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| Stanley Milgram |
Stanley Milgram is well-known for his famous, yet extremely controversial, experiment on obedience. Milgram was fascinated by the effect that authority had on obedience, and believed that people would nearly always obey orders out of desire to seem cooperative or out of fear.
Milgram began his obedience experiment in 1961, shortly after trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichman. Eichmans defense was that he was just following orders.
EXPERIMENT
Milgram conducted the experiment at Yale university, where he recruited 40 men through newspaper ads. The participants were informed that the study was focused on memory and learning. They were told that one person would take on the role teacher and the other would take on the role of student. In reality, all of the papers said "Teacher" on them. The only students were actors.
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| Milgram experiment setup |
Each subject is paired with a student/learner (actors) and placed front of a "shock generator". The shock generator starts at 30 volts and goes all the way up to 450 volts. The switches are labeled with moderate, strong, danger and XXX.
The subject is told he will teach word pairs to the student and if the student makes mistake, he/she should administer a shock.
The word pairings begin and the student will eventually begin to make planned errors. At 75 volts the student will start to grunt. At 120 volts, complain about pain. At 150 volts the student will scream and wants to be released. At 300 volts, the student pounds on the walls and exclaims he can't stand the pain. After 330 volts, the student remains quiet. The experiment ends when the highest level of 450 volts is reached.
During this if the subject/teacher questions the process, the experimenter will tell him things like "please continue", "It's absolutely essential that you continue", "the experiment requires that you continue", "you have no other choice, you must go on".
MILGRAM'S FINDINGS
Before the experiment Yale students were asked to predict how many people will obey and administer maximum of 450 volts. They estimated 3 out of 100 will do so (3%).
Surprisingly a whopping 65% administered shock levels of 450 volts. While people did show signs of internal struggle through groaning, nervous laughter, and trembling, most of them obeyed the experimenter's request to continue. Milgram even found that the subjects - in an effort to justify their behavior - devalued the student during the experiment saying the student was so dumb that he actually deserved the shock.
Milgram was able to explain such high levels of obedience in the following ways:
I. Compliance was increased because of the physical presence of an authority figure (the experimenter)
II. Many subjects believed the experiment was safe because it was a Yale experiment.
III. The selection process of who would be teacher and student seemed random.
IV. Assumption the experimenter was competent.
V. The subjects were told the shocks were painful but not dangerous.
CRITICISM
The experiment caused great stress to the subjects and the fact that they believed they were hurting a complete stranger could have traumatized them, so the Milgram experiment draw fierce criticism regarding its ethical procedure.