 The electric shock experiments that Venkman conducts on the college  students parodied the real life Milgram Experiments, which related  to obedience. In the early 1960s, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram  wanted to see if test subjects would administer electric shocks of  increasing voltage to fellow test subjects (actually actors  pretending to be shocked) based on the commands of an authority  figure. Most of them did.