The Milgram experiment found that the percentage of its participants who were prepared to continue inflicting increasingly high voltages of electric shocks to victims in a room next door, right up to the point where fatal voltages were being administered, was an astonishing 61–66 percent.
Hypnotism was not employed by the researchers, as the experiment set out to test how obedient human beings are to authority using only the authority status of the researchers as an inducement to participants. It's akin to a holocaust experiment, if you like.
Victims were not actually receiving electric shocks, of course, however the subjects pressing the buttons to administer these 'shocks' believed that they were indeed inflicting pain.
As the voltages the subjects inflicted apparently grew higher, victims screamed with pain and banged on the walls for the experiment to stop, yet 61% to 66% of those inflicting shocks continued. Even when the victims stopped screaming and went alarmingly quiet at the highest level of voltage, over 60% of those inflicting the shocks continued to do so, merely because they accepted the researchers as authority figures and did what the researchers instructed them to do.
I think a lot of this obedience factor underlies the effects of much of the alleged hypnotic powers we see in the media and on stage.
