Stanley Milgram's (Yale University psychologist) experiment with obedience can be described as follows: There are three individuals involved--the teacher, the learner, and the experimenter. The teacher is teaching the learner a set of words and, if the learner gets something wrong, the teacher has been instructed (and encouraged) by the experimenter to give the learner a shock. The shock treatment increases with every answer the learner gets wrong. The teacher was the only one who did not know what was going on in this experiment. The learner and experimenter were actors and the shocks were simulated.
Though some teachers stopped after a certain shock level or after the learner was shocked to the point of being unconscious, many of the teachers actually went on. Milgram wanted to experiment with people's willingness to obey an authority figure.
I think these experiments are extremely interesting and disturbing. We all believe that we, ourselves, would never take part in such horrible actions but Milgram's experiments show that human nature is a lot more universal than we thought.
http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/History/2003/stanley_milgram.htm
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