in his studies of obedience to authority, milgram found that: d. the closer subjects were to the victim, the less they shocked him
What did milgram found in his studies of obedience to authority?
Milgram's obedience to authority experiments demonstrated that people's willingness to obey authority figures can be incredibly strong, even when the commands are clearly unethical. In one of the most famous variations of the experiment, participants were instructed to deliver increasingly severe electric shocks to a confederate who was pretending to be in pain.
Milgram found that the closer participants were to the victim, the less likely they were to deliver the highest levels of shock. This suggests that proximity to the victim's suffering can make it more difficult to ignore the moral implications of one's actions.