Milgram’s Shocking Experiment
By Angel Tang
If an authoritative figure commanded you to administer a 400-volt electric shock to another person, would you do it? Like most people, your answer is probably a strong “no.” However, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram and his shocking experiments proved otherwise. In fact, Milgram’s findings asserted that people will obey instructions from others they see as authoritative figures, even if the instructions given were to harm another person. In short, obedience to authority is encoded in our DNA.
Milgram’s experiments began in July 1961, just a year after the trial of one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann. He aimed to examine some of the justifications for acts of genocide that many accused offered at the Nuremberg War Criminal trials and specifically about their claims of obedience – that they were just following orders. Milgram questioned if “it [could] be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”
Newspaper advertisements that promoted a study of learning at Yale University helped draw hundreds to Milgram’s lab for the supposed learning study. Participants were males, aged 20 to 50, whose occupations ranged from unskilled to professional, and were paid $4.50 (~$40 today) for their participation in the study. Milgram’s procedure consisted of pairing a participant with another person and drawing lots to determine who would be the “learner” and who would be the “teacher.” The draw was purposefully rigged so that the participant would always draw the role of the teacher. The learner was one of Milgram’s people pretending to be a real participant, named Mr. Wallace. The third role in this study, the “experimenter” dressed in a technician’s coat, explained to the other two that the study was concerned with “the effects of punishment on learning.” The learner would then be taken to a separate room, strapped to a chair, and have electrodes attached to his arm. The teacher and experimenter go to a separate room where there is a stimulated shock generator with 30 switches ranging from 15 to 450 volts, labeled accordingly from “Slight Shock” to “Danger: Severe Shock” to an ominous “XXX.”
The teacher was instructed to read out a series of word pairs which the learner was supposed to memorize. After the learner seemed to become familiar with the list of word pairs, the teacher tested him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall the word that was paired with it from a list of four word choices. The teacher was told to administer a shock to the learner each time he gave an incorrect response. The experimenter would direct the teacher to “move one level higher on the shock generator each time the learner [gives] a wrong answer”. Following the prearranged script, the learner does not show any vocal response or sign of protest until the shock level reaches 300 volts. When the 300 volts shock is administered, the learner pounds on the wall of the room he is held in and the teacher can hear it. At any point in the experiment where the teacher hesitates or refuses to administer a shock, the experimenter was to give a series of prods to encourage the teacher to continue the experiment. The experimenter’s tone remained firm but not completely impolite. If the teacher refuses to obey the experimenter even after the fourth prod, the experiment is terminated. Those who terminate the experiment at any point before administering the highest shock level are termed defiant subjects, and those who comply with the experiment all the way to the highest shock level are termed as obedient subjects.
Prod 1: Please continue. or Please go on.
Prod 2: The experiment requires that you continue.
Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Prod 4: You have no other choice, you must go on.
The results of the experiment were very shocking indeed. All of the participants, the teachers, continued the experiment to 300 volts, and 65% of the participants continued to the highest shock level, 450 volts. After concluding the experiment, Milgram conducted a post-experiment interview and asked each subject, “How painful to the learner were the last few shocks that you administered him?” Subjects were told to indicate their answers on a 14-point scale that ranged from “Not at all painful” to “Extremely painful”; the most common answer was 14, “Extremely painful.” Milgram also noted that many of the participants showed signs of nervousness, especially when being prompted to administer the higher shocks.
From the results of his experiment, Milgram had two surprising findings. One, that many participants were often acting against their own moral values when punishing the “learner,” emphasizing the potency of simple obedient tendencies, and two, that the experiment had very striking signs of extreme tension in the participants that were unanticipated. Neither of the findings were consistent with the pre-experiment survey that was conducted. Every participant predicted that he, himself, would at some point firmly disobey the experimenter’s orders to proceed with the punishments.
As insightful as Milgram’s findings were, his research raised serious ethical concerns and controversies. In advertising his study and debriefing the participants, Milgram disguised the purpose of the experiment as a simple learning study. In accordance with the American Psychological Association’s principles of research ethics, Milgram’s obedience experiment is unethical. Many participants walked out of the experiment with lots of psychological and emotional distress. In the years following Milgram’s initial experiment, his findings have been replicated in a variety of cultures and conditions, and most showed similar obedience rates recorded by Milgram, and in some cases, even higher. Ultimately, despite the controversies surrounding the ethics of the study, the Milgram obedience experiment offers a new perspective on the frightening human tendency of obedience.
Angel is a senior attending the High School for Math, Science, and Engineering at City College. She is currently conducting research on follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) in a Down Syndrome mouse model at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Based in New York City, Angel finds inspiration from the city’s diversity and is passionate about building community through Ping Pong initiative, PongSpace, and her school’s STEM magazine, Dr. Dragon. When she’s not in the lab, Angel loves to chase sunsets, play Ping Pong, and is a big hot chocolate fan.
Edited by Denise Croote, PhD