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What do you know about the Milgram experiment? Imagine you’re given a gun and ordered to shoot at an unarmed stranger. What would it take for you to pull the trigger? Would someone have to threaten your life or your family to be obedient, or would you refuse no matter what? Although it seems like an unlikely scenario, this happened to Ishmael Beah.
When he was 13, Ishmael was separated from his parents because of the civil war in his home country, Sierra Leone. After 6 months of wandering the country on his own, he was recruited by the rebel army and became a child soldier.
Today, there are around 100,000 child soldiers around the world that are kidnapped and forced to fight and kill. If they refuse to obey orders, they are beaten or threatened. Many political and charity campaigns are fighting to get countries to stop using child soldiers. Luckily Ishmael was freed with the help of one of these charities.
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.
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 is it just part of human nature to follow orders by someone in authority? This is what Milgram wanted to find out in his psychology experiment.
Milgram’s first obedience test investigated destructive obedience. He continued to investigate many specific variations in his later experiments in 1965 and mostly focused on situational influences on obedience such as location, uniforms, and proximity.
After his first study, he went on to develop his agency theory which offers some explanations as to why people obey.
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.
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 that the participant would always end up as the ‘teacher’. There was also a third person 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 study was designed so that no real shocks were administered and the ‘learner’ was never going to succeed in his memory task. The experiment was designed to be open-ended so that the participant’s conscience alone would determine the outcome of the experiment.
Milgram experiment setup: E= experimenter, T= teacher, L=learner, Wikimedia Commons
The levels of voltage that the participant was administering was 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.
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.’
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:
‘Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on.’
If the subject said that the learner did not want to go on,
the experimenter replied:
‘Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on.’
All of the participants went up to 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.
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.
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.
For your exam, you might be asked how Milgram measured the level of obedience of his participants, as well as how variables were controlled in the laboratory.
First, let us explore the contributions and positive aspects overall of Milgram’s experiment.
Some of its strengths include:
In psychology, operationalisation means to be able to measure invisible human behaviour in numbers. 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 future. By creating a fake shocking apparatus, Milgram was able to measure in numbers to which extent humans would obey authority.
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.
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.
There were numerous criticisms and debates surrounding Milgram’s obedience experiment. Let’s explore a couple of examples.
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.
However, some factors speak for the external validity of Milgram’s study, one example being a similar experiment having been conducted in a different setting. Hofling et al. (1966) conducted a similar study to Milgram, but in a hospital setting. Nurses were instructed to administer an unknown drug to a patient over the phone by a doctor they didn’t know. In the study, 21 out of 22 nurses (95%) were heading to give the drug to the patient before being intercepted by the researchers. On the other hand, when this experiment was replicated by Rank and Jacobson (1977) using a known doctor and known drug (Valium), only two out of 18 nurses (10%) carried out the order.
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.
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.
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.
The Milgram obedience experiment showed that when pressured, most people will obey orders that could be harmful to other people.
The criticisms of Milgram’s research were that the laboratory experiment can’t be applied to situations in the real world, so his conclusions can’t be taken as indicators of true human nature. Also, the experiment was unethical. As the sample used for Milgram’s obedience experiment were mainly American men, there is also the question of whether his conclusions apply to other genders as well as across cultures.
The Milgram obedience experiment was unethical because the study participants were misled about the real aim of the experiment, meaning they couldn’t consent, and it caused extreme distress to some of the participants.
The Milgram obedience experiment is considered reliable because variables were mainly controlled and the results are reproducible.
Milgram’s first obedience test investigated destructive obedience. He continued to investigate many specific variations in his later experiments in 1965 and mostly focused on situational influences on obedience such as location, uniforms, and proximity.
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