The subjects believed they were torturing fellow volunteers, by electrocution, out of sight in an adjacent room. As a doctor instructed them to rev up the juice, the recruits could hear the nightmarish screaming of actors pretending to be suffering electrocution and their pleadings for mercy. Of Milgram’s forty subjects, some 65 percent administered the full-bore 450-volt shocks they had been told were potentially fatal. Milgram describes his experiments as proof that “obedience to authority” trumps morality and conscience:
