I think the fact that the participant does not hear any objection from the victim and that the victim still responds up to this point gives him the impression that the victim still thinks that the benefit of scientific gains from the experiment outweighs the risks/harms to which he is exposed. The participant might assume that the victim would speak up if he was uncomfortable. I would guess that the participants who did stop at this point would have stopped earlier if the victim had the same response then. Yet, this still does not explain why 65% of the participants continued to shock the victim until the end.

I'd be curious to see if different groups of people (specifically those who have been exposed to more physical pain in their life or those who have been exposed to intense authority figures) would obey less or more. One particular group I think would be very interesting to study would be war veterans because many have dealt with strong authoritative leaders but also have experienced severe trauma and pain.

I would guess that as anxiety levels increased in the participants their thinking became more unclear and they turned more to the authority figure (the experimenter) to determine how to respond in this distressing and foreign situation. Following orders of the experimenter could have given the participant assurance that they were at least satisfying the demands of one person (perhaps lowering their anxiety some amount).

Surely there can't be a clear parallel between obedience in Milgram's experiment and that in Hitler's Germany because factors influencing obedience in the members of the German Officers Corps (like the fear of severe punishment or even death for disobeying) could not be replicated in an experiment. It'd be interesting to learn more about how fear for oneself affects obedience and decision making.

How should experimenters go about receiving informed consent and notifying their participants beforehand of all possible serious aftereffects without causing more anxiety than necessary? If participants have higher levels of anxiety before starting the experiment then their performance/behavior may be severely affected.

I don't really agree with this argument because based off of the last article we read about External Validity, Milgram's experiment wasn't meant to be a model of real life situations but rather show how there is still a high level of obedience even in a lab setting (with no punishment and the ability to leave).

The participants may have also believed that the experimenter was following strict lab regulations and therefore the harm they were causing to the learners was not unethical or at least severe enough to prevent the experiment from being approved in the first place. This could have given the participants the idea that they could trust the experimenter and the instructions they were asked to follow.