Milgram Experiment

11 Key excerpts on "Milgram Experiment"

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  Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making

  Mental Models, Milgram and the Problem of Obedience

  • Patricia H. Werhane, Laura Pincus Hartman, Crina Archer, Elaine E. Englehardt, Michael S. Pritchard(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In this chapter, we will examine in more detail the Milgram (1974) experiments, the well-known studies that tested whether or not naive participants would engage in unconscionable acts if encouraged or told to do so by a person in authority. We shall also present some new analyses of the original experiments that help to explain not only why so many people obeyed the person in authority in the experiments, but also why some were disobedient. In Chapter 2 we argued that the use of language in various formats, including conversation and discourse, shapes our perspectives and thus our mental models. As we shall see, the ways our mind interprets a discourse affects human choices and actions as well. It will turn out that most disobedience and exits from the Milgram Experiments occurred when the teacher administered the 150-volt shock. And it was what the learner said when at 150 volts he cried, “Get me out of here,” and in later iter- ations of the experiment adds, “My heart’s starting to bother me,” that was most decisive in the choices of those few na¨ ıve participants who exited the experiment before the final instruction to administer 450 volts. The Milgram Experiments 45 II. The Milgram Experiments In the late 1960s a young psychologist at Yale University, Stanley Milgram, began a set of experiments that have come to be called “the obedience experiments.” Milgram (1974) was struck by the fact that so many German citizens went along with Nazi behavior before and during the Second World War even when they knew atrocities were being committed to their Jewish neighbors and friends. He also wondered why ordinarily decent human beings who became guards at the concentration camps turned into monsters in their treatment of inmates, while carrying on seemingly exemplary family, religious, and neighborly lives outside their work. Thus motivated, Milgram created a set of experiments to test whether and how ordinary human beings would react to authority.

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  The Use and Misuse of the Experimental Method in Social Psychology

  A Critical Examination of Classical Research

  • Augustine Brannigan(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4     Scientific demonstration in Milgram, Zimbardo, and Rosenhan

  More evidence from the archives

  Introduction

  In this chapter, we focus on three of the most provocative studies in classical social psychology: Stanley Milgram’s obedience study, Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, and David Rosenhan’s study of psychiatric hospitals. The theme that unites these diverse investigations is the utilization of the experiment as a pedagogical device to demonstrate a perspective whose findings are a foregone conclusion.

  The Holocaust and obedience to authority

  Although Milgram’s study was derived conceptually from the work of Solomon Asch (Sabini 1986), the trial of Adolph Eichmann sharpened the issues for him. Eichmann was the allegedly plodding Nazi bureaucrat who assisted in the mass murder of European Jewry by masterminding the concentration of the victims in Poland after the Nazi occupation of France and most of western Europe. Subsequently, the Nazis developed factories for the extermination of Jewish victims at Treblinka, Sorbibor, Auschwitz, and other death camps. Several million innocent people, men, women, and children, were murdered at these death camps by ordinary German administrators, policemen, soldiers, and camp guards. In Milgram’s experiment, ordinary subjects were cast in the parts of executioners. In the “received view” of this work (Stam, Radtke, and Lubek 1998), Milgram took people from all walks of life and turned them into the experimental analogs of Eichmann, suggesting that the capacity for evil was fostered in virtuous individuals by monstrous bureaucrats. The existential problem could not have been more clear-cut. Indeed, all of Milgram’s work has the bite of immediate relevance.

  The study was advertised as an experiment designed to test the effects of punishment on human learning. Subjects (“teachers”) were paid to teach the “learners” to memorize a long series of paired associations. The pretext for the study was to advance knowledge about the effectiveness of negative reinforcements on learning. Errors were to result in a shock, but the level of the shock escalated at every mistake in fifteen-point gradations from 15 volts right up to and beyond 450 volts. The experiment was run with individual teachers and learners, but the role assignment was rigged so that the real subject was always assigned the role of the teacher who administered shocks, while an affable middle-aged man, a confederate, acted as the learner. The teachers were given a sample shock to demonstrate the actual discomfort that resulted from their control of the shock machine. The machine was an impressive electrical appliance with switches, lights, and verbal designations describing the severity of the shock (mild, moderate, high, extremely high, XXX). The subjects were drawn from a wide range of occupations and professions, unlike the usual captive population of undergraduate students.

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  Great Ideas in Psychology

  A Cultural and Historical Introduction

  • Fathali M. Moghaddam(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Oneworld Publications

    (Publisher)

  2   Imagine living in the seventeenth century rather than the twenty-first century. What are some ways in which you would experience less individual rights and be expected to show greater obedience to authority?

  THE EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF OBEDIENCE

  Before 1960, two ground-breaking series of studies on conformity were conducted by psychologists, the first initiated by Muzafer Sherif in the 1930s and the second by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. Both of these series of studies were conducted in contexts involving issues that had little real-world significance: estimating the movement of a spot of light (in the case of Sherif’s studies) and estimating lengths of lines (in the case of Asch’s studies). During 1959–60 Stanley Milgram was working in Asch’s laboratory and thinking about what would happen if instead of the movement of a spot of light, judgments of line lengths, or the like, issues of greater human significance were introduced into the laboratory. Would the individual still bend to the will of the majority? This question was the point of departure for Milgram’s studies on obedience to authority, and it eventually led to the question of how far individuals would obey an authority figure.

  Milgram recruited participants by advertising for volunteers aged 20–50 to take part in a study on the effect of punishment on learning. Participants were told that a goal of the research was to discover how much punishment is good for learning, how much difference it makes whether an older or younger person is giving the punishment, and similar such questions. From the pool of applicants he was able to select a sample of participants with varied ages and backgrounds. In each experiment, the participants were forty percent skilled and unskilled workers, forty percent white-collar, sales, and business, and twenty percent professionals. All those selected had been screened to ensure that they had a normal psychological profile. When the selected participants arrived at Milgram’s laboratory, they were introduced to another person who was supposedly also a participant but was actually a middle-aged accountant selected to act as Milgram’s confederate. It was explained to the participants that this learning experiment required a teacher and a student. The two participants drew lots to decide who would play the role of the teacher and who would play the role of the student, but the outcome was pre-arranged so that the confederate would always play the role of student. There was also a scientist in a white laboratory coat in the room, purportedly in charge of the “learning study.”

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  Research Methods for Social Psychology

  • Dana S. Dunn(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Reflecting on what became all-too-typical reactions, one observer of Milgram’s study commented that I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe, and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered “Oh God, let’s stop it.” And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the very end. (Milgram, 1974, p. 377) 48 Ethical Issues in Social Psychological Research Here are some of the ethical issues to consider regarding this work:  Participants genuinely believed they were hurting another person, just as they genuinely believed they had to do so in the interest of the “experiment.”  The participants were not told in advance what was going to happen or their role in the proceedings (doing so would have biased their responses).  Many learned something unsettling about themselves, that they were entirely capable of obeying authority, of “hurting” someone despite his protests.  Others, a minority, learned they were capable of disobeying an authority figure in order to avoid harming another person. Generations of students and fellow social psychologists were moved to ask whether Milgram’s (1963) methods were justified and justifiable. Was the knowledge about behavioral responses to obedience worth it? Did Milgram treat his participants fairly? These and related issues were debated once his controversial work appeared. Milgram had defenders (e.g., Blass, 2004) and critics (e.g., Baumrind, 1964, 1985; Orne & Holland, 1968), and he spent considerable efforts dealing with reactions to the obedience paradigm (Milgram, 1964, 1972, 1977).

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  Psychoanalysis, Classic Social Psychology and Moral Living

  Let the Conversation Begin

  • Paul Marcus(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine. The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation—a conception of his duties as a subject—and not from any particular aggressive tendencies. This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.

  (Milgram, 1974, pp. 5–6)

  It is mainly within the psychosocial context of trying to fathom the Holocaust that Milgram designed a series of obedience to authority experiments that provided “evidence of probably the most compelling phenomenon ever uncovered by social psychology” (Reicher & Haslam, 2017, p. 125). Indeed, researchers and scholars are still debating Milgram’s fifty-year-old findings and analyses, though the obedience to authority phenomenon “still lacks a compelling explanation” (ibid.).

  The obedience shock experiments

  In Experiment 5, the most famous of the eighteen variations, Milgram informed naïve subjects in the all-males study that they were engaged in a scientific investigation of the effects of punishment on learning [all were “decent and courteous” in real-life says Milgram (1974, p. 132)]. One of the men in each participant pair would act as the “Learner” and would attempt to do a simple task involving memory by supplying a word. The other man was the “Teacher” who was requested to read the words to the Learner and would punish mistakes through an electric shock if the Learner did not provide the second word in each pair. The shocks were delivered by an imposing, realistic-looking machine (henceforth, the shock generator) that contained thirty numbered switches spanning from 15 volts (“slight shock”) through 450 volts (“XXX”; the descriptor for 375 volts read, “danger severe shock”), reflecting the first to the thirtieth switch. The two participants involved in the study, the naïve subject (the Teacher) and a research assistant (the Learner) then drew slips of paper from a hat to decide who would assume each role. The drawing was rigged so that the naïve subject always assumed the role of the Teacher. The Teacher was then instructed by the scientific-looking authority in a white coat to give a shock to the Learner whenever he made an error on the memory task. Most importantly, the Teacher was instructed that they had to increase the strength of the shock each time the Learner made a mistake. What this meant was that when the Learner made numerous mistakes, he would soon be getting strong and seemingly painful jolts of electricity. It is vital to understand that the Learner, who was actually a research assistant, never received any shocks during the experiment. The only time a shock was ever used was a mild pulse from switch number three to persuade naïve subjects that the shock generator was in fact real.

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  Stanley Milgram

  Understanding Obedience and its Implications

  • Peter Lunt(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  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.

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  Obedience to Authority

  Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm

  • Thomas Blass(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  There is no question of Stanley Milgram’s pre-eminence as a behavioral researcher (Blass, 1992, 1996), the architect of “the most well-known research in social psychology, perhaps all of psychology” (Brock & Brannon, 1994, p. 259). An introductory psychology textbook would be incomplete without mention of Milgram’s obedience experiments (Perlman, 1980). A social psychology course without them would be unthinkable (Perlman, 1979). Some prominent social psychologists have been unreserved in recognizing a unique quality in Milgram’s obedience research, that applies to no other study within the field. For example, Muzafer Sherif (1975) said, “Milgram’s obedience experiment is the single greatest contribution to human knowledge ever made by the field of social psychology, perhaps psychology in general.” And at Milgram’s eulogy in December, 1984, his close colleague Irwin Katz noted “When viewed in relation to the main body of psychology…, Stanley Milgram’s work on obedience stands by itself—an indestructible monolith on an uninhabited plain.” Besides the obedience studies, which he conducted in his twenties, he went on to do other pioneering research on city life, the media, cognitive maps, and a score of diverse topics (Blass, 1992), that made him one of the few social scientists to directly impact our popular culture—including Broadway theater and feature films (Takooshian, 1998), and a television play based on the obedience experiments (Milgram, 1976).

  Yet the fact is that Milgram was also a teacher throughout his career—first at Yale (1960–1963), then at Harvard (1963–1967), and finally at the City University of New York (1967–1984). In fact, his teaching at CUNY began at age 33, as a full professor and head of the social psychology doctoral program, and ended by chairing a student’s defense of her dissertation at 2 pm on December 20, 1984, a few hours before he succumbed to heart failure. His 24 continuous years of teaching were punctuated only by a few sabbaticals and, starting in 1980, some brief medical leaves interspersed among his 4 heart attacks. His teaching materials fill some 106 boxes in the Yale University archives. Soon after his untimely death, the American Psychological Foundation (APF) considered Milgram’s nomination by his students for its annual award for Distinguished Teaching in Psychology, but APF policy ultimately excluded a posthumous Award. (See Appendix

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  Psychology and Politics

  A Social Identity Perspective

  • Alexa Ispas(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  5

  The psychology of authoritarian regimes

  Learning objectives

  •    gain a critical understanding of Milgram's obedience studies and Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment, and their implications for resisting authoritarian regimes; •    develop an insight into the process through which authoritarian regimes gain access to power; •    recognize the dynamics of resistance in political settings.

  In the previous chapter, we touched on leaders’ ability to construct the social context in such a way as to bolster their prototypicality and therefore their social influence within the group. This aspect of leadership can be used just as effectively by leaders wishing to safeguard democratic processes as by leaders intent on using their social influence to impose authoritarian, tyrannical regimes.

  In this chapter we consider the psychological underpinnings of such regimes. We discuss two social psychological experiments that in different ways have influenced the public consensus on our ability to resist tyrannical systems: Milgram's obedience studies and Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment. These studies are widely known outside the discipline and are often perceived as showing that human beings are helpless in the face of tyranny. The source of tyranny is located within an authority figure in the Milgram studies, or within ourselves in the case of Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment. From a social identity perspective, this interpretation is problematic, and not supported by the data. In fact, when examining the findings with a focus on social identity, we discover that they can be interpreted more fruitfully in terms of our ability to withstand tyranny.

  Deference to authority: Milgram's obedience studies

  Milgram's (1974) research on obedience constitutes one of the best-known social psychology experimental paradigms. This research was widely publicized through a short educational film titled Obedience

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  Arguing, Obeying and Defying

  A Rhetorical Perspective on Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments

  • Stephen Gibson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  And they attribute less responsibility to the learner.’ While cautioning that these are post hoc accounts and should necessarily be treated with caution, Milgram nevertheless suggested that disobedient participants see themselves as primarily responsible for shocking the learner, whereas obedient participants do not. Milgram’s theory thus constitutes an attempt to account for the vari- ation in obedience levels across conditions, and this has important impli- cations for the philosophical and practical way in which we understand agency and responsibility. Notably, and perhaps troublingly, it suggests 26 The Obedience Experiments that ‘just following orders’ may have some basis in the reality of under- lying psychological processes. Critical Reaction Milgram’s experiments provoked an almost immediate critical reaction, and in many respects this continues to the present day (see Chapter 2). Key early criticisms of Milgram’s experiment highlighted a number of important ethical, methodological and theoretical weaknesses, and it is testament to the controversy generated by the obedience experiments that many of these critiques have gone on to be an integral part of the story of the Milgram Experiments. Ethics Diana Baumrind’s (1964) seminal article set the tone for much of the criticism of the obedience experiments on ethical grounds. As Miller (2013) has recently noted, Baumrind’s critique has been almost as influ- ential as Milgram’s experiments themselves, both in terms of bringing the experiments to the attention of a wider disciplinary readership, and in framing the terms of the ethical debate at a time when such matters were not the subject of routine discussion in the academic literature. Indeed, it is arguable that the ethical controversy resulting from the experiments played a key role in the debates that led to the more robust codification of research ethics in US psychology a decade later (Stark, 2010).

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  OCR Psychology

  AS Core Studies and Psychological Investigations

  • Philip Banyard, Cara Flanagan(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  1964 ) wrote a damning critique, arguing that just because someone volunteers for a study this does not take away the researcher’s responsibilities towards them. She used direct quotes from Milgram’s study to illustrate the lack of regard she believed was given to the subjects. For example:

  ‘In a large number of cases the degree of tension [in the subjects] reached extremes that are rarely seen in sociopsychological laboratory studies. Subjects were observed to sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan, and dig their fingernails into their flesh. These were characteristic rather than exceptional responses to the experiment.’ (page 375)

  Baumrind accepted that some harm to subjects is a necessary part of research, for example testing out new medical procedures, because the results could not be achieved in any other way. Social psychology, however, is not in the same game as medicine and is unlikely to produce life-saving results, thus does not justify harming subjects.

  The case for the prosecution was very powerful. Milgram’s application to join the American Psychological Association (APA) was put on hold while they investigated the study, and he was not given the post he hoped for at Yale.

  The case for the defence, however, is overwhelming. At the time of study psychologists were less sensitive about ethical issues than today, however there were ethical guidelines in place. In fact Milgram took more care than his colleagues about such issues. His obedience study contains the first reference to debriefing

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  Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 1

  Milgram's Obedience Experiments and the Holocaust

  • Nestar Russell(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  http://​web.​missouri.​edu/​~bondesonw/​Laud.​html . Accessed 25 February 2015.

   
• 58.
  Miller (1986 , p. 136).
   
• 59.
  Eckman (1977 , p. 94), Miller (1995 , p. 34), and Orne and Holland (1968 , p. 282).
   
• 60.
  Milgram (1972 , p. 139).
   
• 61.
  Orne and Holland (1968 , p. 287).
   
• 62.
  Orne (1962 , p. 779).
   
• 63.
  Milgram (1972 , p. 141).
   
• 64.
  After undertaking a replication of the Obedience experiment, David Rosenhan had independent judges interview participants, asking them in astonishment, “You really mean you didn’t catch on to the experiment?” Seventy percent admitted to having been fooled by the deception (Milgram 1972 , p. 141; see also Meeus and Raaijmakers 1985, as cited in Miller 1986 , p. 156).
   
• 65.
  Eckman (1977 , p. 94).
   
• 66.
  Milgram (1972 , p. 140).
   
• 67.
  See, for example, Milgram (1974 , p. 57). More specifically, consider the following post-experimental exchange: Experimenter: “How painful to the learner were the last few shocks that you administered to him…?” Participant: “From his reaction I would say…extremely painful…” Experimenter: “Well…how…high a sample shock would you take on this machine right now?” Participant: “I would like to say [laughs] cautious me, alright, I’d go up to…60 [volts]. I’ve had 10,000 volts but [laughs] it felt different to [the earlier 45-volt test shock]” (SMP, Box 155, Audiotape #0303). Also, in Rosenhan’s replication of the Obedience studies, every participant later refused to participate in another trial, but this time in the learner’s role (1969 , p. 142; see also Mantell 1971 , p. 108).
   
• 68.
  Milgram (1974 , p. 159).
   
• 69.
  See, for example, Perry (2012 , p. 197).
   
• 70.
  See, for example, Russell (2009 , pp. 152–153).
   
• 71.
  Eckman (1977 , p. 95). In fact, Milgram’s procedure was so convincing that one participant had even been informed by a friend who had earlier been a participant “that the experiment was ‘a fake, the learner does not get any shocks’ but I didn’t believe this” (SMP, Box 44, Divider “8”, #1014).
   
• 72.
  Harré (1979 , p. 105). As De Swaan (2015 , p. 28) most recently argued, “Nobody in their right mind would ever accept the idea that someone, anyone, would be electrocuted in the presence of certified researchers in the psychology lab on the campus of Yale University in New Haven , Connecticut.” At best, De Swaan