During the Milgram experiment, what was the teacher's (subject's) role?

In the Milgram experiment, the teacher's role involved administering electric shocks to the learner whenever an incorrect answer was provided. This was a pivotal aspect of the study designed to investigate obedience to authority. The participants, who were assigned the role of "teachers," believed they were part of a learning experiment and were instructed to deliver escalating levels of electric shocks, which were fake, to another participant (the learner) for mistakes made in a word-pairing task.

The significance of this setup was to explore the extent to which individuals would comply with an authority figure's instruction, even when it conflicted with their personal conscience. The experiment revealed that a significant number of participants were willing to go to extreme lengths, believing they were harming someone, simply due to the pressure exerted by the authority figure, represented by the experimenter.

In this context, the correct answer highlights the core element of the Milgram experiment, which was fundamentally about obedience rather than memorization, observation, or providing support.