 Obedience to Authority. Stanley Milgram’s shock experiments are arguably the most famous in the history of psychology.  Especially relevant is experiment five, where a participant had to give a test to an innocent person in another room, and turn up a dial with increasingly greater shocks for each wrong answer. At 270 volts, the test taker demanded to be released from the test and was making agonizing screams. At higher levels the pleas became desperate and hysterical. Nevertheless, under pressure from an authority figure, 80% of participants went at least to 270 volts, and 65% went all the way to the 450 volt XXX level, which was a lethal level of shock (so they thought) (Milgram 1974: 60).