Obedience to Authority Milgram’s obedience to authority experiment countered the participant’s moral beliefs against the demands of authority. For this study, Milgram took out a newspaper ad that offered $4. 50 for one hour of work, at Yale University, for a psychology experiment that sought to investigate memory and learning. Participants were told that the study would look at the relationship of punishment in learning, and that one person would be the teacher, and the other would be the learner (a confederate), and that these roles would be determined by a random drawing.
The learner was then strapped into a chair, and electrodes are attached to their arm. It was explained to both the teacher and the learner that the electrodes were attached to an electric shock generator, and that shocks would serve as punishment for incorrect answers. The experimenter then states that the shocks will be painful, but that they will not cause any permanent tissue damage, while in reality no shocks would actually be received. The teacher and learner are then divided into separate rooms.
The experimenter shows the teacher the shock generator, which has 30 switches, with a voltage ranging from 15-450 volts, and are labeled from “slight shock” to “danger: severe shock,” and the last switch labeled “XXX. ” The teacher is told that it is their job to teach the learner a simple paired associate task, and that they must punish the learner for incorrect answers, by increasing the shock 15 volts each time. The teacher was then given a 15 volt shock to show that the generator was actually working.
When the experiment begins, the learner found the task to be difficult and made various mistakes, which resulted in increasing intensity of the shocks. When the machine reached 75, 90, and 105 volts, the teacher could hear the learner grunting through the wall, and at 120 volts the learner claimed that the shocks were getting painful, and at 150 volts he screamed, “get me out of here! I refuse to go on. ” When the teacher questioned progressing, the experimenter said things such as, “you can’t stop now,” or “the experiment depends on your continuing compliance. As the shock voltage increased the learner cried out, “I can’t stand the pain,” at 300 volts the learner began to pound on the wall and demanded to be let out. When the machine reached 330 volts there was no longer any noise coming from the learner. The experimenter then told the teacher that his lack of response was to be considered as an incorrect answer, and that shocks were to still be administered. The experiment concludes when the highest shock level is reached.
Milgram found that 65% of participants would render shock levels of 450 volts, and that these were everyday normal people. In the post-experiment interview, Milgram asked the participants to rate how painful they thought the shocks were, the typical answer was extremely painful. Most of the subjects obeyed the experimenter, however the subjects did show obvious signs of an internal struggle, and demonstrated reactions such as nervous laughter, trembling, and groaning.
These interviews confirmed that everyday normal people can cause pain and suffering to another person, under the right set of circumstances. Milgram also found the tendency of the teacher to devalue the learner, by saying such phrases as, “he is so dumb he deserves to get shocked,” which helped to interally justify the teachers behavior of continuing to administer the shocks. This experiment by Milgram has given a tremendous amount of insight into human behavior and obedience.
Stanley Milgram (2004) Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (with a preface written for this edition by Jerome Bruner). NY: Harper Perennial Classic [first published in 1974, and reissued in 1983]. This is Milgram’s most complete account of his obedience experiments, his explanation of his findings, and some of the controversy that surrounded them. In recognition of its literary merits, it was a finalist for a National Book Award. Arthur G. Miller (1986). The Obedience Experiments: A Case Study of Controversy in Social Science. NY: Praeger.
A scholarly and well-written examination of the obedience experiments with emphasis on the controversies surrounding them. 1. Richard L. Gregory (1987). The Oxford Companion to the Mind. NY: Oxford University Press. This one-volume encyclopedia contains an entry on obedience by Milgram, one of his last writings to appear in print. Controversy surrounded Stanley Milgram for much of his professional life as a result of a series of experiments on obedience to authority which he conducted at Yale University in 1961-1962. He found, surprisingly, that 65% f his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment. The victim was, in reality, a good actor who did not actually receive shocks, and this fact was revealed to the subjects at the end of the experiment. But, during the experiment itself, the experience was a powerfully real and gripping one for most participants.
Milgram’s career also produced other creative, though less controversial, research; such as, the small-world method (the source of “Six Degrees of Separation”), the lost-letter technique, mental maps of cities, cyranoids, the familiar stranger, and an experiment testing the effects of televised antisocial behavior which, though conducted 30 years ago, remains unique to the present day. Betcha didn’t know… Although Milgram was to become one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century, he never took a single psychology course as an undergraduate at Queens College, where he obtained his BA in Political Science.
He changed career goals in his senior year and applied to the Ph. D. program in Social Psychology at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations. Rejected at first because he did not have any background in psychology, he was accepted provisionally after he took six psychology courses at three different New York-area schools in the summer of 1954. . . . . . In the fall of 1962, a year before the appearance of his first journal article on his obedience research, the American Psychological Association (APA) put Milgram’s membership application “on hold” because of questions raised about the ethics of that research.
After an investigation by the APA produced a favorable result, they admitted him. The first published criticism of his obedience experiments appeared in an unusual place. In the fall of 1963, right after the first appearance of his research in a journal, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an editorial criticizing him and Yale for the highly stressful experience he created for his subjects. Milgram found out about the editorial from a St. Louis social psychologist, Robert Buckhout. As a result, Milgram was able to write a rebuttal that the newspaper subsequently published on its editorial page. In August, 1976, CBS presented a prime-time dramatization of the obedience experiments and the events surrounding them, titled “The Tenth Level. ” William Shatner had the starring role as Stephen Hunter, the Milgram-like scientist. Milgram served as a consultant for the film. While it contains a lot of fictional elements, it powerfully conveyed enough of the essence of the true story for its writer, George Bellak, to receive Honorable Mention in the American Psychological Association’s media awards for 1977.
Milgram’s “shock machine” still exists. It can be found at the Archives of the History of American Psychology at the University of Akron. For a number of years, beginning in 1992, it was part of a traveling psychology exhibit created by the American Psychological Association. Milgram’s mentoring style was to be supportive of his students’ interests rather than impose his own research interests on them. Although he chaired the largest number of Ph. D. heses in the Psychology Department while at the Graduate Center of CUNY from 1967-84, only one of them was an obedience experiment: A “role-played” version conducted by Daniel Geller in 1975, using Milgram’s machine. Who are more obedient -men or women? Milgram found an identical rate of obedience in both groups-65%–although obedient women consistently reported more stress than men. There are about a dozen replications of the obedience experiment world-wide which had male and female subjects. All of them, with one exception, also found no male-female differences. Would Milgram find less obedience if he conducted his experiments today? I doubt it. To go beyond speculation on this question, I carried out the following statistical analysis. I gathered all of Milgram’s standard obedience experiments and the replications conducted by other researchers. The experiments spanned a 25-year period from 1961 to 1985. I did a correlational analysis relating each study’s year of publication and the amount of obedience it found. I found a zero-correlation-that is, no relationship whatsoever.
In other words, on the average, the later studies found no more or less obedience than the ones conducted earlier. A more detailed report of this finding, as well as the finding on sex-differences described in the previous paragraph, can be found in my article, “The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority,” which appears in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1999, Vol. 25, pp. 955-978. . . . . . Rock musician, Peter Gabriel, was a serious and avid admirer of Milgram. His album, “So,” which came out in 1986, contains a track titled, “We do what we’re told-Milgram’s 37. What does the “37” refer to? The answer is posted in the Question of the Month section of the website. September, 2007 For decades, there has been a widespread belief that, because of ethical reasons, it would be impossible to conduct a Milgram-type obedience experiment today. This belief was disproved in January 2007 a. When a former member of the German secret police revealed that, under Communism, several universities in Eastern Europe were conducting them till the early 1990s. b. When ABC’s Primetime TV program showed such an experiment? using Milgram? script and an exact copy of his machine? which had been conducted by social psychologist Jerry Burger at Santa Clara University in California with safeguards in place to make it ethically acceptable. c. When it was revealed that one of Milgram’s students conducted a role-played version in 1975. d. When the British entertainer and ‘psychological illusionist’ Derren Brown, as shown in his TV program ‘The Heist,’ had apparently conducted such an experiment as a selection procedure to identify individuals who could be conditioned to impulsively rob the driver of an armored truck at gunpoint.
