Miligram's Experiment

The Miligarm experiment was an experiment done that was used to test the question of why people act obedient. The supervisor of the experiment tells the volunteers to shock the people in the adjacent room which will cause them a lot of pain. What the volunteers don't know is that this shock is completely harmless. The supervisor claims that the shocking is under his supervision and he says he takes complete resposibility for what happens. He makes the volunteer shock the person everytime there is a wrong answer, with no pity even if the volunteer doesn't want to do it.

From this experiment we can conclude through the Agency Theory that the volunteer acted unethically out of his own free-will. We can conclude this based on the fact that shocking people is unethical and that he voluntered under his own free will.

So what exactly is the Agency theory? The agency theory basically says that a free act is an act which is caused by and agent, it also says its not the feelings that come from inside our brain that make us act freely but instead they are all caused by an agent, hence the name of the theory. So who is the agent? An agent is just basically someone in some form of power over someone else that does something, and what they do causes other things to happen and the cycle just keeps going on and on.