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]
Join 22301 readers
- No related posts.
Charles Sheridan and Richard King hypothesised that some of Milgram's subjects may have suspected that the victim was faking, so they repeated the experiment with a real victim: a puppy. They found that 20 out of the 26 participants complied to the end. The six who did not were all male; all 13 of the women obeyed to the end, although many were highly disturbed and some openly wept.
^ Sheridan, C.L. and King, K.G. (1972) Obedience to authority with an authentic victim, Proceedings of the 80th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association 7: 165-6.
Sigfpe perhaps has a point - the experiment does not measure how many people would proceed when they KNEW the end point would be death or sever injury, but it DOES show that many would proceed when they thought there was a risk of damage or death, and subjects were certainly willing to inflict pain.
John has perhaps missed the point of the experiment ... which was to show that to obey authority and instructions is perhaps just human nature, ie that we ARE just like those people were.
And nobody comments how much more so this applies within a military structure, where questioning orders is out of the realm of possible responses (trained into each soldier at every stage of his career) and orders come down from a structure of command .....
I'm in no way a pro in psychology, but I have a pretty good explanation to the experiment results for myself. People are prone to causing pain by nature. They're prone to studying other people's suffering. Most of them don't enjoy it, they subconsciously look upon other people's sufferings as a way to gain experience that would help them protect themselves. Having an authority to encourage the pain only gives them the reason to do what they intrinsically want to.
OK. Milgram says, in his book "obedience to authority", that there are two states: Normality and Agency. In normality, a human has his own thoughts and is unafraid to state them.
Its converse, the state of agency, is what humans revert to when presented the wishes of a person with authority. In this state, we are far more susceptible to orders. This is the "follow orders or it's your head on a pike" state. This instinctive state derives from the constant message in all orders.
For example, we recieve multiple commands with the order that many hear: "Show some respect to your grandmother." From that simple order we recieve many strong psychological commandments. The one taken at face value: "Obey your grandmother." The one taken from the fact that you will: "Obey me." And the one taken from every single command that you don't reject: "Obey those with power over you."
With these signals constantly deluging you from everything from the scoldings of your mother, to the ads you see on TV (BUY STUFF), obedience is constantly and subconciously being reinforced because each signal you accept reestablished the authority.
In this study, we see it proven. Whenever we're ordered: "Don't hurt people", we again are presented with "Don't hurt people.", "Obey me." and "Obey Authority."
Also note that when the experiment was over, people weren't like children being pulled away from a game, they were shaken and visibly relieved.
To those who don't think human beings are wired to blindy and willingly obey orders and the culture around them I would ask you to consider infant circumcision.
While the rate has dropped in the U.S. in recent years, a lot of that has to do with latino immigrants. Infant circumcision rates among whites is still very high.
The baby is screaming in pain and parents tell themselves: it's a baby it won't remember. The baby is losing 20,000 nerve endings in the foreskin (there are 4000 in the head of the penis and 8000 in the clitoral glans of women) and parents tell themselves: it's a useless piece of skin. The lifetime probability of breast cancer is 1 in 8 yet the breasts of infant girls are not removed and parents tell themselves: circumcision reduces the rate of penile cancer (which is 1 in 600).
The VAST majority of people are lemmings, until we face that fact about our species and actively seek to overcome that part of our nature, we will not grow ethically or morally.
I wonder if there were participants (and what was the number of them) who refused to take part in the experiment from the very beginning, from the moment they learned that they would be required to shock someone because in the course of the study.
Do you know anything about it?
Thanks!
I heard there was similar study done attempting to remove the possibly nonverbal cues of the actors by replacing the actor with a puppy and, even though they lowered the voltage below what would kill the puppy, to quote all-creatures.com:
""In this experiment the learner-victim was actually given shocks. A nonhuman subject--a cute, fluffy puppy--was substituted for the human learner-victim of Milgram's paradigm. In addition, shocks were amperage-limited and capable of creating responses such as running, howling, and yelping, without, however, doing the subject any serious harm ... The first of the three actual voltage levels produced foot flexion and occasional barks, the second level produced running and vocalization, and the final level resulted in continuous barking and howling."
I want to say it was done by Sheridan and King. I can't recall last names.
The results are frightening, most of the people told to give electric shock to someone would. If they were taken out of the situation they would not have given the electric shock. In the experiment the participant almost always looks back behind them at the authority figure. This shows that they need direction, but it also makes people wonder how far a person will follow authority. How much power do they really have?