Milgram Experiment
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40 free Milgram Experiment trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In the early 1960s a young social psychologist invited ordinary men into a laboratory and asked them to punish a stranger's mistakes with painful shocks. The shocks were fake, the stranger was in on it, and the real test was how far each volunteer would go when a man in authority told him to continue. The results startled psychologists and have been argued over ever since. This quiz covers the whole story of Stanley Milgram's obedience studies: the cover story and the rigged roles, the machine and its switches, what the volunteers did and how they reacted, and the many variations that raised or lowered compliance. It also covers the ethics dispute, the later critics and replications, Milgram's life and other research, and the films, songs and television shows the experiment inspired. It is written for psychology students revising for an exam, instructors who want a quick check on the key facts, and anyone curious about why decent people do harmful things when instructed. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Stanford prison experiment psychologist was Stanley Milgram's high school classmate in New York?
Philip Zimbardo
Philip Zimbardo sat in Milgram's class at James Monroe High School. The two also shared a love of the hidden-camera show Candid Camera and admired its creator, Allen Funt.
Q 02Which animal received real shocks in Sheridan and King's follow-up to Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment?
A puppy
A puppy took real but apparently harmless shocks, because the researchers suspected some of Milgram's volunteers had guessed the victim was faking. Some subjects openly wept, yet most obeyed to the end.
Q 03A 2010 French documentary restaged Milgram's obedience experiment disguised as what kind of TV program?
A game show
A game show pilot was the cover story in Le Jeu de la Mort (The Game of Death), made as a critique of reality television. Only 16 of 80 contestants quit before the highest-voltage penalty.
Q 04Which Star Trek actor played a professor based on Stanley Milgram in the 1970s TV drama The Tenth Level?
William Shatner
William Shatner played Professor Stephen Turner, a thinly disguised Milgram. The drama also gave a young John Travolta an uncredited part as a student.
Q 05In Stanley Milgram's first obedience experiment, what share of the 40 volunteers delivered the maximum shock?
65%
65% went all the way to the last switch. Every one of the 40 paused at least once to question what was happening, and most carried on once the man in charge reassured them.
Q 06Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment began in 1961, months after which Nazi's trial opened in Jerusalem?
Adolf Eichmann
Adolf Eichmann, an organizer of the Holocaust, went on trial in April 1961. Milgram wanted to know whether ordinary people would really harm a stranger simply because they were told to.
Q 07Which former Genesis member recorded a song about Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment for his 1986 album So?
Peter Gabriel
Peter Gabriel titled it We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37). He had first recorded the track for his 1980 album, six years before it finally appeared.
Q 08Stanley Milgram's small-world experiment, mailing folders between strangers, is linked to which famous idea?
Six degrees of separation
Six degrees of separation matches his finding that folders reached a Boston stockbroker through a median of five go-betweens. Milgram himself never used the phrase.
Q 09Stanley Milgram planned his American volunteers as a control group before testing people in which country?
Germany
Germany was where he expected to find unusually compliant people. The American results were so startling that he never ran the comparison.
Q 10What was the highest voltage marked on the shock generator in Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment?
450 volts
450 volts was the top of a row of switches that climbed in 15-volt steps. No current ever reached the learner, an actor who only pretended to be in pain.
Q 11At which Ivy League university did Stanley Milgram run his obedience experiment in the early 1960s?
Yale
Yale housed the sessions in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall. Milgram had joined the faculty as an assistant professor only the year before.
Q 12Both slips of paper in the rigged draw of Milgram's obedience experiment carried which single word?
Teacher
Teacher was written on both slips, so the volunteer always landed that role. The actor simply claimed that his own slip read learner.
Q 13The stern experimenter in Milgram's obedience experiment wore a technician's lab coat of which color?
Gray
Gray was the color of the technician's coat. The stern man wearing it was 31 and, away from the laboratory, taught biology at a school.
Q 21What did the learner in Milgram's obedience experiment have to recall, earning a shock for every mistake?
Word pairs
Word pairs were read out as a list, then the volunteer gave the first word of each with four possible partners. The learner answered by pressing a button, not by speaking.
Q 22Which stark label marked the final switches on the shock generator in Milgram's obedience experiment?
XXX
XXX was all the top switches said, just past the label Danger: Severe Shock. Psychologist Don Mixon argued the vagueness mattered: compliance fell sharply once the harm was spelled out.
Q 23What did Stanley Milgram call the mindset of seeing oneself as merely an instrument of another person's wishes?
The agentic state
Q 14In Milgram's obedience experiment, the learner was strapped into a device that looked like what?
An electric chair
An electric chair was the look of the apparatus, and the volunteer watched as the straps went on. The man in charge said they were there to prevent excessive movement during the shocks.
Q 15Stanley Milgram designed his shock experiment to test which defense offered by accused Holocaust perpetrators?
Just following orders
Just following orders was the claim Milgram set out to examine in a laboratory. He later wrote that one mental process was at work in both his sessions and the Holocaust, a link many scholars dispute.
Q 16What happened to compliance when Stanley Milgram reran his obedience experiment with women instead of men?
It barely changed
It barely changed: the women obeyed at much the same rate as the men. The one difference was that they reported feeling more stress while doing it.
Q 17Which odd reaction did 14 of the 40 volunteers show during Stanley Milgram's first obedience experiment?
Nervous laughter
Nervous laughter or smiling broke out in 14 subjects, a sign of strain rather than amusement. Others sweated, trembled, stuttered or dug their fingernails into their skin.
Q 18Volunteers in Milgram's obedience experiment were told the shocks were part of a scientific study of what?
Memory and learning
Memory and learning was the cover story, supposedly a test of whether penalties for mistakes help people remember. The real subject was the volunteer's own willingness to obey.
Q 19In later versions of Milgram's obedience experiment, the learner cried out about which medical problem?
A heart condition
A heart condition was written into the script for the actor, who would plead for mercy as the voltage rose. In the very first version his protests had been wordless.
Q 20The learner's protests in Milgram's obedience experiment were not performed live; what machine produced them?
A tape recorder
A tape recorder wired to the shock generator played a pre-recorded sound for each switch, so every volunteer heard exactly the same protests at exactly the same points.
The agentic state was Milgram's name for the shift in which people stop feeling responsible for what they do. He set the idea out in his 1974 book on the experiments.
Q 24Stanley Milgram worked as an assistant to which psychologist, famous for his conformity experiments?
Solomon Asch
Solomon Asch employed Milgram at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton while Milgram was finishing his doctorate. Milgram later built peer pressure into some versions of his own study.
Q 25In the first version of Milgram's obedience experiment, how did the unseen learner protest at 300 volts?
Banged on the wall
Banged on the wall is what the volunteers heard him do at 300 and again at 315 volts. After that the learner fell silent, yet most of them kept working up the switches.
Q 26Which university at first rejected Stanley Milgram's PhD application because he had never studied psychology?
Harvard
Harvard turned him down, then relented, and he earned his doctorate there in 1960. His first degree, from Queens College, was in political science.
Q 27What name did Stanley Milgram give the four scripted phrases the experimenter used to keep volunteers going?
Prods
Prods came in a fixed sequence, starting with a polite request to continue and ending by telling the volunteer there was no other choice. After a fourth refusal the session was halted.
Q 28In Stanley Milgram's follow-up survey, how did 84 percent of former volunteers describe having taken part?
Glad or very glad
Glad or very glad was the answer most gave, and Milgram leaned on it to defend his ethics. Critics reply that many volunteers were never properly told the truth afterwards.
Q 29Compliance in Milgram's obedience experiment fell to about 21 percent when the experimenter gave instructions how?
By telephone
By telephone, with the man in charge out of the room, only about one in five went to the end. Some volunteers pretended to carry on while quietly giving weaker shocks than they were told to.
Q 30Before Milgram's obedience experiment, forty psychiatrists predicted what share of people would give the top shock?
0.1%
0.1% was the experts' guess, about one person in a thousand; they expected most to stop by the tenth shock. The real figure turned out to be hundreds of times higher.