Stanley Milgram: Obedience to Authority Or Just Conformity?
What psychological experiment could be so powerful that simply taking part might change your view of yourself and human nature? What experimental procedure could provoke some people to profuse sweating and trembling, leaving 10% extremely upset, while others broke into unexplained hysterical laughter? What finding could be so powerful that it sent many psychologists into frenzied rebuttals? Welcome to the sixth nomination for the top ten psychology studies and as you'll have guessed it's a big one. Hold on for controversy though, as this study has come in for considerable criticism with some saying its claims are wildly overblown.
Explaining human cruelty
"Many wondered after the horrors of WWII, and not for the first time, how people could be motivated to commit acts of such brutality towards each other."Stanley Milgram's now famous experiments were designed to test obedience to authority (Milgram, 1963). What Milgram wanted to know was how far humans will go when an authority figure orders them to hurt another human being. Many wondered after the horrors of WWII, and not for the first time, how people could be motivated to commit acts of such brutality towards each other. Not just those in the armed forces, but ordinary people were coerced into carrying out the most cruel and gruesome acts.
But Milgram didn't investigate the extreme situation of war, he wanted to see how people would react under relatively 'ordinary' conditions in the lab. How would people behave when told to give an electrical shock to another person? To what extent would people obey the dictates of the situation and ignore their own misgivings about what they were doing?
The experimental situation into which people were put was initially straightforward. Participants were told they were involved in a learning experiment, that they were to administer electrical shocks and that they should continue to the end of the experiment. Told they would be the 'teacher and another person the 'learner', they sat in front of a machine with a number of dials labelled with steadily increasing voltages. This was the 'shock machine'. The third switch from the top was labelled: "Danger: Severe Shock", the last two simply: "XXX".
During the course of the experiment, each time the 'learner' made a mistake the participant was ordered to administer ever-increasing electrical shocks. Of course the learner kept making mistakes so the teacher (the poor participant) had to keep giving higher and higher electrical shocks, and hearing the resultant screams of pain until finally the learner went quiet.
"When the participant baulked at giving the electrical shocks, the experimenter - an authority figure dressed in a white lab coat - ordered them to continue."Participants were not in fact delivering electrical shocks, the learner in the experiment was actually an actor following a rehearsed script. The learner was kept out of sight of the participants so they came to their own assumptions about the pain they were causing. They were, however, left in little doubt that towards the end of the experiment the shocks were extremely painful and the learner might well have been rendered unconscious. When the participant baulked at giving the electrical shocks, the experimenter - an authority figure dressed in a white lab coat - ordered them to continue.
Results
Before I explain the results, try to imagine yourself as the participant in this experiment. How far would you go giving what you thought were electrical shocks to another human being simply for a study about memory? What would you think when the learner went quiet after you apparently administered a shock labelled on the board "Danger: Severe Shock"? Honestly. How far would you go?
How ever far you think, you're probably underestimating as that's what most people do. Like the experiment, the results shocked. Milgram's study discovered people are much more obedient than you might imagine. 63% of the participants continued right until the end - they administered all the shocks even with the learner screaming in agony, begging to stop and eventually falling silent. These weren't specially selected sadists, these were ordinary people like you and me who had volunteered for a psychology study.
How can these results be explained?
At the time Milgram's study was big news. Milgram explained his results by the power of the situation. This was a social psychology experiment which appeared to show, beautifully in fact, how much social situations can influence people's behaviour.
The experiment set off a small industry of follow-up studies carried out in labs all around the world. Were the findings still true in different cultures, in slightly varying situations and in different genders (only men were in the original study)? By and large the answers were that even when manipulating many different experimental variables, people were still remarkably obedient. One exception was that one study found Australian women were much less obedient. Make of that what you will.
Fundamentally flawed?
Now think again. Sure, the experiment relies on the situation to influence people's behaviour, but how real is the situation? If it was you, surely you would understand on some level that this wasn't real, that you weren't really electrocuting someone, that knocking someone unconscious would not be allowed in a university study?
"How good would the actors have to be in order to avoid giving away the fact they were actors?"Also, people pick up considerable nonverbal cues from each other. How good would the actors have to be in order to avoid giving away the fact they were actors? People are adept at playing along even with those situations they know in their heart-of-hearts to be fake. The more we find out about human psychology, the more we discover about the power of unconscious processes, both emotional and cognitive. These can have massive influences on our behaviour without our awareness.
Assuming people were not utterly convinced on an unconscious level that the experiment was for real, an alternative explanation is in order. Perhaps Milgram's work really demonstrates the power of conformity. The pull we all feel to please the experimenter, to fit in with the situation, to do what is expected of us. While this is still a powerful interpretation from a brilliant experiment, it isn't what Milgram was really looking for.
Whether you believe the experiment shows what it purports to or not, there is no doubting that Milgram's work was some of the most influential and impressive carried out in psychology. It is also an experiment very unlikely to be repeated nowadays (outside of virtual reality) because of modern ethical standards. Certainly when I first came across it, my view of human nature was changed irrevocably. Now, thinking critically, I'm not so sure.
ยป This study is also nominated as a top 10 social psychology study.
References
Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378. [Abstract]
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Humans are quite capable of this type of cruelty. Look at soldiers. Look at Iraq. Vietnam. For the right price, for loyalty, for some ideal, people will kill or injure other people. You wouldn't have war if it weren't for people's (mostly men's) willingness to set aside their personal beliefs and feelings and kill.
In school year 1970-1971, I was a subject in a repeat of the Milgram experiment (I was a frosh at UNC Chapel Hill; I don't recall if the experiment was there or at Duke -- I was a frequent subject in the Duke psi trials).
I gave the first shock and heard the person cry out. Then I stopped. I was extremely shy at that time, but I knew I couldn't continue. I told the authority figure -- grad student in white lab coat. He tried to argue, you agreed, we already registered you in the study, I'll lose my funding! I said I'd have to talk with the prof. The grad student in retrospect did a great acting job!
He was following me down the hall, lab coat billowing, waving a clip board around agitatedly.
My IQ was tested around that time at 160. Some years later, I took the Kohlberg Scale of Moral Development, getting a 6.
Anyhow, I was completely taken in by the Milgram setting, didn't think for a minute it was a hoax. And I was familiar by then with typical psych experimental set-ups, from being a subject at Duke (granted, for different type of research).
I got a friend, another girl student who'd been in the Milgram thing (she'd done about half the shocks then stopped), and we tried to find the prof -- he was hiding out. So we went to the Dean, and asked him to stop this experiment, we thought it was terrible and unethical and cruel. The Dean blustered on about scientific progress, etc. etc.
It was quite difficult for me to leave the experiment, because I DID believe the grad student, that he'd "signed me up for the study" and so I'd be wrecking a data point. I felt very anxious about this, but quite determined to not only not participate, but to get the experiment stopped.
Years later, taking a psych class,
heard about the Milgram experiment and realized hey! that was it!
There was just one "teacher" in this version, I'd not heard of versions with more than one teacher.
This experiment was a huge factor in the development of university research ethics committees.
Gesine
Gesine, thanks for your comment - very interesting.
actually, the milgram experiment WAS repeated (although i haven't taken the time yet to verify exactly how academic it was) - it's referenced in my post guilt, cheney and guantanamo bay.
ooops, i just saw that someone already mentioned the replication.
an addition, though - the link that's referenced in my post is an actual video of the re-enactment; and they did go beyond 150 volts.
watching the people squirm as they hear the screams of the "learner" to whom they had just administered a "shock", while being told by a man in a white coat in a cold and uninterested voice that "the experiment must continue" is hard to forget.
Thanks for the pointer Isabella.
sigfpe your argument about assumptions of being in a civilized society don't change anything in the experiment.
most societies have some form of organized and authority sanctioned torture is including the "civilized ones" (want to start a debate about waterboarding?).
in fact the torturers who are following orders or norms are probably making the same assumptions, despite the visible pain and humiliation if this act is sanctioned by my state/boss/employer/whatever then it can't be that bad.
I find it very interesting that the people who seem to get the most out of social psychology typically learn the "anti-lesson" of the classic studies. In other words, Milgram's classic experiment is not used to make society less cruel, but rather, to make cruelty and torture more efficient, and less damaging to the torturers.
I think the results of this experiment speak more about the experimenters than the participants.
Arn't the people who conducted the experiment, at the time, following the same conditions as the experiment ? That is, allowing it to continue despite the obvious distress to the people involved. The difference being the participants were under the assumption, as mentioned and rightfully so, that the conditions were safe in a safe environment (science, university, society).
This experiment is the experiment itself. More may be learnt from Milgram himself than the willing participants. He really should have looked internally.
I've heard about this expirement being repeated, and I wish I had a source but heard it was repeated with a puppy learner, it must have been real. It sort of makes me sick to think this was done to a puppy. I'd like to think I would be the type of person to not only quit but try to get the experiment shut down.
Chances are people doing this experiment are nothing like the people who committed those acts in WWII, socially, mentally everything.
Maybe some of them knew the victim was just acting.
Or maybe people will go as far as until the person is about to die..I don't know and neither do you
John, I think you're making the mistake that the world is divided into black and white, when in fact most of it is grey areas.
What they were trying to do in this experiment was show the power of the situation.
Isn't there selection bias involved here? After all, the only people who participated as teachers were those willing to give someone else an electric shock of unknown power.
I would like to know how many people declined to even begin the experiment.
Insist on taking any shock you're willing to administer first. It's the ignorance of the actual pain administered that allows one to continue. The flaw in human nature is the inaccuracy of our empathy, or our ability to ignore it.
John is completely wrong that the Milgram subjects were nothing like the people who perpetrated the atrocities in WWII. The people who lived near the death camps had to shovel hair, fingernails and human ash from their yards. The trains were run by private companies--not the Nazi government--who charged the government by boxcar for transporting human bodies to the camps. For every evil Nazi like Hitler or Himmler, there were 500 'good Germans' who did as they were told because they lived in fear of authority figures and did nothing. The reason so many studies on human behavior were done in the 50s was because people were so horrified that entire countries could let something like the Holocaust happen, and were looking for validation that they would react differently. Sadly, the experiments just proved the opposite: that we are all 'the good German.' Sad, but it's human nature and you aren't going to change it.