Hello and welcome to Backchat. If the Nature podcast is a direct and firm order from someone in a

position of authority, then Backchat is a sly wink and a nudge in the ribs. And appropriately,

this month, Backchat is all about manipulation, manipulating ourselves with drugs or with our

own thoughts, or manipulating others, or others manipulating us, all topics that we've covered in some way or another in nature during February.

I'm Kerry Smith and I'm pleased to introduce my manipulative colleagues, David Adam.

Hello, I work for nature.

I commission and edit the editorials and the worldview opinion page.

Also joining us, Sarah Abdullah.

Hi, Gary. I'm Sarah. I run the comment section. And on the phone

from Munich, Alison Abbott. Hi, Kerry. Yes, I'm a journalist with nature and as you said, I work out of the

Munich office. Lovely. Now coming up, psychologists rerun one of the most infamous experiments in history,

Stanley Milgram's study showing how people blindly obey authority.

And how should we game our own natures, manipulate our own cognitive biases so that they work in our favour, particularly for the benefit of future humans.

And we'll also be discussing the best way to manipulate brains so they perform better.

Let's begin with an update to a famous, infamous experiment. Alison Abbott, you've been writing about this in a news story.

Can you just tell us a little bit about Stanley Milgram and the original study he performed in the 60s?

Well, it's actually a series of studies that he performed in the 60s and the beginning of the 1970s.

And it's essentially to investigate, to what extent will we obey orders to harm other people?

What Milgram did was to recruit people who thought that they were taking part in an experiment on learning.

And he told them that what they had to do was to control a person learning in a neighbouring room,

that they could hear him, but they could not see him.

When that person made a mistake, they would press a button to deliver an electric shock

...