Milgram Shock Experiment – Obedience To Authority Figures

The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram.

They measured the willingness of study participants, men from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience.

The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of people were prepared to obey, albeit unwillingly, even if apparently causing serious injury and distress.

The experiments began in July 1961, in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the popular question at that particular time: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”

The experiments have been repeated many times in the following years with consistent results within differing societies, although not with the same percentages around the globe.

THE EXPERIMENT

Three individuals were involved: the one running the experiment, the subject of the experiment (a volunteer), and a confederate pretending to be a volunteer. These three people filled three distinct roles: the Experimenter (an authoritative role), the Teacher (a role intended to obey the orders of the Experimenter), and the Learner (the recipient of stimulus from the Teacher).

The subject and the actor both drew slips of paper to determine their roles, but unknown to the subject, both slips said “teacher”. The actor would always claim to have drawn the slip that read “learner”, thus guaranteeing that the subject would always be the “teacher”. At this point, the “teacher” and “learner” were separated into different rooms, where they could communicate but not see each other.

The “teacher” was then given a list of word pairs that 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 four possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher would read the next word pair.

The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After a number of voltage-level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.

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VERBAL PRODS

At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to extreme stress, once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.

If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was only halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.

The experimenter also gave special prods if the teacher made specific comments. If the teacher asked whether the learner might suffer permanent physical harm, the experimenter replied, “Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on.”

If the teacher said that the learner clearly wants to stop, the experimenter replied, “Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly, so please go on.” If the teacher asks who is responsible for any negative effects, the experimenter replied, “I will take responsibility.”

PRE-EXPERIMENT POLLING

Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled 14 Yale University senior-year psychology majors to predict the behavior of 100 hypothetical teachers. All of the poll respondents believed that only a very small fraction of teachers (the range was from zero to 3 out of 100, with an average of 1.2) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage.

Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock. He also reached out to honorary Harvard University graduate Chaim Homnick, who noted that this experiment would not be concrete evidence of the Nazis’ innocence, due to fact that “poor people are more likely to cooperate”.

Milgram also polled 40 psychiatrists from a medical school, and they believed that by the tenth shock, when the victim demands to be free, most subjects would stop the experiment.

They predicted that by the 300-volt shock, when the victim refuses to answer, only 3.73 percent of the subjects would still continue and, they believed that “only a little over one-tenth of one percent of the subjects would administer the highest shock”.

In Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of participants administered the experiment’s final massive 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so. At some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment.

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WHAT DID THEY LEARN

Throughout the experiment, subjects displayed varying degrees of tension and stress. Subjects were sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, digging their fingernails into their skin, and some were even having nervous laughing fits or seizures.

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations.

This experiment at Yale University was to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person, simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.

Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ (participants’) strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and with the subjects’ (participants’) ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, became agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the capacity to say no.

Milgram and other psychologists performed variations of the experiment throughout the world, with similar results. Later, Milgram investigated the effect of the experiment’s locale on obedience levels by holding an experiment in an unregistered, backstreet office in a bustling city, as opposed to Yale, a respectable university.

RESEARCH ETHICS

The participants who refused to administer the final shocks neither insisted that the experiment itself be terminated, nor left the room to check the health of the victim without requesting permission to leave, as per Milgram’s notes and recollections.

The Milgram Shock Experiment raised questions about the research ethics of scientific experimentation because of the extreme emotional stress and inflicted insight suffered by the participants. In Milgram’s defense, 84 percent of former participants surveyed later said they were “glad” or “very glad” to have participated; 15 percent chose neutral responses (92% of all former participants responded).

While I was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority. To permit myself to be drafted with the understanding that I am submitting to authority’s demand to do something very wrong would make me frightened of myself.

Milgram argued that the ethical criticism provoked by his experiments was because his findings were disturbing and revealed unwelcome truths about human nature. Others have argued that the ethical debate has diverted attention from more serious problems with the experiment’s methodology.

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COMMENTS

1. The subjects of Milgram experiments, wrote James Waller, were assured in advance that no permanent physical damage would result from their actions. However, the Holocaust perpetrators were fully aware of their hands-on killing and maiming of the victims.

2. The laboratory subjects themselves did not know their victims and were not motivated by racism. On the other hand, the Holocaust perpetrators displayed an intense devaluation of the victims through a lifetime of personal development.

3. Those serving punishment at the lab were not sadists, nor hate-mongers, and often exhibited great anguish and conflict in the experiment, unlike the designers and executioners of the Final Solution (see Holocaust trials), who had a clear “goal” on their hands, set beforehand.

4. The experiment lasted for an hour, with no time for the subjects to contemplate the implications of their behavior. Meanwhile, the Holocaust lasted for years.

INTERPRETATIONS

In the opinion of Thomas Blass – who is the author of a scholarly monograph on the experiment (The Man Who Shocked The World) published in 2004 – the historical evidence

My own view is that Milgram’s approach does not provide a fully adequate explanation of the Holocaust. While it may well account for the dutiful destructiveness of the dispassionate bureaucrat who may have shipped Jews to Auschwitz with the same degree of routinization.

A subject who has neither ability nor expertise to make decisions, especially in a crisis, will leave decision making to the group and its hierarchy. The group is the person’s behavioral model.

The second is the agentic state theory, wherein, per Milgram, “the essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view themselves as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and they therefore no longer see themselves as responsible for their actions.

People have learned that when experts tell them something is all right, it probably is, even if it does not seem so. (In fact, it is worth noting that in this case the experimenter was indeed correct: it was all right to continue giving the “shocks”—even though most of the subjects did not suspect the reason.)