What is the Milgram experiment?

Introduction

Stanley Milgram
is widely acknowledged to have been one of the most innovative and creative experimental social psychologists in the history of the discipline. Raised in a Jewish family during the Great Depression and World War II, Milgram was influenced by stories he heard about the Nazi persecutions of European Jews. After graduating in political science at Queen’s University, he did graduate work in Harvard’s social relations department, where he studied under Gordon Allport and Solomon Asch. His doctoral dissertation was devoted to a comparative study of conformity in Norway and France.

After he received his PhD in 1960, Milgram was appointed assistant professor of psychology at Yale University. During his first year at Yale, he conducted pilot studies of obedience with small groups of students. About this time, he conceptualized the framework for his famous obedience experiments. Influenced by accounts of mass participation in Nazi atrocities, his goal was to measure the willingness of average citizens to obey a person who had institutionalized authority. After receiving a grant from the National Science Foundation, Milgram conducted the experiments from July, 1961, to May, 1962. His first publication reporting the results of the experiments appeared in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963, and his major book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, was published eleven years later.

The Experiments

Each of Milgram’s obedience experiments involved three people: a supervisor, a learner, and a teacher. Milgram’s initial experiments were made with only men. Milgram employed and trained the supervisor and the learner, both of whom were actors. The third person in each session, the teacher, was an individual who had responded to an advertisement calling for volunteers to assist in a psychological study for a small fee. The teacher was uninformed about the true nature of the experiment. When the uninformed volunteer and actor entered the lab, the supervisor explained to them that the purpose of the experiment was to determine whether punishment in the form of electrical shocks would promote learning.

The supervisor had the two men select slips of paper to decide their respective roles. The slips, however, were arranged so that the unsuspecting volunteer would always take the role of teacher. The supervisor then seated the teacher in front of a large and impressive apparatus containing a series of levels marked from 15 volts to 450 volts. In most versions, the learner was strapped to a chair in a different room. After hearing that the shocks were painful but not dangerous, the teacher was instructed to give the learner a long multiple-choice test of word associations. Whenever the learner’s response was incorrect, the teacher’s duty was to administer a shock, increasing the voltage in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. Although no shocks were actually delivered, the learner would cry out as if in pain when the 150-volt stage was reached, and he screamed louder until the shocks reached 315 volts, after which he would make no more sounds.

When a participant said he wanted to halt the experiment, the supervisor would reply with one of the following four directives: “Please continue!” “The experiment requires that you continue!” “It is absolutely essential that you continue!” and “You have no other choice; you must go on!” If the participant refused to continue, the experiment was stopped. Otherwise, it continued until the teacher had administered three successive shocks marked 450 volts. At the end of every experiment, the teacher was introduced to the learner and shown that the learner was unharmed. There was no attempt made to assure volunteers who gave high-voltage shocks that their behavior was not shameful or unusual.

In the first set of experiments, 65 percent of forty participants continued until the 450-volt shock. None of the participants insisted on stopping before the 300-volt stage. Milgram conducted nineteen variations of the experiments. In the tenth experiment, when the experiments took place in a modest office building in Bridgeport, Connecticut, continuation to the highest shock dropped to 47.5 percent. In the eighth experiment, he found that the use of women participants did not significantly change the result. When the physical proximity between teacher and learner increased, obedience significantly decreased. When a teacher was joined with other actor-teachers, full conformity reached about 90 percent.

Impact and Reaction

The Milgram experiment raised a number of serious ethical issues. Without their informed consent, participants were put in extremely stressful conditions, with the real possibility that a person with a heart condition might have suffered significant harm. Some participants, moreover, were embarrassed by their own conduct in rendering fake shocks. In answer to his critics, Milgram argued that there was no evidence that any significant harm had occurred and that he had protected each participant’s confidentiality. He also pointed to a survey indicating that 84 percent of participants said that they were “glad” or “very glad” to have been part of the experiment. Some even reported that the experiments had made them more ethically sensitive about the dangers of unquestionable obedience to authority.

The ethical controversy surrounding Milgram’s experiments was one of several reasons why the American Psychological Association formulated its principles for research with humans and required approval of proposed experiments by institutional review boards (IRBs) in the early 1970s. Congress in 1974 enacted legislation mandating both informed consent and the use of IRBs. Although variations on Milgram’s experiments were conducted a number of times in the United States and other countries throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, after the establishment of these regulations, social psychologists were no longer able to replicate the Milgram experiment in its entirety. In 2006, however, social psychologist Jerry M. Burger obtained permission to conduct a partial replication, stopping at 150 volts, the point at which the actor-learner began to scream in pain. Burger’s results were similar to those recorded by Milgram, finding that approximately 67 percent of male participants and 73 percent of female participants continued administering shocks up to the 150-volt level.

Bibliography

Blass, Thomas. The Man Who Shocked the World. New York: Basic, 2004. Print.

Blass, Thomas, ed. Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 2000. Print.

Burger, Jerry M. "Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?" American Psychologist 64.1 (2009): 1–11. Print.

Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper, 2009. Print.

Miller, Arthur G. The Obedience Experiments: A Case Study of Controversy in Social Science. New York: Praeger, 1986. Print.

Sales, Bruce D., and Susan Folkman, eds. Ethics in Research with Human Participation. Washington, DC: Amer. Psychological Assn., 2005. Print.

Slater, Lauren. Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. New York: Norton, 2005. Print.

Smeulers, Alette, and Fred Grünfeld. International Crimes and Other Gross Human Rights Violations: A Multi- and Interdisciplinary Textbook. Leiden: Nijhoff, 2011. Print.