Milgram brought these strands together in a series of experiments with the underlying
feature that people are socialised to respect the authority of the state (Milgram, 1963, 1974;
see Blass, 2004). If we enter an agentic state, we can absolve ourselves of responsibility for
what happens next. Participants in his experiments were recruited from the community by
advertisement and reported to a laboratory at Yale University to participate in a study of the
effect of punishment on human learning. They arrived in pairs and drew lots to determine
their roles in the study (one was the 'learner', the other the 'teacher'). See Box 7.1 for a
description of what happened next, and check how the shock generator looked in Figure 7.2.