Milgram Experiment

When he was 13, Ishmael Beah was separated from his parents because of the civil war in his home country, Sierra Leone. After six months of wandering the country, he was recruited by the rebel army and became a child soldier.

Children are known to be more vulnerable to being coerced into obeying than adults. But what other factors determine whether a human will or won’t display a specific behaviour in response to a command? Is it just part of some people’s nature, or do the circumstances determine whether people obey? Finding the answers to these questions is a major topic in social psychology.

• What was Milgram's obedience experiment based on?
• How was Milgram's obedience experiment set up?
• What was Milgram's hypothesis?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of Milgram's experiment?
• What are the ethical issues with Milgram's experiment?

Milgram’s Original Obedience Experiment

A year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking officer in Nazi Germany, Stanley Milgram (1963) carried out a series of experiments to investigate why and to what extent people obey authority. Eichmann’s legal defence, and that of many other Nazis prosecuted after the holocaust, was: ‘We were just following orders.

Were these Germans particularly obedient people, or was it just part of human nature to follow orders from someone in authority? This is what Milgram wanted to find out in his psychology experiment.

Aim of Milgram's Experiment

Milgram’s first obedience test investigated destructive obedience. He continued investigating many specific variations in his later experiments in 1965 and mostly focused on situational influences on obedience, such as location, uniforms, and proximity.

Forty male participants from different professional backgrounds from the local area around Yale in Connecticut, between 20-50 years of age, were recruited through a newspaper advertisement and paid $4.50 per day to participate in a study on memory.

Milgram's Obedience to Authority Experiment Setup

When participants arrived at Milgram’s lab at Yale University in Connecticut, they were told that they were participating in an experiment about punishment in learning. An individual participant and a confederate (‘Mr. Wallace’) would draw numbers out of a hat to see which one would take on the role of ‘learner’ or ‘teacher’. The draw was rigged, so the participant would always end up as the ‘teacher’. A third person was also involved; an ‘experimenter’ wearing a grey lab coat, who represented the authority figure.

The participant would witness the ‘learner’ being strapped into an ‘electric chair’ in the neighbouring room, and he and the ‘experimenter’ would sit on the other side of a wall. The participant was instructed to run through a set of learning tasks with the ‘learner’. Each time the ‘learner’ got an answer wrong, the ‘experimenter’ was to turn up the voltage by one unit and deliver a shock until the ‘learner’ had achieved the task without error.

The levels of voltage that the participant was administering were clearly labelled and ranged from 15 volts (slight shock) to 300 volts (Danger: severe shock) and 450 volts (XXX). They were informed that the shocks would be painful but cause no permanent tissue damage and given a sample shock of 45 volts (fairly low) to prove that the shocks actually hurt.

While carrying out the procedure, the ‘learner’ would provide standardised reactions. When the voltages got beyond 300 volts, the ‘learner’ would start pleading for the ‘teacher’ to stop, saying he wanted to leave, shout, pound the wall, and at 315 volts, there would be no responses given from the ‘learner’ anymore at all.

Usually, around the 300 volts mark, the participant would ask the ‘experimenter’ for guidance. Each time the ‘teacher’ tried to protest or asked to leave, the ‘experimenter’ would reinforce the instructions using a script of four stock answers in sequence, called prods.

There were also similar standardised responses the ‘experimenter’ gave when asked whether the subject was going to be harmed by the shocks. If the subject asked if the learner was liable to suffer permanent physical injury, the experimenter said:

If the subject said that the learner did not want to go on, the experimenter replied:

The Hypothesis of Milgram's Experiment

Milgram’s hypothesis was based on his World War II observations. He hypothesized that the Nazi soldiers were following orders in extreme situations. He said that the pressure that these people were under was so great that they obeyed demands they would not normally have done.

Results of Milgram's Obedience Experiment

During the trials, all of the participants went up to at least 300 volts. Five of the participants (12.5%) stopped at 300 volts when the first signs of distress by the learner appeared. Thirty-five (65%) went up to the highest level of 450 volts, a result that neither Milgram nor his students anticipated.

Participants also showed intense signs of tension and distress including nervous laughing fits, groaning, ‘digging fingernails into their flesh’ and convulsions. For one participant the experiment had to be cut short because they had started having a seizure.

Fig. 2. Would you be distressed in this situation?

Milgram’s experiment indicates that it is normal to obey legitimate authority figures, even if the order goes against our conscience.

After the study, all the participants were told of the hoax and debriefed, including meeting the ‘learner’ again.

Conclusion of Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Experiment

All of the study participants obeyed the authority figure when asked to go against their better judgement rather than refuse to proceed. Although they were met with resistance, all study participants had been informed at the start that they could stop the experiment at any point. Milgram argued that it’s normal for humans to give in to destructive obedience when pressured.

What was surprising about Milgram’s experiment was how easy it was to get people to be destructive - participants obeyed even in the absence of force or threat. Milgram’s results speak against the idea that particular groups of people are more prone to obedience than others.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Milgram’s Experiment

First, let us explore the contributions and positive aspects overall of Milgram’s experiment.

Strengths

Some of its strengths include:

Operationalisation of Human Behaviour

Let's first review what operationalisation means.

It’s a major part of making psychology a legitimate science that can produce objective results. This allows for comparison of people with each other and statistical analysis as well as comparison with other similar experiments that happen in other places in the world and even in the future. By creating a fake shocking apparatus, Milgram was able to measure in numbers to which extent humans would obey authority.

Validity

The control of variables through set prods, a unified setting, and procedure means that it’s more likely that the results of Milgram’s experiment produced internally valid results. This is a strength of laboratory experiments in general; because of the controlled environment, it is more likely that the researcher can measure what they set out to measure.

Reliability

With the shock experiment, Milgram was able to reproduce a similar result with forty different participants. After his first experiment, he also went on to test many different variables that could influence obedience.

Weaknesses

There were numerous criticisms and debates surrounding Milgram’s obedience experiment. Let’s explore a couple of examples.

External validity

There is some debate about whether Milgram’s obedience study has external validity. Even though conditions were strictly controlled, the laboratory experiment is an artificial situation and this might factor into how the participants behaved. Orne and Holland (1968) thought that the participants might have guessed that they were not really harming anyone. This casts doubt on whether the same behaviour would be seen in real life - what is known as ecological validity.

The Debate about Internal Validity

The internal validity was questioned after Perry (2012) examined the tapes of the experiment and noted that many participants expressed doubts that the shocks were real to the ‘experimenter’. This might indicate that what was displayed in the experiment was not genuine behaviour but rather the effect of unconscious or conscious influence by the researchers.

Biased sample

The sample was made up exclusively of American men, so it’s not clear whether the same results would be obtained using other gender groups or cultures. To investigate this, Burger (2009) partially replicated the original experiment using a mixed male and female American sample with diverse ethnic backgrounds and a broader age range. The results were similar to Milgram’s, showing that gender, ethnic background, and age might not be contributing factors to obedience.

There have been many replications of Milgram’s experiment in other Western countries and most have delivered similar results; however, Shanab’s (1987) replication in Jordan showed remarkable differences in that Jordanian students were significantly more likely to obey across the board. This raises the question of whether there is a difference in levels of obedience in different cultures.

Ethical Issues with Milgram’s Experiment

Although the participants were debriefed and 83.7% of them went away from the experiment satisfied, the experiment itself was ethically problematic. Using deception in a study means that the participants can’t give their full consent as they don’t know what they’re agreeing to.

Also, keeping participants in an experiment against their will is a violation of their autonomy, but Milgram’s four stock answers (prods) meant that the participants were denied their right to leave. It is the researcher’s responsibility to ensure that no harm comes to the participants, but in this study, the signs of mental distress became so extreme that the study subjects went into convulsions.

At the time that Milgram carried out his experiment into obedience, there were no official research ethics standards. It was studies like that of Milgram and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment that forced psychologists to put ethics rules and regulations in place. However, ethics rules aren’t as strict outside of the scientific context, so replications of the experiment can still be carried out for entertainment purposes on TV shows.