8 Shockingly Unethical Experiments That Actually Happened

4. The Milgram Experiments Were Unethical, But Not How You'd Think

The Milgram Experiment is so often included in lists such as this, and everyone knows that it just proves that us humans are inherently evil dicks.

For a bit of background: The Milgram Experiment was a study into obedience carried out by Stanley Milgram back in the 1960s. The participants were led to believe that they were delivering potentially deadly shocks to another person under the guise of a "learning exercise", and were encouraged to carry on by the "scientists" in charge, even to the point where they were screaming in pain or even becoming unresponsive. The truth is that everyone but the participants were actors and no one was really getting shocked, but the point was that ordinary people are willing to do terrible things if instructed to by an authority figure.

It seems pretty conclusive. The results show that 65% of the participants were willing to give someone an electric shock strong enough to kill them. The experiments struck a nerve with a public that remembered the horrors of the Second World War, and were trying to come to terms with how exactly so many ordinary people could commit such atrocities.

The results, however, were a sham. In reality, about 60% of participants displayed strong empathy, disobeyed the authority figure and refused to continue, despite many of the authority figures resorting to coercion and bullying to get them to continue, which was against the rules.

So people might not be inherently evil, but Milgram was willing to twist the figures to say they were.