New psychological experiment confirms the conclusions reached by Stanley Milgram, a young psychologist from Yale who, back in the ‘60s, proved that most people are actually willing to torture others if they were told to. His experiments, while famous and literally shocking (participants were given the impression they were administering electrical shocks to someone), have attained a semi-mythological status and researchers recently reached conclusions similar to Milgram’s.

The results of a new study on this very subject will be published next moth in the American Psychologist. According to CNN, it’s only one of other experiments which showed that individuals tend to follow orders harmful to other people more willfully than one might imagine. Judged from this perspective, the mechanisms behind the involvement of accomplices in heinous acts (such as the appalling crimes of the Nazis) are more easily understood.

Psychology professor Jerry Burger from Santa Clara University in California performed an almost exact replica of Milgram’s experiment. The setting requires a “teacher”, a “learner” and a scientist. Participants are told by the scientist that they must teach the “learner” to memorize some pair of words; if the latter gets it wrong, the teacher must punish him with an electric shock. Of course, the so-called shock machine is a fake and the screams and pleads of the “learner” are just recordings.

The fact that participants went as far as administering 150 volt jolts to the victims (while being utterly convinced that the pre-recorded screams of agony were real) can also be explained by the fact that the torture machine had multiple levers which incrementally increased the intensity of the shocks. Burger explains that this gradual shift “is a very powerful way to change attitudes and behaviors”. 70 percent of the 40 people who took part in his experiment were willing to go on with electrocuting the “learner” even after 150 volts.

Still, Burger’s test wasn’t exactly the same as Milgram’s (the old study went as far as 450 volts) and there are some specialists who question it for this reason.