For the experiment, subjects were recruited by newspaper ads and direct mail to participate in a study at Yale. The experiments themselves took place in two rooms in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall on the university's Old Campus. The experiment was advertised as taking one hour, for which those responding would be paid $4.50. Participants were men between the ages of 20 and 50, coming from all educational backgrounds, ranging from an elementary school dropout to participants with doctoral degrees.

The participant and a confederate of the experimenter, who would be an actor pretending to be another participant, were told by the experimenter that they would be participating in an experiment to test the effects of punishment on learning behavior.

A slip of paper was given to the participant and another to the confederate. The participant was led to believe that one of the slips said "learner" and the other said "teacher," and that the participants had been given the slips randomly. In fact, both slips said "teacher," but the actor claimed to have the slip that read "learner," thus guaranteeing that the participant was always the "teacher." At this point, the "teacher" and "learner" were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. The confederate was sure to mention to the participant that he had a heart condition.

The "teacher" was given a 45-volt electric shock from the electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the "learner" would supposedly receive during the experiment. The "teacher" was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner. The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read 4 possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the learner would receive a shock, with the voltage increasing by 15 volts with each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher read the next word pair.