Stanley Milgram

Understanding Obedience and its Implications

Peter Lunt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781349874880
• eBook ISBN: 9781350312722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In a series of ingenious studies, social psychologist Stanley Milgram, examined the impact of modern society on the psychology of individuals. His most famous experiment saw participants commanded to administer painful electric shocks to supposed fellow volunteers and their compliance raised serious questions about the limits of moral autonomy and the ability of individuals to resist authority. Lunt explores the historical and cultural setting of Milgram's social psychology, his intellectual roots and the continuing relevance of his research today. This authoritative introduction is essential reading for all those interested in the psychology of power and obedience.

1 Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Experiments

An invitation

Imagine you are reading your local paper one day and a public announcement catches your eye calling for volunteers to take part in a study of memory at your local university and promising to pay you a small amount of money plus expenses for your time. The announcement goes on to say that no special qualifications are needed to take part and lists a range of jobs illustrating that a variety of people are being sought. At the bottom of the announcement there is a form for potential volunteers to fill in. You are intrigued and decide to fill in the form giving your name, address, telephone number, age, occupation and sex, whether you can participate on weekdays, evenings or weekends and the best time to call you. A little while later you receive a phone call from the university asking you to arrange a time to participate in the study, you agree on a time and are told the location. On the appointed day you travel to the university campus, you are slightly nervous as you have never been there before but you follow the signs to a modern building, locate the room and enter to find two men waiting for you. One, a professional looking man in his 30s wearing a grey scientists lab coat says ‘hello’, explains that he is the experimenter and introduces you to another, mild looking, middle aged man who, like you, is a volunteer in the study.

The scientist then explains that the study you have agreed to participate in aims to find out if punishment can improve performance on a simple memory test. You and the other volunteer draw lots to see who will play the role of the teacher in the study and who will play the role of the learner. The experimenter invites you and your fellow participant to draw lots; you both draw slips of paper. One of the slips of paper has the word ‘learner’ and the other ‘teacher’ and you draw the one with ‘teacher’ on it. You then accompany the experimenter and the ‘learner’ to the room next-door and watch the learner being seated in a chair, strapped in and having an electrode fixed to his wrist by the experimenter. You return to the other room and the experimenter instructs you to sit in front of a large piece of electrical equipment that has a series of switches. The switches are labelled with voltage levels starting at 15 and going up in 15-volt intervals to a maximum of 450 volts. You receive a mild electric shock to demonstrate what the learner will experience during the experiment.

At last, the study starts and you ask the first question. You read out a pair of words (e.g. blue box, nice day, wild duck) and then ask the ‘learner’ to name the word paired with one that you read out. If they get the answer right then you go on to the next question. However, if they give the wrong answer then you press a button to administer an electric shock (15 volts the first time, then 30 volts, then 45 volts and so on adding 15 volts each time there is a wrong answer).

At first things seem okay; you ask the questions, administer the shocks when a wrong answer is given and, following the experimenter’s prompts, you raise the voltage level. The learner does not respond when you give them the initial shocks. However, as the voltage level rises to 100 volts you hear his first reactions to the shocks. You feel apprehensive as the learner calls out in pain and you look across at the experimenter who seems to be calm so you carry on. The shock levels get even higher, the learner starts to protest, shouting, screaming with pain and demanding to be released. You feel very uncomfortable and upset at this point and you turn to the experimenter suggesting that something is going wrong with the experiment and that you are concerned about the learner. The experimenter responds in a matter of fact voice asking you to continue. You carry on but the screams are getting louder and the learner complains that they have a heart condition so you turn again to the experimenter and receive another bland reply telling you to continue with the experiment. Again, despite your misgivings, despite the screams of the learner, despite feeling a combination of anger and distress you carry on asking the questions and administrating the shocks.

At about 300 volts, something extraordinary happens; the learner stops responding. You are worried that he might have fainted or even died and you turn to the experimenter who again tells you to continue with the experiment. You ask how you can since the person is no longer answering your questions, but the experimenter tells you to treat no answer as a wrong answer so you press the switch to administer a 315 volt shock and raise the level to 330. By now you have asked many questions and administered 22 shocks, you just want this to end and continue to 450 volts by which time you have delivered 30 shocks to the learner and nine or ten since you felt that he had either fainted, had a heart attack or died.

The experimenter says that you have completed the experiment and explains the background of the study to you. With astonishment, you hear that the learner had been pretending and did not in fact receive any shocks. What you had been hearing were not his screams of agony resulting from electric shocks that you were delivering but a tape that he had recorded earlier in which he acted out reactions to different levels of shock. The experimenter introduces the learner to you and he confirms that he was play-acting all the time and never received a single shock! This has been an upsetting, difficult, highly uncomfortable experience. You listen in surprise as the experimenter tells you that you have not been participating in a study of memory but a study of the psychology of obedience to authority aiming to find out the conditions under which individuals are prepared to harm others when they are ordered to do so. You try to explain to the experimenter how you had felt during the experiment and to give an explanation for why you went along with the deception and, although it was a role-play, the reasons why you carried on despite your evident unhappiness.

Later you hear about the experiments, which have become quite a talking point, and the person responsible for them, a social psychologist called Stanley Milgram has become quite a public figure, appearing in documentaries and in magazine articles. You have been a subject in one of the most famous experiments in psychology (perhaps second only to Pavlov’s dogs): Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority.

Stanley Milgram

Despite his early death of heart failure at the age of 51, Stanley Milgram had a long and distinguished career as an academic social psychologist. I will discuss a number of examples of his empirical work and writings in this book. However, what made Milgram famous was the series of experiments on obedience to authority that he conducted very early in his career when he was a young assistant professor at Yale and just after the completion of his PhD.

Although the series of experiments that Milgram conducted between 1960 and 1963 were to gain immediate recognition, even fame, he did not write up the full account of the obedience experiments until his 1974 book Obedience to Authority. Milgram published a small number of the studies in the academic literature along with more popular articles describing the experiments, which turned out to be important for the reception of Milgram’s work. The study reported in his first paper published in 1963 was Milgram’s baseline study in which he set out to establish a procedure that would put participants in a conflict situation that was meaningful to them and through which he could generate a simple measure of the level of obedience. Milgram’s intention was to use this ‘procedure’ or baseline condition in what he saw as the real business of his experiments: to manipulate the conditions under which people received orders from authority to see which situational factors influence the level of obedience. Milgram drew a distinction between his ‘procedure’ and his subsequent experiments and as a scientist, he was careful to claim that causal accounts could only be given when he designed manipulations of the conditions under which people were exposed to commands from an authority figure. Many of the manipulations that Milgram subsequently introduced reduced the level of obedience, so the notoriety that Milgram’s study achieved is exacerbated because the initial procedure produced amongst the highest levels of obedience and ‘harm’ to the learner.

Yet it was the first study, the demonstration of obedience, which caught the academic and public imagination because the results of the study were both unexpected and alarming. Sixty five percent of the participants in the study described above completed the experiment and administered 450 volts to an apparently unconscious or dead learner. Apparently normal citizens of the USA in the early 1960s agreed to inflict serious harm on people who they thought were fellow volunteers when asked to do so by a scientific investigator. The findings are sensational and evocative and leave us with as many questions as answers. The experimental context resonates with the Holocaust, bringing to mind the excesses of the Nazi regime and the genocide committed during the Second World War. Worse still, the experiment took place in the USA in the early 1960s in an apparently free liberal democracy not against the backdrop of a totalitarian regime. Furthermore, the experimenter had no real power over the participants who as volunteers could, in principle, have walked out of the experiment at any point. These points raise uncomfortable questions about the nature of genocide and the assumption that evil deeds arise from evil minds. The participants in Milgram’s studies were ordinary American citizens, not homicidal maniacs, psychopaths or evil people. They left the experiment and returned to their families and workplaces to lead normal, respectable lives.

Milgram tapped into the ideas that the political theorist Hannah Arendt had developed in reaction to the arrest and trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for whom she coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’. Eichmann was an administrator in Nazi Germany with responsibility for organising part of the logistics that supported the transportation and running of the extermination camps during the Holocaust. However, the man who appeared in the courtroom in Jerusalem in the early 1960s had more in common with a civil servant than the popular image of a mass murderer. Against this background, Milgram’s findings suggested that we might all be capable of inflicting harm on others in the right circumstances. Although some of the participants in the experiment protested, many of them carried on obeying the commands of the experimenter even though it caused them distress, suggesting a moral weakness of character amongst ordinary American citizens. People appear to be passive conformists who are unable to assert their rights to challenge authority based on their conscience and personal values. What did this tell us about modern, affluent, liberal societies and what did it tell us about ourselves? In addition, Eichmann’s occupation as an administrator suggested another frightening idea: that the efficiency of modern societies could, under certain circumstances, lead to terrible social and human consequences rather than to the good life we might hope to live.

In addition to all of these connotations of Milgram’s findings, which raise a variety of disturbing social, moral and political questions, the fact that they are so unexpected adds to their fascination. Milgram himself had thought that it would be hard to get people to obey the experimenter in his experiment. When he asked people to predict the results based on a description of the experiment most people predicted far lower levels of obedience than those found in practice. The results are counterintuitive, which makes them good social science because they challenge our assumptions and stereotypes. However, it also suggests that we are carrying around with us, all of us, assumptions about our moral autonomy and independence that may be false. We cherish our sense of ourselves as moral, independent and free and Milgram’s experiments bring this into doubt. Additionally, in liberal democratic society the ability of citizens to challenge authority is, we fondly imagine, critical to what keeps power in check. If individuals are passive in the face of authority what is the value of political freedom and accountability?

These reactions demonstrate the elegance and power of Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority: they are rich with serious implications that raise important questions about the nature of modern society, the operation of power, the role and responsibilities of individuals and their moral character. In this book, I will discuss all these questions but first, in the remainder of this chapter, I will give a more detailed account of the experiments that Milgram completed as reported in his 1974 book Obedience to Authority.

The obedience experiments

Having established that he could induce obedience to authority in an experiment, Milgram set about manipulating the conditions of the experiment to see which variables would influence the level of obedience. Some of the manipulations that Milgram carried out were to check that the experiment was working in the way that he wanted, for example that the context was meaningful to participants. He designed other conditions to rule out alternative explanations for obedience such as the idea that people were expressing latent aggression. The most important manipulations, however, are those in which Milgram tests which social conditions influence the level of obedience, for example, the distance between the participant, the learner and the experimenter.

Proximity

In Milgram’s original procedure, the actor playing the role of the learner was in a separate room from the participant playing the role of the teacher and the experimenter who heard the moans, complaints and screams of the learner through a loudspeaker. In the first condition of his experiments manipulating the proximity of the teacher and the learner, Milgram switched off the loudspeaker so that the teacher could not see the learner, nor could he hear the learner’s comments, protests and screams. In this condition, 26 out of 40 people completed the experiment, a lower percentage than the original procedure. In the second condition, the experimenter switched on the loud speaker and otherwise the procedure was the same as the first condition. In this situation, 25 out of 40 participants went to the end of the study. In a third condition, the learner was in the same room as the experimenter and the teacher and obedience reduced to 16 of the 40 participants. In the fourth condition, the learner and teacher sat next to each other and the teacher administered the shocks by pushing the hand of the learner onto an electric plate. In this condition, only 12 out of the 40 participants completed the study. These results demonstrate that the level of obedience to authority increases as the social distance between the learner and the teacher increases.

Milgram discusses a number of possible explanations as to why distance might influence the level of obedience. One possibility is that the visibility of the suffering of another human being provides a powerful cue that increases the empathy the teacher feels for the learner. The Milgram experiment puts the participant playing the role of the teacher in a conflict between obeying authority and following his or her conscience. Empathy makes the identity of the learner salient and might therefore have increased disobedience to the commands of the experimenter. Milgram considers that in the remote conditions it is easier for the teacher to deny the effects that the shocks have on the learner whereas it is more difficult to deny the suffering of the learner when they are in the same room and even more so when they are touching. Milgram suggests that it is more difficult to harm someone who is looking you in the eye and judging your conduct because this makes salient his or her identity as a human being. There are, however, alternative possible explanations as to why obedience levels decline in response to a reduction in the distance between the learner and the teacher. For example, in the remote condition the link between the actions of the teacher and the consequences for the learner are less salient than in the conditions when the effects on the learner are more audible or visible. Alternatively, Milgram suggests that a subtle social psychological effect might result from the fact that the teacher is alone with the experimenter in the remote conditions, which subconsciously draws the teacher into a relationship with the experimenter and ‘against’ the learner. This interpersonal dynamic changes when the learner is in the same room as the teacher and the experimenter making it less likely that the teacher will take the side of the experimenter.

In his explanations, Milgram draws on a range of social psychological theories. During his PhD studies, he was influenced by the work on conformity by another social psychologist, Solomon Asch. Asch conducted studies of conformity which confronted individuals with a group of people who were all making the same but wrong judgement about the length of lines. In Asch’s experiment, people go along with the group decision even if they are clear that the judgement is wrong. However, Asch found that conformity reduced radically when there was more than one independent participant in the group. It appears that the support of a fellow ‘real’ participant who goes along with their judgements empowers participants to resist the pressure of the majority.

The results of Asch’s experiments are open to two different interpretations: that participants respond to the information in the situation that others have made particular judgements or that they simply decide to conform to what the other people are doing in the experiment. In the Milgram experiment, proximity does afford more information, for example, about the effects of the teacher’s actions on the learner. Alternatively, participants may be influenced by subtle effects of social conformity, the tendency of individuals to want to get on with other people in a social situation, and they went along with the suggestion of the experimenter. One of the criticisms of Asch’s work is that his experiment demonstrates conformity but does not distinguish whether his participants go along with the group norm because they regard this as the best information about the length of the lines or because they want to conform to what other people do. The critical point is that in the different proximity conditions of the Milgram experiment give varying cues to participants about the nature of the task. In the remote conditions, the role of the experimenter is more salient and so people interpret their task as to follow the lead of the experimenter. In contrast, in the proximal conditions, where the teacher is in the same room or touching the learner, they look for clues as to what to do from the learner who is saying that they want to stop the experiment.

The variety of potential explanations also suggests that Milgram did not have a clear rationale for the manipulation of distance in his experiments. Why did Milgram think that social distance would influence the level of obedience? The importance of proximity and the salience of the victim was one of the themes in the very public...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1. Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Experiments
• 2. Milgram’s Explanation of His Findings
• 3. The Reaction of the Psychology Community
• 4. Power, Domination and the Sociology of the Holocaust
• 5. Political Culture, Political Psychology and Social Influence
• 6. The Individual in a Social World
• 7. Contemporary Resonances of Milgram’s Research
• 8. Afterword
• References
• Index