Do you know about the 1960s ‘Milgram experiments’, wherein subjects willingly harm and electrically shock a person once ordered by an authoritative figure?

Recently, a modified and quite milder Milgram experiment was carried out, showing that human beings lose a sense of agency or ownership on their actions when they are following orders. The experiment answers why people agree to inflict harm to others at times, when pressurized by someone else.

Such a feeling of less responsibility over actions is applicable when people are asked to do something good or bad by someone authoritative.

Yale University study led by Stanley Milgram was conducted in 1963, in which subjects were ordered to be give electric shocks to each other, who weren’t able to give the correct answers. The individual, stranger to them, was an actor who mocked like responding to the punishment. A large number of subjects submissively delivered shocks after an authority figure's encouragement, despite watching the ‘victim’ struggling in pain.

Now, the updated experiment, carried out by University College London researchers, has shown the mental distance of the subjects from their actions while following orders.

UCL professor and senior study author Patrick Haggard, “We wanted to know what people actually felt about the action as they made it, and about the outcome. Time perception tells us something about the basic experiences people have when they act, not just about how they think they should have felt”.

The findings showed that when the subjects freely selected the action in coercive orders, there was a longer gap between the action and tone, which was generated when subjects delivered an electric shock to the study participants by pressing a key.

The subjects had to tell in milliseconds about the time gap between the key-press and the tone. With the help of the interval, which, in reality, was from 200 to 500 to 800 milliseconds, the team calculated the sense of agency of the participants, and thus, responsibility over the outcome of their actions.