Milgram (1974,1992) was one of these critics; he tried to replicate Asch's study, but with
a task that had important consequences attached to the decision to conform or remain
independent. He decided to have experimental confederates apparently administer electric
shocks to another person to see whether the true participant, who was not a confederate,
would conform. Before being able to start the study, Milgram needed to run a control
group to obtain a base rate for people's willingness to shock someone without social pressure
from confederates. For Milgram, this almost immediately became a crucial question
in its own right. In fact, he never actually went ahead with his original conformity study,
and the control group became the basis of one of social psychology's most dramatic
research programmes.