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MELISSA BLOCK: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL: I'm Robert Siegel. In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale, conducted a series of experiments that became famous. Unsuspecting Americans were recruited for what purported to be an experiment in learning. A man who pretended to be a recruit himself was wired up to a phony machine that supposedly administered shocks. He was called the learner. In some versions of the experiment, he was in an adjoining room. The unsuspecting subject of the experiment, the teacher, read lists of words that tested the learner's memory. Each time the learner got one wrong, which he did intentionally, the teacher was instructed by a man in a lab coat to deliver a shock. And with each wrong answer, the voltage went up. From the other room came recorded and convincing protests from the learner.(SOUNDBITE OF EXPERIMENT)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Incorrect, 150 volts. Sad face.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: That's all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart's starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please.
SIEGEL: The results of Stanley Milgram's experiment made news and contributed a dismaying piece of wisdom to the public at large. It was reported that almost two-thirds of the subjects were capable of delivering painful, possibly lethal shocks, if told to do so. We were as obedient as Nazi functionaries. Or are we? Gina Perry, a psychologist from Australia, has written "Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments." She has been retracing Milgram's steps, interviewing his subjects decades later, and his colleagues as well. Welcome to the program.
GINA PERRY: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Is it fair to say that you've gone from a great admirer of these experiments to a real critic of what...