Stanley Milgram

12 Key excerpts on "Stanley Milgram"

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  The Art of Followership

  How Great Followers Create Great Leaders and Organizations

  • Ronald E. Riggio, Ira Chaleff, Jean Lipman-Blumen, Ronald E. Riggio, Ira Chaleff, Jean Lipman-Blumen(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Jossey-Bass

    (Publisher)

  It was an ambi-tious piece of research, requiring spending almost two years in Europe comparing conformity levels in France and Norway using a modification of the Asch confor-mity paradigm. And indeed Milgram succeeded in making his mark with the obedience research. Although he had just begun his academic career, and would go on to do other innovative research, it would always be overshadowed by the obedience work. Of the 140 or so talks he gave during his career, more than a third dealt with obedience. He was still giving invited talks on obedience in 1984, the year he died. It remains his best-known and most widely discussed work; many consider it one of the most important psychological works of the latter half of the twentieth century. Some have equated the importance of his work with that of Sigmund Freud. But Milgram was no Freud. He did not attempt an all-encompassing theory of human behavior. No “school” of thought bears his name. Whereas Freud, of course, focused on childhood and intrapsychic determinants of human behav-ior, for Milgram—following in the footsteps of Kurt Lewin, the father of experi-mental social psychology—the primary causal explanation for a person’s actions was to be found in the here and now—in the immediate, concrete social situation. However, Milgram was similar to Freud in that both of them have led to profound alterations in our thinking about human nature. 2 What Can Milgram’s Obedience Experiments Contribute? 197 As many, if not most, readers probably know, in his obedience experiments Milgram made the startling discovery that a majority of his subjects—average and presumably normal community residents—were willing to give a series of increasingly painful and perhaps harmful electric shocks to a protesting, scream-ing victim simply because they were commanded to by an experimental authority.

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  Obedience to Authority

  Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm

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

    (Publisher)

  2How Stanley Milgram Taught About Obedience and Social Influence

  Harold Takooshian

  Fordham University

  “What was he like?” This is the question almost invariably heard by a few dozen U.S. social psychologists, when someone discovers they studied with Stanley Milgram. Such curiosity is understandable, considering that Milgram was such a widely-known researcher who taught so few students, and that only a small number of psychologists knew Milgram as anything but the larger-than-life scientist who created the obedience experiments. “What was he like?” is indeed an excellent question, because those of us who studied with Milgram saw much more than a researcher. As a doctoral student in the Social-Personality Psychology program at the graduate school of the City University of New York (CUNY), I completed some half-dozen of Milgram’s courses, and he chaired my dissertation committee. This chapter cumulates my recollections, supplemented by those of some of his other students, to describe Milgram’s work in the classroom—his teaching in general, and his teaching about obedience and social influence in particular.

  Stanley Milgram, PROFESSOR

  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).

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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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  Stanley Milgram

  Understanding Obedience and its Implications

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

    (Publisher)

  2   Milgram’s Explanation of His Findings

  The experiments that Milgram conducted are fascinating in their own right and the results raise important and worrying questions about human agency and responsibility in the face of authority. However, what motivated Milgram to conduct these experiments and how did he interpret the results? In his book Obedience to Authority , written ten years after he had completed his experiments, Milgram was able to develop a psychological theory of the results, to reflect on the ideas that had influenced him and to elaborate on the broader social, political and moral context of his research.

  In the preface and first chapter of Obedience to Authority Milgram reviews the theoretical questions and social concerns that led him to design and conduct his obedience experiments. Milgram does not start with psychological theory but blends sociological analyses of power and authority with enduring concerns about the Holocaust and political concerns about post-war American society. Milgram’s acknowledgements give us some clues as to the key influences on his work. The list of authors he cites are from two different academic traditions: research on the social psychology of social influence, including Asch, Lewin and Sherif and a group of writers of social and political theory who influenced the broader intellectual zeitgeist in which Milgram and other social scientists of his day started their careers, including Adorno et al. (1950), Arendt, Fromm and Weber.

  Milgram starts his discussion with a paradox which he claims is as old as western civilisation; that authority and obedience are necessary for the cohesion and smooth running of society and therefore of tremendous benefit. At the same time, however, under the influence of authority individuals can perform acts that they would otherwise regard as wrong, immoral or evil. This is an important starting point because it suggests that obedience as a basic function of complex societies can be used for both positive and negative ends, and is therefore value neutral. Although Milgram is interested in sociological and political questions, he places the individual at the centre of his enquiry. When an authority figure asks an individual to do something they disagree with there is a conflict between the individual and society. Milgram sees obedience to authority through the eyes of a social psychologist who is concerned with the relationship between individuals and society.

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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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  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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  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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  Arguing, Obeying and Defying

  A Rhetorical Perspective on Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments

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

    (Publisher)

  Equally, we are talking about a recent trend and one that is ongoing, so this sort of fuller historical treatment awaits the attention of future scholars. However, it would be remiss not to highlight the role of Thomas Blass’s (2004) superb biography of Milgram in creating space for a renewed engagement with Milgram’s ideas. Blass (1991, 1992, 1993, 1998) was the most prolific writer on the obedience experiments during the 1990s, and in many respects the biography represented the culmination of various strands of this work. In summarising Milgram’s approach to social psychology (Blass, 1992), and placing the obedience experiments in the context of Milgram’s other 41 work, as well as in biographical context, Blass (2004) performed a valuable service to scholars interested in the experiments, and his book also ranks as one of the most enjoyable reads in the Milgram canon. But Blass arguably did something more than this. His work drew attention to the Stanley Milgram Papers archive – Milgram’s personal papers held at the Archives and Manuscripts Services in Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library. Engagement with this archive has facilitated the development of new perspectives on the obedience experiments and has generated new lines of enquiry and new debates. In the present chapter, I will review this recent reawakening of interest in the obedience experiments. Beginning with attempts to develop novel experimental paradigms with which to study obedience, I will move on to consider recent attempts to theorise behaviour in Milgram’s experi- ments, before exploring the ways in which Milgram’s archive has been drawn on to develop new lines of enquiry. The boundaries between these different enterprises are not hard and fast, with many researchers engaged in enquiries that straddle more than one of these domains.

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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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  Seven Management Moralities

  • T. Klikauer(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In addition, manager- ial authority is greatly supported by pay structures, managerial praise and formal appraisal systems, the illusion of promotion, the avoidance of punish- ment, and obedience. Nobody has better explained the issue of obedience to authority and its moral implications than Stanley Milgram. 185 Stage 1: The Management Morality of Obedience and Punishment 71 Management morality and Stanley Milgram One of the foremost experts on obedience is Stanley Milgram with his work Obedience to Authority (1974). 186 Perhaps the first key finding was that ‘situ- ations powerfully override personal disposition as determinants of social behaviour’. 187 When people face the moral dilemma between what an author- ity demands of them and what their personal moral standards tell them, the former wins, especially inside authoritarian structures. In managerial struc- tures and with management as the sole authority, managerial regimes are prime areas where this occurs: the authoritarian structure wins over indi- viduals. Management is even in a position to engineer specific situations and systems that powerfully override personal moral dispositions. In short, inside the agency-vs.-structure model, it is likely that the structure of management determines the moral behaviour of others. The principle moral agent is no longer the self but management, managerially created situations, and man- agement authority. Milgram’s obedience experiments have shown that ordi- nary people are much more likely to obey managerial orders and perhaps even immoral orders when authority is perceived to be legitimate. The key to obedience is that power is enshrined in institutions and this is linked to power of a person in authority. This is what defines modern man- agement. 188 Power can be seen as the capacity of managers and the institution of management to achieve its aims even in the face of opposition or resist- ance.

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  Modernity and the Holocaust

  • Zygmunt Bauman(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  unlike us? Surely they must have escaped the ennobling, humanizing impact of our enlightened, civilized society? Or, alternatively, they must have been spoiled, corrupted, subjected to some vicious or unhappy combination of educational factors which resulted in a faulty, diseased personality? Proving these suppositions wrong would have been resented not only because it would tear apart the illusion of personal security which the life in a civilized society promises. It would also have been resented for a much more pregnant reason; because it exposed the irredeemable inconclusiveness of every morally righteous self-image, and any clear conscience. From now on, all consciences were to be clean until further notice only.

  The most frightening news brought about the Holocaust and by what we learned of its perpetrators was not the likelihood that ‘this’ could be done to us, but the idea that we could do it. Stanley Milgram, an American psychologist from Yale University, bore the brunt of this terror when he recklessly undertook an empirical test of suppositions based on emotional urge and determined to remain oblivious to the evidence; more recklessly still, he published the results in 1974. Milgram’s findings were indeed unambiguous: yes, we could do it and we still may, if conditions are right.

  It was not easy to live with such findings. No wonder learned opinion came down on Milgram’s research in full force. Milgram’s techniques were put under the microscope, pulled apart, proclaimed faulty and even disgraceful, and reproved. At any price and by any means, respectable and less respectable, the academic world tried to discredit and disown the findings which promised terror where complacency and peace of mind should better be. Few episodes in scientific history disclose more fully the reality of the allegedly value-free search for knowledge and disinterested motives of scientific curiosity. ‘I’m convinced’ said Milgram in reply to his critics, ‘that much of the criticism, whether people know it or not, stems from the results of the experiment. If everyone had broken off at slight shock or moderate shock,’ (that is, before the following of the experimenter’s orders began to mean bringing pain and suffering to the putative victims) ‘this would be a very reassuring finding and who would protest?1

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