experiment with electric shock

Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, carried out one of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology.

He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.

Milgram (1963) examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on obedience  – that they were just following orders from their superiors.

The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question:

Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974).

Milgram (1963) wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures, as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.

Milgram selected participants for his experiment by newspaper advertising for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University.

The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher.’  The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s confederates (pretending to be a real participant).

The learner (a confederate called Mr. Wallace) was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arms, and the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX).

The shocks in Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments were not real. The “learners” were actors who were part of the experiment and did not actually receive any shocks.

However, the “teachers” (the real participants of the study) believed the shocks were real, which was crucial for the experiment to measure obedience to authority figures even when it involved causing harm to others.

Milgram’s Experiment (1963)

Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person.

Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities, for example, Germans in WWII.

Volunteers were recruited for a controlled experiment investigating “learning” (re: ethics: deception). 

Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional, from the New Haven area. They were paid $4.50 for just turning up.

At the beginning of the experiment, they were introduced to another participant, a confederate of the experimenter (Milgram).

They drew straws to determine their roles – learner or teacher – although this was fixed, and the confederate was always the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a gray lab coat, played by an actor (not Milgram).

Two rooms in the Yale Interaction Laboratory were used – one for the learner (with an electric chair) and another for the teacher and experimenter with an electric shock generator.

The “learner” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped to a chair with electrodes.

After he has learned a list of word pairs given to him to learn, the “teacher” tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.

The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).

The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose), and for each of these, the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock, the experimenter was to give a series of orders/prods to ensure they continued.

There were four prods, and if one was not obeyed, then the experimenter (Mr. Williams) read out the next prod, and so on.

Prod 1 : Please continue. Prod 2: The experiment requires you to continue. Prod 3 : It is absolutely essential that you continue. Prod 4 : You have no other choice but to continue.

These prods were to be used in order, and begun afresh for each new attempt at defiance (Milgram, 1974, p. 21). The experimenter also had two special prods available. These could be used as required by the situation:

• Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on’ (ibid.)
• ‘Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on’ (ibid., p. 22).

65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.

Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations of his study.  All he did was alter the situation (IV) to see how this affected obedience (DV).

Conclusion 

The individual explanation for the behavior of the participants would be that it was something about them as people that caused them to obey, but a more realistic explanation is that the situation they were in influenced them and caused them to behave in the way that they did.

Some aspects of the situation that may have influenced their behavior include the formality of the location, the behavior of the experimenter, and the fact that it was an experiment for which they had volunteered and been paid.

Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being.  Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.

People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in the family, school, and workplace.

Milgram summed up in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), writing:

“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”

Milgram’s Agency Theory

Milgram (1974) explained the behavior of his participants by suggesting that people have two states of behavior when they are in a social situation:

• The autonomous state – people direct their own actions, and they take responsibility for the results of those actions.
• The agentic state – people allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving the orders. In other words, they act as agents for another person’s will.

Milgram suggested that two things must be in place for a person to enter the agentic state:

• The person giving the orders is perceived as being qualified to direct other people’s behavior. That is, they are seen as legitimate.
• The person being ordered about is able to believe that the authority will accept responsibility for what happens.

According to Milgram, when in this agentic state, the participant in the obedience studies “defines himself in a social situation in a manner that renders him open to regulation by a person of higher status. In this condition the individual no longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others” (Milgram, 1974, p. 134).

Agency theory says that people will obey an authority when they believe that the authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This is supported by some aspects of Milgram’s evidence.

For example, when participants were reminded that they had responsibility for their own actions, almost none of them were prepared to obey.

In contrast, many participants who were refusing to go on did so if the experimenter said that he would take responsibility.

According to Milgram (1974, p. 188):

“The behavior revealed in the experiments reported here is normal human behavior but revealed under conditions that show with particular clarity the danger to human survival inherent in our make-up.

And what is it we have seen? Not aggression, for there is no anger, vindictiveness, or hatred in those who shocked the victim….

Something far more dangerous is revealed: the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.”

Milgram Experiment Variations

The Milgram experiment was carried out many times whereby Milgram (1965) varied the basic procedure (changed the IV).  By doing this Milgram could identify which factors affected obedience (the DV).

Obedience was measured by how many participants shocked to the maximum 450 volts (65% in the original study). Stanley Milgram conducted a total of 23 variations (also called conditions or experiments) of his original obedience study:

In total, 636 participants were tested in 18 variation studies conducted between 1961 and 1962 at Yale University.

In the original baseline study – the experimenter wore a gray lab coat to symbolize his authority (a kind of uniform).

The lab coat worn by the experimenter in the original study served as a crucial symbol of scientific authority that increased obedience. The lab coat conveyed expertise and legitimacy, making participants see the experimenter as more credible and trustworthy.

Milgram carried out a variation in which the experimenter was called away because of a phone call right at the start of the procedure.

The role of the experimenter was then taken over by an ‘ordinary member of the public’ ( a confederate) in everyday clothes rather than a lab coat. The obedience level dropped to 20%.

Change of Location:  The Mountain View Facility Study (1963, unpublished)

Milgram conducted this variation in a set of offices in a rundown building, claiming it was associated with “Research Associates of Bridgeport” rather than Yale.

The lab’s ordinary appearance was designed to test if Yale’s prestige encouraged obedience. Participants were led to believe that a private research firm experimented.

In this non-university setting, obedience rates dropped to 47.5% compared to 65% in the original Yale experiments. This suggests that the status of location affects obedience.

Private research firms are viewed as less prestigious than certain universities, which affects behavior. It is easier under these conditions to abandon the belief in the experimenter’s essential decency.

The impressive university setting reinforced the experimenter’s authority and conveyed an implicit approval of the research.

Milgram filmed this variation for his documentary Obedience , but did not publish the results in his academic papers. The study only came to wider light when archival materials, including his notes, films, and data, were studied by later researchers like Perry (2013) in the decades after Milgram’s death.

Two Teacher Condition

When participants could instruct an assistant (confederate) to press the switches, 92.5% shocked to the maximum of 450 volts.

Allowing the participant to instruct an assistant to press the shock switches diffused personal responsibility and likely reduced perceptions of causing direct harm.

By attributing the actions to the assistant rather than themselves, participants could more easily justify shocking to the maximum 450 volts, reflected in the 92.5% obedience rate.

When there is less personal responsibility, obedience increases. This relates to Milgram’s Agency Theory.

Touch Proximity Condition

The teacher had to force the learner’s hand down onto a shock plate when the learner refused to participate after 150 volts. Obedience fell to 30%.

Forcing the learner’s hand onto the shock plate after 150 volts physically connected the teacher to the consequences of their actions. This direct tactile feedback increased the teacher’s personal responsibility.

No longer shielded from the learner’s reactions, the proximity enabled participants to more clearly perceive the harm they were causing, reducing obedience to 30%. Physical distance and indirect actions in the original setup made it easier to rationalize obeying the experimenter.

The participant is no longer buffered/protected from seeing the consequences of their actions.

Social Support Condition

When the two confederates set an example of defiance by refusing to continue the shocks, especially early on at 150 volts, it permitted the real participant also to resist authority.

Two other participants (confederates) were also teachers but refused to obey. Confederate 1 stopped at 150 volts, and Confederate 2 stopped at 210 volts.

Their disobedience provided social proof that it was acceptable to disobey. This modeling of defiance lowered obedience to only 10% compared to 65% without such social support. It demonstrated that social modeling can validate challenging authority.

The presence of others who are seen to disobey the authority figure reduces the level of obedience to 10%.

Absent Experimenter Condition 

It is easier to resist the orders from an authority figure if they are not close by. When the experimenter instructed and prompted the teacher by telephone from another room, obedience fell to 20.5%.

Many participants cheated and missed out on shocks or gave less voltage than ordered by the experimenter. The proximity of authority figures affects obedience.

The physical absence of the authority figure enabled participants to act more freely on their own moral inclinations rather than the experimenter’s commands. This highlighted the role of an authority’s direct presence in influencing behavior.

A key reason the obedience studies fascinate people is Milgram presented them as a scientific experiment, contrasting himself as an “empirically grounded scientist” compared to philosophers. He claimed he systematically varied factors to alter obedience rates.

However, recent scholarship using archival records shows Milgram’s account of standardizing the procedure was misleading. For example, he published a list of standardized prods the experimenter used when participants questioned continuing. Milgram said these were delivered uniformly in a firm but polite tone.

Analyzing audiotapes, Gibson (2013) found considerable variation from the published protocol – the prods differed across trials. The point is not that Milgram did poor science, but that the archival materials reveal the limitations of the textbook account of his “standardized” procedure.

The qualitative data like participant feedback, Milgram’s notes, and researchers’ actions provide a fuller, messier picture than the obedience studies’ “official” story. For psychology students, this shows how scientific reporting can polish findings in a way that strays from the less tidy reality.

Critical Evaluation

Inaccurate description of the prod methodology:.

A key reason the obedience studies fascinate people is Milgram (1974) presented them as a scientific experiment, contrasting himself as an “empirically grounded scientist” compared to philosophers. He claimed he systematically varied factors to alter obedience rates.

However, recent scholarship using archival records shows Milgram’s account of standardizing the procedure was misleading. For example, he published a list of standardized prods the experimenter used when participants questioned continuing. Milgram said these were delivered uniformly in a firm but polite tone (Gibson, 2013; Perry, 2013; Russell, 2010).

Perry’s (2013) archival research revealed another discrepancy between Milgram’s published account and the actual events. Milgram claimed standardized prods were used when participants resisted, but Perry’s audiotape analysis showed the experimenter often improvised more coercive prods beyond the supposed script.

This off-script prodding varied between experiments and participants, and was especially prevalent with female participants where no gender obedience difference was found – suggesting the improvisation influenced results. Gibson (2013) and Russell (2009) corroborated the experimenter’s departures from the supposed fixed prods. 

Prods were often combined or modified rather than used verbatim as published.

Russell speculated the improvisation aimed to achieve outcomes the experimenter believed Milgram wanted. Milgram seemed to tacitly approve of the deviations by not correcting them when observing.

This raises significant issues around experimenter bias influencing results, lack of standardization compromising validity, and ethical problems with Milgram misrepresenting procedures.

Milgram’s experiment lacked external validity:

The Milgram studies were conducted in laboratory-type conditions, and we must ask if this tells us much about real-life situations.

We obey in a variety of real-life situations that are far more subtle than instructions to give people electric shocks, and it would be interesting to see what factors operate in everyday obedience. The sort of situation Milgram investigated would be more suited to a military context.

Orne and Holland (1968) accused Milgram’s study of lacking ‘experimental realism,”’ i.e.,” participants might not have believed the experimental set-up they found themselves in and knew the learner wasn’t receiving electric shocks.

“It’s more truthful to say that only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real, and of those two-thirds disobeyed the experimenter,” observes Perry (p. 139).

Milgram’s sample was biased:

• The participants in Milgram’s study were all male. Do the findings transfer to females?
• Milgram’s study cannot be seen as representative of the American population as his sample was self-selected. This is because they became participants only by electing to respond to a newspaper advertisement (selecting themselves).
• They may also have a typical “volunteer personality” – not all the newspaper readers responded so perhaps it takes this personality type to do so.

Yet a total of 636 participants were tested in 18 separate experiments across the New Haven area, which was seen as being reasonably representative of a typical American town.

Milgram’s findings have been replicated in a variety of cultures and most lead to the same conclusions as Milgram’s original study and in some cases see higher obedience rates.

However, Smith and Bond (1998) point out that with the exception of Jordan (Shanab & Yahya, 1978), the majority of these studies have been conducted in industrialized Western cultures, and we should be cautious before we conclude that a universal trait of social behavior has been identified.

Selective reporting of experimental findings:

Perry (2013) found Milgram omitted findings from some obedience experiments he conducted, reporting only results supporting his conclusions. A key omission was the Relationship condition (conducted in 1962 but unpublished), where participant pairs were relatives or close acquaintances.

When the learner protested being shocked, most teachers disobeyed, contradicting Milgram’s emphasis on obedience to authority.

Perry argued Milgram likely did not publish this 85% disobedience rate because it undermined his narrative and would be difficult to defend ethically since the teacher and learner knew each other closely.

Milgram’s selective reporting biased interpretations of his findings. His failure to publish all his experiments raises issues around researchers’ ethical obligation to completely and responsibly report their results, not just those fitting their expectations.

Unreported analysis of participants’ skepticism and its impact on their behavior:

Perry (2013) found archival evidence that many participants expressed doubt about the experiment’s setup, impacting their behavior. This supports Orne and Holland’s (1968) criticism that Milgram overlooked participants’ perceptions.

Incongruities like apparent danger, but an unconcerned experimenter likely cued participants that no real harm would occur. Trust in Yale’s ethics reinforced this. Yet Milgram did not publish his assistant’s analysis showing participant skepticism correlated with disobedience rates and varied by condition.

Obedient participants were more skeptical that the learner was harmed. This selective reporting biased interpretations. Additional unreported findings further challenge Milgram’s conclusions.

This highlights issues around thoroughly and responsibly reporting all results, not just those fitting expectations. It shows how archival evidence makes Milgram’s study a contentious classic with questionable methods and conclusions.

Ethical Issues

What are the potential ethical concerns associated with Milgram’s research on obedience?

While not a “contribution to psychology” in the traditional sense, Milgram’s obedience experiments sparked significant debate about the ethics of psychological research.

Baumrind (1964) criticized the ethics of Milgram’s research as participants were prevented from giving their informed consent to take part in the study. 

Participants assumed the experiment was benign and expected to be treated with dignity.

As a result of studies like Milgram’s, the APA and BPS now require researchers to give participants more information before they agree to take part in a study.

The participants actually believed they were shocking a real person and were unaware the learner was a confederate of Milgram’s.

However, Milgram argued that “illusion is used when necessary in order to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at-truths.”

Milgram also interviewed participants afterward to find out the effect of the deception. Apparently, 83.7% said that they were “glad to be in the experiment,” and 1.3% said that they wished they had not been involved.

Protection of participants 

Participants were exposed to extremely stressful situations that may have the potential to cause psychological harm. Many of the participants were visibly distressed (Baumrind, 1964).

Signs of tension included trembling, sweating, stuttering, laughing nervously, biting lips and digging fingernails into palms of hands. Three participants had uncontrollable seizures, and many pleaded to be allowed to stop the experiment.

Milgram described a businessman reduced to a “twitching stuttering wreck” (1963, p. 377),

In his defense, Milgram argued that these effects were only short-term. Once the participants were debriefed (and could see the confederate was OK), their stress levels decreased.

“At no point,” Milgram (1964) stated, “were subjects exposed to danger and at no point did they run the risk of injurious effects resulting from participation” (p. 849).

To defend himself against criticisms about the ethics of his obedience research, Milgram cited follow-up survey data showing that 84% of participants said they were glad they had taken part in the study.

Milgram used this to claim that the study caused no serious or lasting harm, since most participants retrospectively did not regret their involvement.

Yet archival accounts show many participants endured lasting distress, even trauma, refuting Milgram’s insistence the study caused only fleeting “excitement.” By not debriefing all, Milgram misled participants about the true risks involved (Perry, 2013).

However, Milgram did debrief the participants fully after the experiment and also followed up after a period of time to ensure that they came to no harm.

Milgram debriefed all his participants straight after the experiment and disclosed the true nature of the experiment.

Participants were assured that their behavior was common, and Milgram also followed the sample up a year later and found no signs of any long-term psychological harm.

The majority of the participants (83.7%) said that they were pleased that they had participated, and 74% had learned something of personal importance.

Perry’s (2013) archival research found Milgram misrepresented debriefing – around 600 participants were not properly debriefed soon after the study, contrary to his claims. Many only learned no real shocks occurred when reading a mailed study report months later, which some may have not received.

Milgram likely misreported debriefing details to protect his credibility and enable future obedience research. This raises issues around properly informing and debriefing participants that connect to APA ethics codes developed partly in response to Milgram’s study.

Right to Withdrawal 

The BPS states that researchers should make it plain to participants that they are free to withdraw at any time (regardless of payment).

When expressing doubts, the experimenter assured them all was well. Trusting Yale scientists, many took the experimenter at his word that “no permanent tissue damage” would occur, and continued administering shocks despite reservations.

Did Milgram give participants an opportunity to withdraw? The experimenter gave four verbal prods which mostly discouraged withdrawal from the experiment:

• Please continue.
• The experiment requires that you continue.
• It is absolutely essential that you continue.
• You have no other choice, you must go on.

Milgram argued that they were justified as the study was about obedience, so orders were necessary.

Milgram pointed out that although the right to withdraw was made partially difficult, it was possible as 35% of participants had chosen to withdraw.

Replications

Direct replications have not been possible due to current ethical standards . However, several researchers have conducted partial replications and variations that aim to reproduce some aspects of Milgram’s methods ethically.

One important replication was conducted by Jerry Burger in 2009. Burger’s partial replication included several safeguards to protect participant welfare, such as screening out high-risk individuals, repeatedly reminding participants they could withdraw, and stopping at the 150-volt shock level. This was the point where Milgram’s participants first heard the learner’s protests.

As 79% of Milgram’s participants who went past 150 volts continued to the maximum 450 volts, Burger (2009) argued that 150 volts provided a reasonable estimate for obedience levels. He found 70% of participants continued to 150 volts, compared to 82.5% in Milgram’s comparable condition.

Another replication by Thomas Blass (1999) examined whether obedience rates had declined over time due to greater public awareness of the experiments. Blass correlated obedience rates from replication studies between 1963 and 1985 and found no relationship between year and obedience level. He concluded that obedience rates have not systematically changed, providing evidence against the idea of “enlightenment effects”.

Some variations have explored the role of gender. Milgram found equal rates of obedience for male and female participants. Reviews have found most replications also show no gender difference, with a couple of exceptions (Blass, 1999). For example, Kilham and Mann (1974) found lower obedience in female participants.

Partial replications have also examined situational factors. Having another person model defiance reduced obedience compared to a solo participant in one study, but did not eliminate it (Burger, 2009). The authority figure’s perceived expertise seems to be an influential factor (Blass, 1999). Replications have supported Milgram’s observation that stepwise increases in demands promote obedience.

Personality factors have been studied as well. Traits like high empathy and desire for control correlate with some minor early hesitation, but do not greatly impact eventual obedience levels (Burger, 2009). Authoritarian tendencies may contribute to obedience (Elms, 2009).

In sum, the partial replications confirm Milgram’s degree of obedience. Though ethical constraints prevent full reproductions, the key elements of his procedure seem to consistently elicit high levels of compliance across studies, samples, and eras. The replications continue to highlight the power of situational pressures to yield obedience.

Milgram (1963) Audio Clips

Below you can also hear some of the audio clips taken from the video that was made of the experiment. Just click on the clips below.

Why was the Milgram experiment so controversial?

The Milgram experiment was controversial because it revealed people’s willingness to obey authority figures even when causing harm to others, raising ethical concerns about the psychological distress inflicted upon participants and the deception involved in the study.

Would Milgram’s experiment be allowed today?

Milgram’s experiment would likely not be allowed today in its original form, as it violates modern ethical guidelines for research involving human participants, particularly regarding informed consent, deception, and protection from psychological harm.

Did anyone refuse the Milgram experiment?

Yes, in the Milgram experiment, some participants refused to continue administering shocks, demonstrating individual variation in obedience to authority figures. In the original Milgram experiment, approximately 35% of participants refused to administer the highest shock level of 450 volts, while 65% obeyed and delivered the 450-volt shock.

How can Milgram’s study be applied to real life?

Milgram’s study can be applied to real life by demonstrating the potential for ordinary individuals to obey authority figures even when it involves causing harm, emphasizing the importance of questioning authority, ethical decision-making, and fostering critical thinking in societal contexts.

Were all participants in Milgram’s experiments male?

Yes, in the original Milgram experiment conducted in 1961, all participants were male, limiting the generalizability of the findings to women and diverse populations.

Why was the Milgram experiment unethical?

The Milgram experiment was considered unethical because participants were deceived about the true nature of the study and subjected to severe emotional distress. They believed they were causing harm to another person under the instruction of authority.

Additionally, participants were not given the right to withdraw freely and were subjected to intense pressure to continue. The psychological harm and lack of informed consent violates modern ethical guidelines for research.

Baumrind, D. (1964). Some thoughts on ethics of research: After reading Milgram’s” Behavioral study of obedience.”.  American Psychologist ,  19 (6), 421.

Blass, T. (1999). The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority 1.  Journal of Applied Social Psychology ,  29 (5), 955-978.

Brannigan, A., Nicholson, I., & Cherry, F. (2015). Introduction to the special issue: Unplugging the Milgram machine.  Theory & Psychology ,  25 (5), 551-563.

Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist, 64 , 1–11.

Elms, A. C. (2009). Obedience lite. American Psychologist, 64 (1), 32–36.

Gibson, S. (2013). Milgram’s obedience experiments: A rhetorical analysis. British Journal of Social Psychology, 52, 290–309.

Gibson, S. (2017). Developing psychology’s archival sensibilities: Revisiting Milgram’s obedience’ experiments.  Qualitative Psychology ,  4 (1), 73.

Griggs, R. A., Blyler, J., & Jackson, S. L. (2020). Using research ethics as a springboard for teaching Milgram’s obedience study as a contentious classic.  Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology ,  6 (4), 350.

Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2018). A truth that does not always speak its name: How Hollander and Turowetz’s findings confirm and extend the engaged followership analysis of harm-doing in the Milgram paradigm. British Journal of Social Psychology, 57, 292–300.

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Birney, M. E. (2016). Questioning authority: New perspectives on Milgram’s ‘obedience’ research and its implications for intergroup relations. Current Opinion in Psychology, 11 , 6–9.

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., Birney, M. E., Millard, K., & McDonald, R. (2015). ‘Happy to have been of service’: The Yale archive as a window into the engaged followership of participants in Milgram’s ‘obedience’ experiment. British Journal of Social Psychology, 54 , 55–83.

Kaplan, D. E. (1996). The Stanley Milgram papers: A case study on appraisal of and access to confidential data files. American Archivist, 59 , 288–297.

Kaposi, D. (2022). The second wave of critical engagement with Stanley Milgram’s ‘obedience to authority’experiments: What did we learn?.  Social and Personality Psychology Compass ,  16 (6), e12667.

Kilham, W., & Mann, L. (1974). Level of destructive obedience as a function of transmitter and executant roles in the Milgram obedience paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29 (5), 696–702.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience . Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67, 371-378.

Milgram, S. (1964). Issues in the study of obedience: A reply to Baumrind. American Psychologist, 19 , 848–852.

Milgram, S. (1965). Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority . Human Relations, 18(1) , 57-76.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view . Harpercollins.

Miller, A. G. (2009). Reflections on” Replicating Milgram”(Burger, 2009), American Psychologis t, 64 (1):20-27

Nicholson, I. (2011). “Torture at Yale”: Experimental subjects, laboratory torment and the “rehabilitation” of Milgram’s “obedience to authority”. Theory & Psychology, 21 , 737–761.

Nicholson, I. (2015). The normalization of torment: Producing and managing anguish in Milgram’s “obedience” laboratory. Theory & Psychology, 25 , 639–656.

Orne, M. T., & Holland, C. H. (1968). On the ecological validity of laboratory deceptions. International Journal of Psychiatry, 6 (4), 282-293.

Orne, M. T., & Holland, C. C. (1968). Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority. On the ecological validity of laboratory deceptions. International Journal of Psychiatry, 6 , 282–293.

Perry, G. (2013). Behind the shock machine: The untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments . New York, NY: The New Press.

Reicher, S., Haslam, A., & Miller, A. (Eds.). (2014). Milgram at 50: Exploring the enduring relevance of psychology’s most famous studies [Special issue]. Journal of Social Issues, 70 (3), 393–602

Russell, N. (2014). Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority “relationship condition”: Some methodological and theoretical implications. Social Sciences, 3, 194–214

Shanab, M. E., & Yahya, K. A. (1978). A cross-cultural study of obedience. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society .

Smith, P. B., & Bond, M. H. (1998). Social psychology across cultures (2nd Edition) . Prentice Hall.

Further Reading

• The power of the situation: The impact of Milgram’s obedience studies on personality and social psychology
• Seeing is believing: The role of the film Obedience in shaping perceptions of Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Experiments
• Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today?

Learning Check

Which is true regarding the Milgram obedience study?

• The aim was to see how obedient people would be in a situation where following orders would mean causing harm to another person.
• Participants were under the impression they were part of a learning and memory experiment.
• The “learners” in the study were actual participants who volunteered to be shocked as part of the experiment.
• The “learner” was an actor who was in on the experiment and never actually received any real shocks.
• Although the participant could not see the “learner”, he was able to hear him clearly through the wall
• The study was directly influenced by Milgram’s observations of obedience patterns in post-war Europe.
• The experiment was designed to understand the psychological mechanisms behind war crimes committed during World War II.
• The Milgram study was universally accepted in the psychological community, and no ethical concerns were raised about its methodology.
• When Milgram’s experiment was repeated in a rundown office building in Bridgeport, the percentage of the participants who fully complied with the commands of the experimenter remained unchanged.
• The experimenter (authority figure) delivered verbal prods to encourage the teacher to continue, such as ‘Please continue’ or ‘Please go on’.
• Over 80% of participants went on to deliver the maximum level of shock.
• Milgram sent participants questionnaires after the study to assess the effects and found that most felt no remorse or guilt, so it was ethical.
• The aftermath of the study led to stricter ethical guidelines in psychological research.
• The study emphasized the role of situational factors over personality traits in determining obedience.

Answers : Items 3, 8, 9, and 11 are the false statements.

Short Answer Questions

• Briefly explain the results of the original Milgram experiments. What did these results prove?
• List one scenario on how an authority figure can abuse obedience principles.
• List one scenario on how an individual could use these principles to defend their fellow peers.
• In a hospital, you are very likely to obey a nurse. However, if you meet her outside the hospital, for example in a shop, you are much less likely to obey. Using your knowledge of how people resist pressure to obey, explain why you are less likely to obey the nurse outside the hospital.
• Describe the shock instructions the participant (teacher) was told to follow when the victim (learner) gave an incorrect answer.
• State the lowest voltage shock that was labeled on the shock generator.
• What would likely happen if Milgram’s experiment included a condition in which the participant (teacher) had to give a high-level electric shock for the first wrong answer?

Group Activity

Gather in groups of three or four to discuss answers to the short answer questions above.

For question 2, review the different scenarios you each came up with. Then brainstorm on how these situations could be flipped.

For question 2, discuss how an authority figure could instead empower those below them in the examples your groupmates provide.

For question 3, discuss how a peer could do harm by using the obedience principles in the scenarios your groupmates provide.

Essay Topic

• What’s the most important lesson of Milgram’s Obedience Experiments? Fully explain and defend your answer.
• Milgram selectively edited his film of the obedience experiments to emphasize obedient behavior and minimize footage of disobedience. What are the ethical implications of a researcher selectively presenting findings in a way that fits their expected conclusions?

How The Milgram Experiment Showed That Anyone Could Be A Monster

The milgram experiment tested its subjects' willingness to harm other people for the sake of obeying authority — and it ended with truly shocking results..

Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Participants in one of Stanley Milgram’s experiments that examined obedience to authority.

In April 1961, former Nazi official and SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann went on trial for crimes against humanity in an Israeli courtroom.

Throughout his trial, which ended with a conviction and death sentence, Eichmann had tried to defend himself on the grounds that he was “only following orders.” He asserted that he was not a “responsible actor,” but merely a servant of those who were, and so he should be held morally blameless for just doing his duties, even if they included organizing the logistics of shipping people to the Nazi camps during the war.

This defense didn’t work in court and he was convicted on all counts. However, the idea of an unwilling-but-obedient participant in mass murder captured the interest of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who wanted to know how easily morally normal people could be convinced to commit heinous crimes after an authority figure ordered them to do so.

To examine the matter, Milgram polled dozens of people for their opinions. Without exception, every group he asked for predictions thought it would be difficult to get people to commit serious crimes just by ordering them to.

Only three percent of the Yale students Milgram polled said that they thought an average person would willingly kill a stranger just because an authority figure pressured them into it. A poll of colleagues on the staff of a medical school showed similar results, with only around four percent of faculty psychologists guessing test subjects would knowingly kill a person if they were coerced into it by someone who looked like they were in charge.

In July 1961, Milgram set out to discover the truth for himself by devising an experiment, the results of which are still controversial to this day.

What Was The Milgram Experiment?

Wikimedia Commons An advertisement to participate in the Milgram experiment in 1961.

The experiment Milgram set up required three people. One person, the test subject, would be told he was participating in a memorization experiment, and that his role would be to administer a series of electric shocks to a stranger whenever he failed to correctly answer a question.

In front of the subject was a longboard with 30 switches labeled with increasing voltage levels, up to 450 volts. The last three switches had high-voltage warnings pasted on them and appeared to be very dangerous.

The second participant was an actor and confederate, who would chat with the test subject before moving to an adjacent room and connecting a tape recorder to the electrical switches so that they could play recorded shouts and screams — which sounded like their reaction to getting “shocked.”

The third participant was a man in a white lab coat, who sat behind the test subject and pretended to administer the test to the actor in the next room.

Related Posts

What happened when the “test-takers” failed their tests.

Wikimedia Commons Illustration of the setup of the Milgram experiment. The experimenter (E) convinces the subject (“Teacher” T) to give what he believes are painful electric shocks to another subject, who is actually an actor (“Learner” L).

At the beginning of the experiment, the test subject would be given a quick shock from the apparatus on its lowest power level. Milgram included this to ensure that the subject knew how painful the shocks were and to make the pain of the shocks “real” to the subject before proceeding.

As the experiment got underway, the administrator would give the unseen confederate a series of memorization problems requiring an answer. When the actor gave the wrong answer, the administrator would instruct the subject to flip the next switch in the sequence so that they were seemingly delivering progressively higher-voltage shocks to the confederate.

When the switch was thrown, the tape recorder would play a yelp or a scream, and at higher levels, the confederate would start pounding on the wall and demanding to be set free. The actor was also given scripted lines about having a heart condition to make the situation seem very urgent.

After the seventh shock, he would go completely silent to give the impression that he had either passed out or died. When this happened, the administrator would continue on with his questions.

Getting no response from the “unconscious” confederate, the administrator told the subject to apply higher and higher shocks, up to the last, 450-volt switch, which was colored red and labeled as potentially lethal.

The Results Of The Milgram Experiment

Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Participants in the Milgram experiment.

The groups that Milgram polled before the experiments began had predicted that just three or four percent of test subjects could be convinced to deliver a potentially fatal electric shock to an unwilling participant.

But results showed that 26 of the 40 subjects — 65 percent — went all the way up to 450 volts during the experiment. Furthermore, all of them had been willing to deliver 300 volts to a screaming and protesting subject.

All of the subjects had raised some kind of objection during the test. However, Milgram was astounded to find out that, apparently, almost two-thirds of normal people would be willing to kill a person with electricity if a man in a lab coat told them, “It is imperative that you continue.”

Accordingly, after the initial experiment was over, Milgram organized more tests with some variables controlled to see what importance different factors had in affecting people’s resistance to authority.

He found that people are vastly more likely to carry out atrocious acts if they feel like they have permission from some recognized authority (such as a scientist in a lab coat or a senior officer in the SS) and that participants’ willingness to shock increases as they are made to feel that the authority has taken moral responsibility for the actions they commit.

Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Most participants in the Milgram experiment apparently believed they were delivering electric shocks to strangers.

Here are some other findings from the Milgram experiment:

• When instructions to shock are given by phone, rather than having the authority figure physically present in the room, compliance dropped to 20.5 percent, and many “compliant” subjects were actually cheating; they would skip shocks and pretend to have thrown the switch when they hadn’t.
• When the subjects were made to press the victim’s hand down onto a shock plate, thus eliminating the distance of throwing an impersonal switch, compliance dropped to 30 percent.
• When the subjects were put in the position of ordering other people — confederates who were part of the experiment staff — to throw the switches, compliance increased to 95 percent. Putting one person between the subject and the victim made it so that 9.5 out of 10 people went all the way up to the presumed-fatal shock.
• When subjects were given “role models” to set an example of resistance, in this case, confederates who raised objections and refused to participate, compliance plunged to only 10 percent. It’s as if the subjects really wanted to stop, but needed leadership to grant moral permission to disobey an authority figure.
• When the administrator participated without the lab coat, that is, without a uniform indicating authority, compliance fell to 20 percent.
• Experiments held at locations separate from the prestigious Yale campus yielded less compliance, only 47.5 percent as if the perceived status of the surroundings had some conforming influence on the subjects.

The Legacy Of The Milgram Experiment

Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Some believed that Stanley Milgram’s experiment was unethical, and others thought that his results said more about the types of people who participated in psychology experiments at Yale than people in general.

They say nothing in the social sciences is ever proven, and the disturbing results of Milgram’s experiment are no exception. Milgram’s work with his subjects faced criticism from other experts in the psychology community almost as soon as his results were published.

One of the more serious charges leveled against Milgram’s paper was the original sin of social science research: sample bias.

It was convincingly argued that even though the 40 local men Milgram had recruited for his research varied in backgrounds and professions, they represented a special case and that such a small group of white males may not be the most representative sample of humanity. Therefore, Milgram’s work had limited value in understanding human psychology.

In fact, critics argued, Milgram may have discovered something alarming about the kind of person who participates in psychology experiments at Yale, but such people would be expected to be more conformist and eager to please authority figures than a truly representative sample of the populace.

This critique was lent some weight when later researchers had trouble reproducing Milgram’s findings. Other investigators, using less-biased samples drawn from other groups in the population, found significantly less compliance with the administrators’ requests. Many reported meeting stiff resistance from non-college-educated and working-class people.

Yale University Manuscripts and Archives The Milgram experiment is still considered one of history’s most controversial psychology experiments.

The results seemed to plot a curve of compliant behavior, from the very top of society (wealthy, white, upper-class overachievers) to the lowest (unemployed, racially diverse school dropouts).

Those who had risen the highest seemed more eager to shock strangers to death when a man in a lab coat asked them to. It was theorized that others who may have had negative experiences with authorities were generally willing to argue and quit the experiment before things went too far.

Though some continue to muse about the results of the Milgram experiment and others have performed different versions of it in recent years, it’s unlikely anyone will ever completely replicate it again in its original form.

The intense psychic stress that test subjects have to be put through, as they are led to believe they’re committing what amounts to murder, violates many of the ethical restrictions now in place for human research. Another problem is the notoriety of the experiment — too many people know about the experiment now to ensure honest performance from the test group.

Whatever the Milgram experiment’s faults, and however hard it might be in the future to make sense of its findings, the fact that so many seemingly normal men felt compelled to violate their own conscience to obey authority is enough to send chills up the spines of many people even today.

After learning about the Milgram experiment, read about Unit 731 , Japan’s sickening human experiments program during World War II. Then, learn about the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment .

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Milgram experiment

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• Open University - OpenLearn - Psychological research, obedience and ethics: 1 Milgram’s obedience study
• Social Science LibreTexts - The Milgram Experiment- The Power of Authority
• Verywell Mind - What was the Milgram Experiment?
• BCcampus Open Publishing - Ethics in Law Enforcement - The Milgram Experiment
• Nature - Modern Milgram experiment sheds light on power of authority
• SimplyPsychology - Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment: Summary, Results, & Ethics
• University of California - College of Natural Resources - Milgrams Experiment on Obedience to Authority

Milgram experiment , controversial series of experiments examining obedience to authority conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram . In the experiment, an authority figure, the conductor of the experiment, would instruct a volunteer participant, labeled the “teacher,” to administer painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to the “learner,” who was actually an actor. Although the shocks were faked, the experiments are widely considered unethical today due to the lack of proper disclosure, informed consent, and subsequent debriefing related to the deception and trauma experienced by the teachers. Some of Milgram’s conclusions have been called into question. Nevertheless, the experiments and their results have been widely cited for their insight into how average people respond to authority.

Milgram conducted his experiments as an assistant professor at Yale University in the early 1960s. In 1961 he began to recruit men from New Haven , Connecticut , for participation in a study he claimed would be focused on memory and learning . The recruits were paid $4.50 at the beginning of the study and were generally between the ages of 20 and 50 and from a variety of employment backgrounds. When they volunteered, they were told that the experiment would test the effect of punishment on learning ability. In truth, the volunteers were the subjects of an experiment on obedience to authority. In all, about 780 people, only about 40 of them women, participated in the experiments, and Milgram published his results in 1963.

Volunteers were told that they would be randomly assigned either a “teacher” or “learner” role, with each teacher administering electric shocks to a learner in another room if the learner failed to answer questions correctly. In actuality, the random draw was fixed so that all the volunteer participants were assigned to the teacher role and the actors were assigned to the learner role. The teachers were then instructed in the electroshock “punishment” they would be administering, with 30 shock levels ranging from 15 to 450 volts. The different shock levels were labeled with descriptions of their effects, such as “Slight Shock,” “Intense Shock,” and “Danger: Severe Shock,” with the final label a grim “XXX.” Each teacher was given a 45-volt shock themselves so that they would better understand the punishment they believed the learner would be receiving. Teachers were then given a series of questions for the learner to answer, with each incorrect answer generally earning the learner a progressively stronger shock. The actor portraying the learner, who was seated out of sight of the teacher, had pre-recorded responses to these shocks that ranged from grunts of pain to screaming and pleading, claims of suffering a heart condition, and eventually dead silence. The experimenter, acting as an authority figure, would encourage the teachers to continue administering shocks, telling them with scripted responses that the experiment must continue despite the reactions of the learner. The infamous result of these experiments was that a disturbingly high number of the teachers were willing to proceed to the maximum voltage level, despite the pleas of the learner and the supposed danger of proceeding.

Milgram’s interest in the subject of authority, and his dark view of the results of his experiments, were deeply informed by his Jewish identity and the context of the Holocaust , which had occurred only a few years before. He had expected that Americans, known for their individualism , would differ from Germans in their willingness to obey authority when it might lead to harming others. Milgram and his students had predicted only 1–3% of participants would administer the maximum shock level. However, in his first official study, 26 of 40 male participants (65%) were convinced to do so and nearly 80% of teachers that continued to administer shocks after 150 volts—the point at which the learner was heard to scream—continued to the maximum of 450 volts. Teachers displayed a range of negative emotional responses to the experiment even as they continued to obey, sometimes pleading with the experimenters to stop the experiment while still participating in it. One teacher believed that he had killed the learner and was moved to tears when he eventually found out that he had not.

Milgram included several variants on the original design of the experiment. In one, the teachers were allowed to select their own voltage levels. In this case, only about 2.5% of participants used the maximum shock level, indicating that they were not inclined to do so without the prompting of an authority figure. In another, there were three teachers, two of whom were not test subjects, but instead had been instructed to protest against the shocks. The existence of peers protesting the experiment made the volunteer teachers less likely to obey. Teachers were also less likely to obey in a variant where they could see the learner and were forced to interact with him.

The Milgram experiment has been highly controversial, both for the ethics of its design and for the reliability of its results and conclusions. It is commonly accepted that the ethics of the experiment would be rejected by mainstream science today, due not only to the handling of the deception involved but also to the extreme stress placed on the teachers, who often reacted emotionally to the experiment and were not debriefed . Some teachers were actually left believing they had genuinely and repeatedly shocked a learner before having the truth revealed to them later. Later researchers examining Milgram’s data also found that the experimenters conducting the tests had sometimes gone off-script in their attempts to coerce the teachers into continuing, and noted that some teachers guessed that they were the subjects of the experiment. However, attempts to validate Milgram’s findings in more ethical ways have often produced similar results.

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Understanding the Milgram Experiment in Psychology

A closer look at Milgram's controversial studies of obedience

Isabelle Adam (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) via Flickr

Factors That Influence Obedience

• Ethical Concerns
• Replications

How far do you think people would go to obey an authority figure? Would they refuse to obey if the order went against their values or social expectations? Those questions were at the heart of an infamous and controversial study known as the Milgram obedience experiments.

Yale University  psychologist   Stanley Milgram  conducted these experiments during the 1960s. They explored the effects of authority on obedience. In the experiments, an authority figure ordered participants to deliver what they believed were dangerous electrical shocks to another person. These results suggested that people are highly influenced by authority and highly obedient . More recent investigations cast doubt on some of the implications of Milgram's findings and even the results and procedures themselves. Despite its problems, the study has, without question, made a significant impact on psychology .

At a Glance

Milgram's experiments posed the question: Would people obey orders, even if they believed doing so would harm another person? Milgram's findings suggested the answer was yes, they would. The experiments have long been controversial, both because of the startling findings and the ethical problems with the research. More recently, experts have re-examined the studies, suggesting that participants were often coerced into obeying and that at least some participants recognized that the other person was just pretending to be shocked. Such findings call into question the study's validity and authenticity, but some replications suggest that people are surprisingly prone to obeying authority.

History of the Milgram Experiments

Milgram started his experiments in 1961, shortly after the trial of the World War II criminal Adolf Eichmann had begun. Eichmann’s defense that he was merely following instructions when he ordered the deaths of millions of Jews roused Milgram’s interest.

In his 1974 book "Obedience to Authority," Milgram posed the question, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

Procedure in the Milgram Experiment

The participants in the most famous variation of the Milgram experiment were 40 men recruited using newspaper ads. In exchange for their participation, each person was paid $4.50.

Milgram developed an intimidating shock generator, with shock levels starting at 15 volts and increasing in 15-volt increments all the way up to 450 volts. The many switches were labeled with terms including "slight shock," "moderate shock," and "danger: severe shock." The final three switches were labeled simply with an ominous "XXX."

Each participant took the role of a "teacher" who would then deliver a shock to the "student" in a neighboring room whenever an incorrect answer was given. While participants believed that they were delivering real shocks to the student, the “student” was a confederate in the experiment who was only pretending to be shocked.

As the experiment progressed, the participant would hear the learner plead to be released or even complain about a heart condition. Once they reached the 300-volt level, the learner would bang on the wall and demand to be released.

Beyond this point, the learner became completely silent and refused to answer any more questions. The experimenter then instructed the participant to treat this silence as an incorrect response and deliver a further shock.

Most participants asked the experimenter whether they should continue. The experimenter then responded with a series of commands to prod the participant along:

• "Please continue."
• "The experiment requires that you continue."
• "It is absolutely essential that you continue."
• "You have no other choice; you must go on."

Results of the Milgram Experiment

In the Milgram experiment, obedience was measured by the level of shock that the participant was willing to deliver. While many of the subjects became extremely agitated, distraught, and angry at the experimenter, they nevertheless continued to follow orders all the way to the end.

Milgram's results showed that 65% of the participants in the study delivered the maximum shocks. Of the 40 participants in the study, 26 delivered the maximum shocks, while 14 stopped before reaching the highest levels.

Why did so many of the participants in this experiment perform a seemingly brutal act when instructed by an authority figure? According to Milgram, there are some situational factors that can explain such high levels of obedience:

• The physical presence of an authority figure dramatically increased compliance .
• The fact that Yale (a trusted and authoritative academic institution) sponsored the study led many participants to believe that the experiment must be safe.
• The selection of teacher and learner status seemed random.
• Participants assumed that the experimenter was a competent expert.
• The shocks were said to be painful, not dangerous.

Later experiments conducted by Milgram indicated that the presence of rebellious peers dramatically reduced obedience levels. When other people refused to go along with the experimenter's orders, 36 out of 40 participants refused to deliver the maximum shocks.

More recent work by researchers suggests that while people do tend to obey authority figures, the process is not necessarily as cut-and-dried as Milgram depicted it.

In a 2012 essay published in PLoS Biology , researchers suggested that the degree to which people are willing to obey the questionable orders of an authority figure depends largely on two key factors:

• How much the individual agrees with the orders
• How much they identify with the person giving the orders

While it is clear that people are often far more susceptible to influence, persuasion , and obedience than they would often like to be, they are far from mindless machines just taking orders. 

Another study that analyzed Milgram's results concluded that eight factors influenced the likelihood that people would progress up to the 450-volt shock:

• The experimenter's directiveness
• Legitimacy and consistency
• Group pressure to disobey
• Indirectness of proximity
• Intimacy of the relation between the teacher and learner
• Distance between the teacher and learner

Ethical Concerns in the Milgram Experiment

Milgram's experiments have long been the source of considerable criticism and controversy. From the get-go, the ethics of his experiments were highly dubious. Participants were subjected to significant psychological and emotional distress.

Some of the major ethical issues in the experiment were related to:

• The use of deception
• The lack of protection for the participants who were involved
• Pressure from the experimenter to continue even after asking to stop, interfering with participants' right to withdraw

Due to concerns about the amount of anxiety experienced by many of the participants, everyone was supposedly debriefed at the end of the experiment. The researchers reported that they explained the procedures and the use of deception.

Critics of the study have argued that many of the participants were still confused about the exact nature of the experiment, and recent findings suggest that many participants were not debriefed at all.

Replications of the Milgram Experiment

While Milgram’s research raised serious ethical questions about the use of human subjects in psychology experiments , his results have also been consistently replicated in further experiments. One review further research on obedience and found that Milgram’s findings hold true in other experiments. In one study, researchers conducted a study designed to replicate Milgram's classic obedience experiment. The researchers made several alterations to Milgram's experiment.

• The maximum shock level was 150 volts as opposed to the original 450 volts.
• Participants were also carefully screened to eliminate those who might experience adverse reactions to the experiment.

The results of the new experiment revealed that participants obeyed at roughly the same rate that they did when Milgram conducted his original study more than 40 years ago.

Some psychologists suggested that in spite of the changes made in the replication, the study still had merit and could be used to further explore some of the situational factors that also influenced the results of Milgram's study. But other psychologists suggested that the replication was too dissimilar to Milgram's original study to draw any meaningful comparisons.

One study examined people's beliefs about how they would do compared to the participants in Milgram's experiments. They found that most people believed they would stop sooner than the average participants. These findings applied to both those who had never heard of Milgram's experiments and those who were familiar with them. In fact, those who knew about Milgram's experiments actually believed that they would stop even sooner than other people.

Another novel replication involved recruiting participants in pairs and having them take turns acting as either an 'agent' or 'victim.' Agents then received orders to shock the victim. The results suggest that only around 3.3% disobeyed the experimenter's orders.

Recent Criticisms and New Findings

Psychologist Gina Perry suggests that much of what we think we know about Milgram's famous experiments is only part of the story. While researching an article on the topic, she stumbled across hundreds of audiotapes found in Yale archives that documented numerous variations of Milgram's shock experiments.

Participants Were Often Coerced

While Milgram's reports of his process report methodical and uniform procedures, the audiotapes reveal something different. During the experimental sessions, the experimenters often went off-script and coerced the subjects into continuing the shocks.

"The slavish obedience to authority we have come to associate with Milgram’s experiments comes to sound much more like bullying and coercion when you listen to these recordings," Perry suggested in an article for Discover Magazine .

Few Participants Were Really Debriefed

Milgram suggested that the subjects were "de-hoaxed" after the experiments. He claimed he later surveyed the participants and found that 84% were glad to have participated, while only 1% regretted their involvement.

However, Perry's findings revealed that of the 700 or so people who took part in different variations of his studies between 1961 and 1962, very few were truly debriefed.

A true debriefing would have involved explaining that the shocks weren't real and that the other person was not injured. Instead, Milgram's sessions were mainly focused on calming the subjects down before sending them on their way.

Many participants left the experiment in a state of considerable distress. While the truth was revealed to some months or even years later, many were simply never told a thing.

Variations Led to Differing Results

Another problem is that the version of the study presented by Milgram and the one that's most often retold does not tell the whole story. The statistic that 65% of people obeyed orders applied only to one variation of the experiment, in which 26 out of 40 subjects obeyed.

In other variations, far fewer people were willing to follow the experimenters' orders, and in some versions of the study, not a single participant obeyed.

Participants Guessed the Learner Was Faking

Perry even tracked down some of the people who took part in the experiments, as well as Milgram's research assistants. What she discovered is that many of his subjects had deduced what Milgram's intent was and knew that the "learner" was merely pretending.

Such findings cast Milgram's results in a new light. It suggests that not only did Milgram intentionally engage in some hefty misdirection to obtain the results he wanted but that many of his participants were simply playing along.

An analysis of an unpublished study by Milgram's assistant, Taketo Murata, found that participants who believed they were really delivering a shock were less likely to obey, while those who did not believe they were actually inflicting pain were more willing to obey. In other words, the perception of pain increased defiance, while skepticism of pain increased obedience.

A review of Milgram's research materials suggests that the experiments exerted more pressure to obey than the original results suggested. Other variations of the experiment revealed much lower rates of obedience, and many of the participants actually altered their behavior when they guessed the true nature of the experiment.

Impact of the Milgram Experiment

Since there is no way to truly replicate the experiment due to its serious ethical and moral problems, determining whether Milgram's experiment really tells us anything about the power of obedience is impossible to determine.

So why does Milgram's experiment maintain such a powerful hold on our imaginations, even decades after the fact? Perry believes that despite all its ethical issues and the problem of never truly being able to replicate Milgram's procedures, the study has taken on the role of what she calls a "powerful parable."

Milgram's work might not hold the answers to what makes people obey or even the degree to which they truly obey. It has, however, inspired other researchers to explore what makes people follow orders and, perhaps more importantly, what leads them to question authority.

Recent findings undermine the scientific validity of the study. Milgram's work is also not truly replicable due to its ethical problems. However, the study has led to additional research on how situational factors can affect obedience to authority.

Milgram’s experiment has become a classic in psychology , demonstrating the dangers of obedience. The research suggests that situational variables have a stronger sway than personality factors in determining whether people will obey an authority figure. However, other psychologists argue that both external and internal factors heavily influence obedience, such as personal beliefs and overall temperament.

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Haslam SA, Reicher SD, Millard K, McDonald R. ‘Happy to have been of service’: The Yale archive as a window into the engaged followership of participants in Milgram’s ‘obedience’ experiments . Br J Soc Psychol . 2015;54:55-83. doi:10.1111/bjso.12074

Perry G, Brannigan A, Wanner RA, Stam H. Credibility and incredulity in Milgram’s obedience experiments: A reanalysis of an unpublished test . Soc Psychol Q . 2020;83(1):88-106. doi:10.1177/0190272519861952

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

The Milgram Experiment: How Far Will You Go to Obey an Order?

Understand the infamous study and its conclusions about human nature

• Archaeology
• Ph.D., Psychology, University of California - Santa Barbara
• B.A., Psychology and Peace & Conflict Studies, University of California - Berkeley

A brief Milgram experiment summary is as follows: In the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of studies on the concepts of obedience and authority. His experiments involved instructing study participants to deliver increasingly high-voltage shocks to an actor in another room, who would scream and eventually go silent as the shocks became stronger. The shocks weren't real, but study participants were made to believe that they were.

Today, the Milgram experiment is widely criticized on both ethical and scientific grounds. However, Milgram's conclusions about humanity's willingness to obey authority figures remain influential and well-known.

Key Takeaways: The Milgram Experiment

• The goal of the Milgram experiment was to test the extent of humans' willingness to obey orders from an authority figure.
• Participants were told by an experimenter to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to another individual. Unbeknownst to the participants, shocks were fake and the individual being shocked was an actor.
• The majority of participants obeyed, even when the individual being shocked screamed in pain.
• The experiment has been widely criticized on ethical and scientific grounds.

Detailed Milgram’s Experiment Summary

In the most well-known version of the Milgram experiment, the 40 male participants were told that the experiment focused on the relationship between punishment, learning, and memory. The experimenter then introduced each participant to a second individual, explaining that this second individual was participating in the study as well. Participants were told that they would be randomly assigned to roles of "teacher" and "learner." However, the "second individual" was an actor hired by the research team, and the study was set up so that the true participant would always be assigned to the "teacher" role.

During the Milgram experiment, the learner was located in a separate room from the teacher (the real participant), but the teacher could hear the learner through the wall. The experimenter told the teacher that the learner would memorize word pairs and instructed the teacher to ask the learner questions. If the learner responded incorrectly to a question, the teacher would be asked to administer an electric shock. The shocks started at a relatively mild level (15 volts) but increased in 15-volt increments up to 450 volts. (In actuality, the shocks were fake, but the participant was led to believe they were real.)

Participants were instructed to give a higher shock to the learner with each wrong answer. When the 150-volt shock was administered, the learner would cry out in pain and ask to leave the study. He would then continue crying out with each shock until the 330-volt level, at which point he would stop responding.

During this process, whenever participants expressed hesitation about continuing with the study, the experimenter would urge them to go on with increasingly firm instructions, culminating in the statement, "You have no other choice, you must go on." The study ended when participants refused to obey the experimenter’s demand, or when they gave the learner the highest level of shock on the machine (450 volts).

Milgram found that participants obeyed the experimenter at an unexpectedly high rate: 65% of the participants gave the learner the 450-volt shock.

Critiques of the Milgram Experiment

The Milgram experiment has been widely criticized on ethical grounds. Milgram’s participants were led to believe that they acted in a way that harmed someone else, an experience that could have had long-term consequences. Moreover, an investigation by writer Gina Perry uncovered that some participants appear to not have been fully debriefed after the study —they were told months later, or not at all, that the shocks were fake and the learner wasn’t harmed. Milgram’s studies could not be perfectly recreated today, because researchers today are required to pay much more attention to the safety and well-being of human research subjects.

Researchers have also questioned the scientific validity of Milgram’s results. In her examination of the study, Perry found that Milgram’s experimenter may have gone off script and told participants to obey many more times than the script specified. Additionally, some research suggests that participants may have figured out that the learner was not harmed: in interviews conducted after the Milgram experiment, some participants reported that they didn’t think the learner was in any real danger. This mindset is likely to have affected their behavior in the study.

Variations on the Milgram Experiment

Milgram and other researchers conducted numerous versions of the experiment over time. The participants' levels of compliance with the experimenter’s demands varied greatly from one study to the next. For example, when participants were in closer proximity to the learner (e.g. in the same room), they were less likely to give the learner the highest level of shock.

Another version of the Milgram experiment brought three "teachers" into the experiment room at once. One was a real participant, and the other two were actors hired by the research team. During the experiment, the two non-participant teachers would quit as the level of shocks began to increase. Milgram found that these conditions made the real participant far more likely to "disobey" the experimenter, too: only 10% of participants gave the 450-volt shock to the learner.

In yet another version of the Milgram experiment, two experimenters were present, and during the experiment, they would begin arguing with one another about whether it was right to continue the study. In this version, none of the participants gave the learner the 450-volt shock.

Replicating the Milgram Experiment

Researchers have sought to replicate Milgram's original study with additional safeguards in place to protect participants. In 2009, Jerry Burger replicated Milgram’s famous experiment at Santa Clara University with new safeguards in place: the highest shock level was 150 volts, and participants were told that the shocks were fake immediately after the experiment ended. Additionally, participants were screened by a clinical psychologist before the experiment began, and those found to be at risk of a negative reaction to the study were deemed ineligible to participate.

Burger found that participants obeyed at similar levels as Milgram’s participants: 82.5% of Milgram’s participants gave the learner the 150-volt shock, and 70% of Burger’s participants did the same.

The Legacy of the Milgram Experiment

Milgram’s interpretation of his research was that everyday people are capable of carrying out unthinkable actions in certain circumstances. His research has been used to explain atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, though these applications are by no means widely accepted or agreed upon.

Importantly, not all participants obeyed the experimenter’s demands , and Milgram’s studies shed light on the factors that enable people to stand up to authority. In fact, as sociologist Matthew Hollander writes, we may be able to learn from the participants who disobeyed, as their strategies may enable us to respond more effectively to an unethical situation. The Milgram experiment suggested that human beings are susceptible to obeying authority, but it also demonstrated that obedience is not inevitable.

• Baker, Peter C. “Electric Schlock: Did Stanley Milgram's Famous Obedience Experiments Prove Anything?” Pacific Standard (2013, Sep. 10). https://psmag.com/social-justice/electric-schlock-65377
• Burger, Jerry M. "Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?."  American Psychologist 64.1 (2009): 1-11. http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2008-19206-001
• Gilovich, Thomas, Dacher Keltner, and Richard E. Nisbett. Social Psychology . 1st edition, W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
• Hollander, Matthew. “How to Be a Hero: Insight From the Milgram Experiment.” HuffPost Contributor Network (2015, Apr. 29). https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-to-be-a-hero-insight-_b_6566882
• Jarrett, Christian. “New Analysis Suggests Most Milgram Participants Realised the ‘Obedience Experiments’ Were Not Really Dangerous.” The British Psychological Society: Research Digest (2017, Dec. 12). https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/12/12/interviews-with-milgram-participants-provide-little-support-for-the-contemporary-theory-of-engaged-followership/
• Perry, Gina. “The Shocking Truth of the Notorious Milgram Obedience Experiments.” Discover Magazine Blogs (2013, Oct. 2). http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2013/10/02/the-shocking-truth-of-the-notorious-milgram-obedience-experiments/
• Romm, Cari. “Rethinking One of Psychology's Most Infamous Experiments.” The Atlantic (2015, Jan. 28) . https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinking-one-of-psychologys-most-infamous-experiments/384913/
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Rethinking One of Psychology's Most Infamous Experiments

In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram's electric-shock studies showed that people will obey even the most abhorrent of orders. But recently, researchers have begun to question his conclusions — and offer some of their own.

In 1961, Yale University psychology professor Stanley Milgram placed an advertisement in the New Haven Register . “We will pay you $4 for one hour of your time,” it read, asking for “500 New Haven men to help us complete a scientific study of memory and learning.”

Only part of that was true. Over the next two years, hundreds of people showed up at Milgram’s lab for a learning and memory study that quickly turned into something else entirely. Under the watch of the experimenter, the volunteer—dubbed “the teacher”—would read out strings of words to his partner, “the learner,” who was hooked up to an electric-shock machine in the other room. Each time the learner made a mistake in repeating the words, the teacher was to deliver a shock of increasing intensity, starting at 15 volts (labeled “slight shock” on the machine) and going all the way up to 450 volts (“Danger: severe shock”). Some people, horrified at what they were being asked to do, stopped the experiment early, defying their supervisor’s urging to go on; others continued up to 450 volts, even as the learner pled for mercy, yelled a warning about his heart condition—and then fell alarmingly silent. In the most well-known variation of the experiment, a full 65 percent of people went all the way.

Until they emerged from the lab, the participants didn’t know that the shocks weren’t real, that the cries of pain were pre-recorded, and that the learner—railroad auditor Jim McDonough —was in on the whole thing, sitting alive and unharmed in the next room. They were also unaware that they had just been used to prove the claim that would soon make Milgram famous: that ordinary people, under the direction of an authority figure, would obey just about any order they were given, even to torture. It’s a phenomenon that’s been used to explain atrocities from the Holocaust to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre to the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. “To a remarkable degree,” Peter Baker wrote in Pacific Standard in 2013, “Milgram’s early research has come to serve as a kind of all-purpose lightning rod for discussions about the human heart of darkness.”

In some ways, though, Milgram’s study is also—as promised—a study of memory, if not the one he pretended it was.

More than five decades after it was first published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963, it’s earned a place as one of the most famous experiments of the 20th century. Milgram’s research has spawned countless spinoff studies among psychologists, sociologists, and historians, even as it’s leapt from academia into the realm of pop culture. It’s inspired songs by Peter Gabriel (lyrics: “We do what we’re told/We do what we’re told/Told to do”) and Dar Williams (“When I knew it was wrong, I played it just like a game/I pressed the buzzer”); a number of books whose titles make puns out of the word “shocking”; a controversial French documentary disguised as a game show ; episodes of Law and Order and Bones ; a made-for-TV movie with William Shatner; a jewelry collection (bizarrely) from the company Enfants Perdus; and most recently, the biopic The Experimenter , starring Peter Sarsgaard as the title character—and this list is by no means exhaustive.

But as with human memory, the study—even published, archived, enshrined in psychology textbooks—is malleable. And in the past few years, a new wave of researchers have dedicated themselves to reshaping it, arguing that Milgram’s lessons on human obedience are, in fact, misremembered—that his work doesn’t prove what he claimed it does.

The problem is, no one can really agree on what it proves instead.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the experiments’ publication (or, technically, the 51st), the Journal of Social Issues released a themed edition in September 2014 dedicated to all things Milgram. “There is a compelling and timely case for reexamining Milgram’s legacy,” the editors wrote in the introduction, noting that they were in good company: In 1964, the year after the experiments were published, fewer than 10 published studies referenced Milgram’s work; in 2012, that number was more than 60.

It’s a trend that surely would have pleased Milgram, who crafted his work with an audience in mind from the beginning. “Milgram was a fantastic dramaturg. His studies are fantastic little pieces of theater. They’re beautifully scripted,” said Stephen Reicher, a professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews and a co-editor of the Journal of Social Issues ’ special edition. Capitalizing on the fame his 1963 publication earned him, Milgram went on to publish a book on his experiments in 1974 and a documentary, Obedience , with footage from the original experiments.

But for a man determined to leave a lasting legacy, Milgram also made it remarkably easy for people to pick it apart. The Yale University archives contain boxes upon boxes of papers, videos, and audio recordings, an entire career carefully documented for posterity. Though Milgram’s widow Alexandra donated the materials after his death in 1984, they remained largely untouched for years, until Yale’s library staff began to digitize all the materials in the early 2000s. Able to easily access troves of material for the first time, the researchers came flocking.

“There’s a lot of dirty laundry in those archives,” said Arthur Miller, a professor emeritus of psychology at Miami University and another co-editor of the Journal of Social Issues . “Critics of Milgram seem to want to—and do—find material in these archives that makes Milgram look bad or unethical or, in some cases, a liar.”

One of the most vocal of those critics is Australian author and psychologist Gina Perry, who documented her experience tracking down Milgram’s research participants in her 2013 book Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments . Her project began as an effort to write about the experiments from the perspective of the participants—but when she went back through the archives to confirm some of their stories, she said, she found some glaring issues with Milgram’s data. Among her accusations: that the supervisors went off script in their prods to the teachers, that some of the volunteers were aware that the setup was a hoax, and that others weren’t debriefed on the whole thing until months later. “My main issue is that methodologically, there have been so many problems with Milgram’s research that we have to start re-examining the textbook descriptions of the research,” she said.

But many psychologists argue that even with methodological holes and moral lapses, the basic finding of Milgram’s work, the rate of obedience, still holds up. Because of the ethical challenge of reproducing the study, the idea survived for decades on a mix of good faith and partial replications—one study had participants administer their shocks in a virtual-reality system, for example—until 2007, when ABC collaborated with Santa Clara University psychologist Jerry Burger to replicate Milgram’s experiment for an episode of the TV show Basic Instincts titled “ The Science of Evil ,” pegged to Abu Ghraib.

Burger’s way around an ethical breach: In the most well-known experiment, he found, 80 percent of the participants who reached a 150-volt shock continued all the way to the end. “So what I said we could do is take people up to the 150-volt point, see how they reacted, and end the study right there,” he said. The rest of the setup was nearly identical to Milgram’s lab of the early 1960s (with one notable exception: “Milgram had a gray lab coat and I couldn’t find a gray, so I got a light blue.”)

At the end of the experiment, Burger was left with an obedience rate around the same as the one Milgram had recorded—proving, he said, not only that Milgram’s numbers had been accurate, but that his work was as relevant as ever. “[The results] didn’t surprise me,” he said, “but for years I had heard from my students and from other people, ‘Well, that was back in the 60s, and somehow how we’re more aware of the problems of blind obedience, and people have changed.’”

In recent years, though, much of the attention has focused less on supporting or discrediting Milgram’s statistics, and more on rethinking his conclusions. With a paper published earlier this month in the British Journal of Social Psychology , Matthew Hollander, a sociology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, is among the most recent to question Milgram’s notion of obedience. After analyzing the conversation patterns from audio recordings of 117 study participants, Hollander found that Milgram’s original classification of his subjects—either obedient or disobedient—failed to capture the true dynamics of the situation. Rather, he argued, people in both categories tried several different forms of protest—those who successfully ended the experiment early were simply better at resisting than the ones that continued shocking.

“Research subjects may say things like ‘I can’t do this anymore’ or ‘I’m not going to do this anymore,’” he said, even those who went all the way to 450 volts. “I understand those practices to be a way of trying to stop the experiment in a relatively aggressive, direct, and explicit way.”

It’s a far cry from Milgram’s idea that the capacity for evil lies dormant in everyone, ready to be awakened with the right set of circumstances. The ability to disobey toxic orders, Hollander said, is a skill that can be taught like any other—all a person needs to learn is what to say and how to say it.

In some ways, the conclusions Milgram drew were as much a product of their time as they were a product of his research. At the time he began his studies, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major architects of the Holocaust, was already in full swing. In 1963, the same year that Milgram published his studies, writer Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Eichmann in her book on the trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem .

Milgram, who was born in New York City in 1933 to Jewish immigrant parents, came to view his studies as a validation of Arendt’s idea—but the Holocaust had been at the forefront of his mind for years before either of them published their work. “I should have been born into the German-speaking Jewish community of Prague in 1922 and died in a gas chamber some 20 years later,” he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1958. “How I came to be born in the Bronx Hospital, I’ll never quite understand.”

And in the introduction of his 1963 paper, he invoked the Nazis within the first few paragraphs: “Obedience, as a determinant of behavior, is of particular relevance to our time,” he wrote. “Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded; daily quotas of corpses were produced … These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders.”

Though the term didn’t exist at the time, Milgram was a proponent of what today’s social psychologists call situationism: the idea that people’s behavior is determined largely by what’s happening around them. “They’re not psychopaths, and they’re not hostile, and they’re not aggressive or deranged. They’re just people, like you and me,” Miller said. “If you put us in certain situations, we’re more likely to be racist or sexist, or we may lie, or we may cheat. There are studies that show this, thousands and thousands of studies that document the many unsavory aspects of most people.”

But continued to its logical extreme, situationism “has an exonerating effect,” he said. “In the minds of a lot of people, it tends to excuse the bad behavior … it’s not the person’s fault for doing the bad thing, it’s the situation they were put in.” Milgram’s studies were famous because their implications were also devastating: If the Nazis were just following orders, then he had proved that anyone at all could be a Nazi. If the guards at Abu Ghraib were just following orders, then anyone was capable of torture.

The latter, Reicher said, is part of why interest in Milgram’s work has seen a resurgence in recent years. “If you look at acts of human atrocity, they’ve hardly diminished over time,” he said, and news of the abuse at Abu Ghraib was surfacing around the same time that Yale’s archival material was digitized, a perfect storm of encouragement for scholars to turn their attention once again to the question of what causes evil.

He and his colleague Alex Haslam, the third co-editor of The Journal of Social Issues ’ Milgram edition and a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland, have come up with a different answer. “The notion that we somehow automatically obey authority, that we are somehow programmed, doesn’t account for the variability [in rates of obedience] across conditions,” he said; in some iterations of Milgram’s study, the rate of compliance was close to 100 percent, while in others it was closer to zero. “We need an account that can explain the variability—when we obey, when we don’t.”

“We argue that the answer to that question is a matter of identification,” he continued. “Do they identify more with the cause of science, and listen to the experimenter as a legitimate representative of science, or do they identify more with the learner as an ordinary person? … You’re torn between these different voices. Who do you listen to?”

The question, he conceded, applies as much to the study of Milgram today as it does to what went on in his lab. “Trying to get a consensus among academics is like herding cats,” Reicher said, but “if there is a consensus, it’s that we need a new explanation. I think nearly everybody accepts the fact that Milgram discovered a remarkable phenomenon, but he didn’t provide a very compelling explanation of that phenomenon.”

What he provided instead was a difficult and deeply uncomfortable set of questions—and his research, flawed as it is, endures not because it clarifies the causes of human atrocities, but because it confuses more than it answers.

Or, as Miller put it: “The whole thing exists in terms of its controversy, how it’s excited some and infuriated others. People have tried to knock it down, and it always comes up standing.”

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What was the Stanley Milgram experiment?

The Stanley Milgram experiment is one of the most famous and controversial studies in the history of psychology. The study was conducted in the early 1960s, and it examined people's willingness to obey an authority figure , even when that obedience caused harm to others. In this article, we'll take a closer look at the Milgram experiment, its significance, and its impact on psychology.

The Milgram experiment was designed to test people's willingness to obey authority, even when that obedience caused harm to others. The study involved three participants: the experimenter, the learner, and the teacher. The learner was actually a confederate of the experimenter, and the teacher was the real participant.

The teacher was instructed to administer electric shocks to the learner whenever the learner gave a wrong answer to a question. The shocks started at a low level and increased in intensity with each wrong answer. The learner was not actually receiving shocks, but they pretended to be in pain and begged the teacher to stop. Despite this, the experimenter instructed the teacher to continue shocking the learner.

The results of the Milgram experiment were shocking. Despite the learner's protests, the majority of participants continued to administer shocks to the maximum level, even when they believed that the shocks were causing serious harm.

The Milgram experiment is perhaps one of the most well-known experiments on obedience in psychology . Milgram's original study involved 40 participants who were instructed to deliver electric shocks to a confederate, who pretended to be receiving shocks.

The shocks were delivered via a "shock machine" and ranged in severity from slight shocks to severe shocks. Despite the confederate's cries of pain and protest, the majority of participants continued to administer shocks up to the maximum level, demonstrating high rates of obedience to authority figures.

Milgram's experiments on obedience generated a great deal of interest and controversy in the scientific community. The results of his study challenged commonly held beliefs about human behavior and the limits of individual autonomy . The study also raised important ethical concerns and spurred a renewed focus on informed consent and debriefing in behavioral research.

In subsequent variations of the experiment, Milgram sought to explore the factors that influenced obedience rates, such as the presence of peers or the proximity of the authority figure. These variations provided further insight into the complex nature of obedience and social influence .

The Milgram experiment remains a significant and influential study in the field of social psychology, providing valuable insights into the power of authority and the limits of individual autonomy. Despite its ethical concerns, Milgram's study continues to be discussed and debated by scholars and students alike, highlighting the enduring impact of this groundbreaking behavioral study.

Who was Stanley Milgram?

Stanley Milgram was a renowned American social psychologist who was born in New York City in 1933. He received his PhD in Social Psychology from Harvard University in 1960 and went on to teach at Yale University, where he conducted his famous obedience experiments. Milgram's research focused on the areas of personality and social psychology, and he is best known for his studies on obedience to authority figures.

Milgram's obedience experiments were controversial and sparked a great deal of debate in the field of psychology. His research showed that ordinary people were capable of inflicting harm on others when instructed to do so by an authority figure. Milgram's work had a profound impact on the field of social psychology and influenced other researchers, such as Philip Zimbardo , to study similar topics.

Milgram's contributions to the field of social psychology were significant, and his obedience experiments remain some of the most well-known and widely discussed studies in the history of psychology. Despite the controversy surrounding his work, Milgram's research continues to be taught in psychology courses around the world and has had a lasting impact on our understanding of obedience, authority, and human behavior.

Milgram's Independent Variables

As we have seen, in Stanley Milgram's famous experiment conducted at Yale University in the 1960s, he sought to investigate the extent to which ordinary people would obey the commands of an authority figure, even if it meant administering severe electric shocks to another person.

The study of obedience to authority figures was a fundamental aspect of Milgram's research in social psychology. To explore this phenomenon, Milgram manipulated several independent variables in his experiment. One key independent variable was the level of shock administered by the participants, ranging from slight shocks to increasingly severe shocks, labeled with corresponding shock levels.

Another independent variable was the proximity of the authority figure, with variations of physical proximity or remote instruction via telephone.

Additionally, the presence or absence of social pressure from others and the authority figure's attire, varying between a lab coat and everyday clothing, were also manipulated.

Through these carefully controlled independent variables, Milgram examined the obedience rates and the level of obedience demonstrated by the participants in response to the concrete situation created in his experiment.

Change of Location

One significant factor that influenced the results of the Milgram experiment was the change of location. Originally conducted at Yale University, the experiment was later moved to a set of run-down offices in Bridgeport, Connecticut. This change had a profound impact on the rates of obedience observed in the study.

In the original experiment at Yale University, the obedience rates were shockingly high, with approximately 65% of participants following the instructions of the authority figure to administer what they believed to be increasingly severe electric shocks to another person. However, when the experiment was relocated to the less prestigious and less authoritative setting of run-down offices, the obedience rates dropped significantly to 47.5%.

This change in location created a shift in the dynamic of the experiment . Participants were less likely to view the authority figure as credible or legitimate in the less prestigious environment. The environment in run-down offices appeared less official and therefore may have weakened the perceived authority of the experimenter. This resulted in a lower level of obedience observed among the participants.

The change in location in the Milgram experiment demonstrated the influence of contextual factors on obedience rates. It highlighted how obedience to authority figures can be influenced by the specific setting in which individuals find themselves. The study serves as a reminder that obedience is not solely determined by individual characteristics but is also shaped by situational factors such as the environment and perceived authority.

In conclusion, the change of location from Yale University to run-down offices had a significant impact on the obedience rates in the Milgram experiment. The move resulted in a drop in obedience, suggesting that the context in which the experiment took place influenced participants' responses to authority .

One important aspect of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment was the role of the experimenter's uniform, specifically the lab coat. The uniform or attire worn by the authority figure in the experiment played a significant role in influencing obedience levels among the participants.

The lab coat served as a symbol of authority and expertise, creating a sense of credibility and legitimacy for the experimenter. By wearing the lab coat, the authority figure appeared more knowledgeable and trustworthy, which influenced participants to follow their instructions more readily.

The uniform also helped establish a clear power dynamic between the authority figure and the participants. The experimenter's attire reinforced the perception of being in a formal and professional setting, where obedience to authority was expected.

Milgram's experiment included variations to the uniform to examine its impact on obedience levels. In some versions of the experiment, the experimenter wore regular clothing instead of the lab coat. This modification significantly reduced the perceived authority of the experimenter, leading to lower levels of obedience among the participants.

By manipulating the presence or absence of the lab coat, Milgram demonstrated how even a simple change in attire could influence obedience levels . This emphasized the role of external factors, such as the uniform, in shaping human behavior in a social context.

Touch Proximity Condition

In the Touch Proximity Condition of the Milgram experiment, participants were subjected to a unique and intense situation that aimed to test the limits of their obedience to authority. In this particular condition, when the learner refused to participate after reaching 150 volts, the participants were required to physically force the learner's hand onto a shock plate. This manipulation was intended to eliminate the psychological buffer that existed between the participants and the consequences of their actions.

The introduction of touch proximity significantly altered the dynamics of the experiment. The physical act of forcing the learner's hand onto the shock plate made the participants more directly responsible for the pain and discomfort experienced by the learner. This direct physical connection to the consequences of their actions created a profound impact on the participants, leading to a notable decrease in obedience levels.

In the Touch Proximity Condition, obedience rates dropped to just 30%, highlighting the significant influence of the removal of the buffer between the participants and the consequences of their actions. The participants were confronted with the immediate and tangible effects of their obedience, which made it much more difficult to justify their continued compliance.

Overall, the Touch Proximity Condition revealed the critical role that the removal of psychological distance plays in obedience to authority. By eliminating the buffer between the participants and the consequences of their actions, Milgram's experiment demonstrated the tremendous impact that immediate physical proximity can have on individuals' behavior in a difficult and morally challenging situation.

Two Teacher Condition

In Milgram's Two Teacher Condition, participants were given the opportunity to instruct an assistant, who was actually a confederate, to press the switches administering electric shocks to the learner. This variation aimed to investigate the impact of participants assuming a more indirect role in the act of shocking the learner.

Surprisingly, the results showed that in this condition, a staggering 92.5% of participants instructed the assistant to deliver the maximum voltage shock. This high rate of obedience indicated that participants were willing to exert their authority over the assistant to carry out the harmful actions.

The Two Teacher Condition aligns with Milgram's Agency Theory, which suggests that people tend to obey authority figures when they perceive themselves as agents carrying out instructions rather than personally responsible. In this variation, participants may have seen themselves as simply giving orders rather than directly causing harm, which diminished their sense of personal responsibility and increased their obedience.

This condition demonstrates how the dynamic of obedience can change when individuals are given the opportunity to delegate harmful actions to others. It sheds light on the complex interplay between authority figures, personal responsibility, and obedience to explain the unexpected and alarming levels of compliance observed in the Milgram experiment.

Social Support Condition

In the Social Support Condition of Stanley Milgram's experiment, participants were not alone in their decision-making process. They were joined by two additional individuals who acted as confederates. The purpose of this condition was to assess the impact of social support on obedience.

The presence of these confederates who refused to obey the authority figure had a significant effect on the level of obedience observed. When one or both confederates refused to carry out the harmful actions, participants became more likely to question the legitimacy of the authority figure's commands and were less willing to comply.

The specific actions taken by the two confederates involved expressing their refusal to deliver the electric shocks. They openly dissented and voiced their concerns regarding the ethical implications of the experiment. These actions served as powerful examples of disobedience and created an atmosphere of social support for the participants.

As a result, the level of obedience decreased in the presence of these defiant confederates. Seeing others defy the authority figure empowered participants to assert their own autonomy and resist carrying out the harmful actions. The social support provided by the confederates challenged the participants' perception of the experiment as a concrete situation and encouraged them to question the legitimacy of the authority figure's instructions.

Overall, the Social Support Condition demonstrated that the presence of individuals who refused to obey had a profound influence on the level of obedience observed. This highlights the importance of social support in challenging authority and promoting ethical decision-making.

Absent Experimenter Condition

In Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiment, the proximity of authority figures played a crucial role in determining the level of obedience observed. One particular condition, known as the Absent Experimenter Condition, shed light on the impact of physical proximity on obedience.

In this condition, the experimenter instructed the teacher, who administered the electric shocks, by telephone from another room. The results were striking. Obedience plummeted to a mere 20.5%, indicating that when the authority figure was not physically present, participants were much less inclined to obey.

Without the immediate presence of the experimenter, many participants displayed disobedience or cheated by administering lesser shocks than instructed. This deviation from the experimenter's orders suggests that the absence of the authority figure weakened the participants' sense of obligation and decreased their willingness to comply.

The findings of the Absent Experimenter Condition highlight the significant influence of proximity on obedience. When the authority figure was physically present, participants were more likely to obey, even when faced with morally challenging actions. However, when the authority figure was not in close proximity, obedience rates dramatically decreased. This emphasizes the impact of physical distance on individuals' inclination to follow orders, indicating that proximity plays a crucial role in shaping obedience behavior.

Milgram's Absent Experimenter Condition underscored the importance of physical proximity with authority figures in determining obedience levels. When the experimenter instructed the teacher by telephone from another room, obedience fell to 20.5%, revealing the diminished compliance when the authority figure was not physically present.

Milgram's Legacy and Influence on Modern Psychology

The Milgram experiment was significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, it highlighted the power of obedience to authority, even in situations where that obedience causes harm to others. This has important implications for understanding real-world situations, such as the Holocaust, where ordinary people were able to commit atrocities under the authority of a fascist regime.

Secondly, the experiment sparked a debate about the ethics of psychological research . Some critics argued that the study was unethical because it caused psychological distress to the participants. Others argued that the study's findings were too important to ignore, and that the benefits of the research outweighed the harm caused.

Stanley Milgram's study of obedience is widely recognized as one of the most influential experiments in the history of psychology. Although Milgram faced significant criticism for the ethical implications of his work, the study has had a lasting impact on our understanding of the power of authority and social influence.

Milgram's legacy can be seen in a variety of ways within the field of personality and social psychology. For example, his research has inspired a multitude of studies on the impact of social norms and conformity on behavior, as well as the importance of individual autonomy and free will in decision-making processes.

In addition, Milgram's influence can be seen in modern psychological research that utilizes variations of his study to explore new questions related to social influence and obedience. One such example is the Milgram Re-enactment, which sought to replicate the original study in a more ethical and controlled manner. This variation of the study found that individuals were still willing to administer shocks to the confederate, albeit at lower levels than in Milgram's original study.

Milgram's work has also had a significant impact on the way that researchers approach the treatment of participants in psychological experiments. The ethical concerns raised by Milgram's study led to a renewed focus on informed consent and debriefing procedures, ensuring that participants are aware of the potential risks and benefits of their involvement in research studies.

Milgram's legacy is one of both controversy and innovation. His study of obedience has contributed greatly to our understanding of human behavior and has served as a catalyst for important ethical discussions within the scientific community . While his work may continue to generate debate, there is no doubt that Milgram's contributions to the field of psychology have had a profound and lasting impact.

Milgram's Relationship with Other Prominent Psychologists

Stanley Milgram was a highly influential figure in the field of social psychology, and his work has been cited by a number of other prominent psychologists throughout the years. One of his contemporaries, Albert Bandura, was also interested in the power of social influence and developed the theory of social learning , which explored the ways in which people learn from one another and their environments.

Gordon Allport was another important figure in the field of social psychology, known for his work on personality and prejudice. Allport's research was highly influential in shaping Milgram's own understanding of social influence and obedience.

Milgram's infamous obedience studies demonstrated how individuals could be led to obey authority figures and commit acts that violated their own moral codes. Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment similarly showed how individuals could adopt new identities and exhibit aggressive and abusive behavior when placed in positions of power. Both studies highlight the importance of social context in shaping behavior and have had a significant impact on our understanding of the role of situational factors in human behavior.

Jerome Bruner, another influential psychologist , was known for his work on cognitive psychology and the importance of active learning in education. Although Bruner's work was not directly related to Milgram's study of obedience, his emphasis on the importance of individual autonomy and active learning aligns with some of the key themes in Milgram's work.

Roger Brown, a psychologist known for his research on language and cognitive developmen t, also shared some common ground with Milgram in terms of their interest in human behavior and social influence. Finally, Solomon Asch , another prominent psychologist, conducted important research on conformity that helped to lay the groundwork for Milgram's own study of obedience.

Milgram's work was highly influential and contributed significantly to the field of social psychology. His relationship with other prominent psychologists reflects the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of psychological research and highlights the ways in which researchers build upon one another's work over time.

Criticisms of the Milgram Experiment

Despite its significance, the Milgram experiment has been heavily criticized by some psychologists. One of the main criticisms is that the study lacked ecological validity - that is, it didn't accurately reflect real-world situations. Critics argue that participants in the study knew that they were taking part in an experiment, and that this affected their behavior.

Another criticism is that the experiment caused psychological distress to the participants. Some argue that the experimenter put too much pressure on the participants to continue administering shocks, and that this caused lasting psychological harm.

The Impact of Milgram's Research on Social Psychology

The Milgram experiment, conducted at Yale University in 1961, shocked the world with its findings on obedience to authority. Despite its groundbreaking contribution to the field of personality and social psychology, the study has also faced significant criticism for its treatment of participants.

Critics have raised concerns about the potential psychological harm inflicted on participants, who were led to believe that they were administering painful electric shocks to a real victim. Nevertheless, the Milgram experiment remains a critical turning point in the history of experiments with people.

It has had a profound impact on psychology, inspiring numerous studies that continue to shed light on obedience, conformity, and group dynamics. It has also sparked important debates about the ethics of psychological research and raised awareness of the importance of protecting the rights and well-being of research participants .

Real-Life Examples of Obedience Leading to Human Catastrophe

Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments have had profound implications for understanding human behavior, especially in contexts where obedience to authority might have contributed to catastrophic outcomes. Here are seven historical examples that resonate with Milgram's findings:

• Nazi Germany : The obedience to authority during the Holocaust, where individuals followed orders to commit atrocities, can be understood through Milgram's experiments. The willingness to administer "lethal shocks" to human subjects reflects how ordinary people can commit heinous acts under authoritative pressure.
• My Lai Massacre : American soldiers massacred hundreds of Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War. Milgram's work helps explain how soldiers obeyed orders despite the moral implications, emphasizing the power of authority in a difficult situation.
• Rwandan Genocide : The obedience to ethnic propaganda and authority figures led to the mass killings in Rwanda. Milgram's experiments shed light on how obedience can override personal judgment, leading to an unexpected outcome.
• Jonestown Massacre : Followers of Jim Jones obeyed his orders to commit mass suicide. Milgram's findings on obedience help explain how charismatic leaders can exert control over their followers, even to the point of death.
• Chernobyl Disaster : The obedience to flawed protocols and disregard for safety by the plant operators contributed to the catastrophe. Milgram's work illustrates how obedience to procedures and hierarchy can lead to disaster.
• Iraq War - Abu Ghraib Prison Abuse : The abuse of prisoners by U.S. military personnel can be linked to obedience to authority, a phenomenon explored in Milgram's experiments. The willingness to inflict harm under orders reflects the human participants' compliance in his studies.
• Financial Crisis of 2008 : Blind obedience to corporate culture and regulatory authorities contributed to unethical practices leading to the global financial meltdown. Milgram's insights into obedience help explain how organizational pressures can lead to widespread harm.

These examples demonstrate the pervasive influence of obedience in various historical and contemporary contexts. Milgram's experiments, documented in various Stanley Milgram Papers and the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , continue to be a critical reference in understanding human behavior.

The documentary film "Shocking Obedience" further explores these themes, emphasizing the universal relevance of Milgram's work. His experiments remind us of the human capacity for obedience , even in the face of morally reprehensible orders, and continue to provoke reflection on our own susceptibilities.

Key Takeaways

• The Milgram experiment was a famous and controversial study in psychology that examined people's willingness to obey authority.
• Participants in the study were instructed to administer electric shocks to a learner, even when that obedience caused harm to the learner.
• The results of the study showed that the majority of participants continued to administer shocks to the maximum level, even when they believed that the shocks were causing serious harm.
• The study has been heavily criticized for lacking ecological validity and causing psychological distress to participants.
• Despite the criticisms, the Milgram experiment has had a lasting impact on psychology and has inspired numerous other studies on obedience and authority.

In conclusion, the Milgram experiment remains an important and controversial study in the field of psychology. Its findings continue to influence our understanding of obedience to authority.

Further Reading on the Milgram Experiment

These papers offer a comprehensive view of Milgram's experiment and its implications, highlighting the profound effects of authority on human behaviour.

1. Stanley Milgram and the Obedience Experiment by C. Helm, M. Morelli (1979)

This paper delves into Milgram's experimen t, revealing the significant control the state has over individuals, as evidenced by their willingness to administer painful shocks to an innocent victim.

2. Credibility and Incredulity in Milgram’s Obedience Experiments: A Reanalysis of an Unpublished Test by G. Perry, A. Brannigan, R. Wanner, H. Stam (2019)

This study reanalyzes an unpublished test from Milgram's experiment , suggesting that participants' belief in the pain being inflicted influenced their level of obedience.

3. The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram by R. Persaud (2005)

Persaud's paper discusses the profound impact of Milgram's experiments on our understanding of human behavior , particularly the willingness of people to follow scientific authority.

4. Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? by J. Burger (2009)

Burger's study replicates Milgram's Experiment 5 , finding slightly lower obedience rates than 45 years earlier, with gender showing no significant influence on obedience.

5. Personality predicts obedience in a Milgram paradigm. by L. Bègue, J. Beauvois, D. Courbet, Dominique Oberlé, J. Lepage, Aaron A. Duke (2015)

This research explores how personality traits like conscientiousness and agreeableness, along with political orientation and social activism, can predict obedience in Milgram-like experiments.

These papers offer a comprehensive view of Milgram's experiment and its implications, highlighting the profound effects of authority on human behavior .

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• Published: 18 February 2016

Modern Milgram experiment sheds light on power of authority

• Alison Abbott  

Nature volume  530 ,  pages 394–395 ( 2016 ) Cite this article

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• Neuroscience

People obeying commands feel less responsibility for their actions.

More than 50 years after a controversial psychologist shocked the world with studies that revealed people’s willingness to harm others on order, a team of cognitive scientists has carried out an updated version of the iconic ‘Milgram experiments’.

Their findings may offer some explanation for Stanley Milgram's uncomfortable revelations: when following commands, they say, people genuinely feel less responsibility for their actions — whether they are told to do something evil or benign.

“If others can replicate this, then it is giving us a big message,” says neuroethicist Walter Sinnot-Armstrong of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the work. “It may be the beginning of an insight into why people can harm others if coerced: they don’t see it as their own action.”

The study may feed into a long-running legal debate about the balance of personal responsibility between someone acting under instruction and their instructor, says Patrick Haggard, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, who led the work, published on 18 February in Current Biology 1 .

Milgram’s original experiments were motivated by the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who famously argued that he was ‘just following orders’ when he sent Jews to their deaths. The new findings don’t legitimize harmful actions, Haggard emphasizes, but they do suggest that the ‘only obeying orders’ excuse betrays a deeper truth about how a person feels when acting under command.

Ordered to shock

In a series of experiments at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1960s, Milgram told his participants that a man was being trained to learn word pairs in a neighbouring room. The participants had to press a button to deliver an electric shock of escalating strength to the learner when he made an error; when they did so, they heard his cries of pain. In reality, the learner was an actor, and no shock was ever delivered. Milgram’s aim was to see how far people would go when they were ordered to step up the voltage.

Routinely, an alarming two-thirds of participants continued to step up shocks, even after the learner was apparently rendered unconscious. But Milgram did not assess his participants’ subjective feelings as they were coerced into doing something unpleasant. And his experiments have been criticized for the deception that they involved — not just because participants may have been traumatized, but also because some may have guessed that the pain wasn’t real.

Modern teams have conducted partial and less ethically complicated replications of Milgram’s work. But Haggard and his colleagues wanted to find out what participants were feeling. They designed a study in which volunteers knowingly inflicted real pain on each other, and were completely aware of the experiment’s aims.

Because Milgram’s experiments were so controversial, Haggard says that he took “quite a deep breath before deciding to do the study”. But he says that the question of who bears personal responsibility is so important to the rule of law that he thought it was “worth trying to do some good experiments to get to the heart of the matter.”

Sense of agency

In his experiments, the volunteers (all were female, as were the experimenters, to avoid gender effects) were given £20 (US$29). In pairs, they sat facing each other across a table, with a keyboard between them. A participant designated the ‘agent’ could press one of two keys; one did nothing. But for some pairs, the other key would transfer 5p to the agent from the other participant, designated the ‘victim’; for others, the key would also deliver a painful but bearable electric shock to the victim’s arm. (Because people have different tolerances to pain, the level of the electric shock was determined for each individual before the experiment began.) In one experiment, an experimenter stood next to the agent and told her which key to press. In another, the experimenter looked away and gave the agent a free choice about which key to press.

To examine the participants’ ‘sense of agency’ — the unconscious feeling that they were in control of their own actions — Haggard and his colleagues designed the experiment so that pressing either key caused a tone to sound after a few hundred milliseconds, and both volunteers were asked to judge the length of this interval. Psychologists have established that people perceive the interval between an action and its outcome as shorter when they carry out an intentional action of their own free will, such as moving their arm, than when the action is passive, such as having their arm moved by someone else.

When they were ordered to press a key, the participants seemed to judge their action as more passive than when they had free choice — they perceived the time to the tone as longer.

In a separate experiment, volunteers followed similar protocols while electrodes on their heads recorded their neural activity through EEG (electroencephalography). When ordered to press a key, their EEG recordings were quieter — suggesting, says Haggard, that their brains were not processing the outcome of their action. Some participants later reported feeling reduced responsibility for their action.

Unexpectedly, giving the order to press the key was enough to cause the effects, even when the keystroke led to no physical or financial harm. “It seems like your sense of responsibility is reduced whenever someone orders you to do something — whatever it is they are telling you to do,” says Haggard.

The study might inform legal debate, but it also has wider relevance to other domains of society, says Sinnot-Armstrong. For example, companies that want to create — or avoid — a feeling of personal responsibility among their employees could take its lessons on board.

Caspar, E. A., Christensen, J. F., Cleeremans, A. & Haggard, P. Curr. Biol. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.12.067 (2016).

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How Would People Behave in Milgram’s Experiment Today?

Photo from the Milgram Experiment.

More than fifty years ago, then Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the famous—or infamous—experiments on destructive obedience that have come to be known as “Milgram’s shocking experiments” (pun usually intended). Milgram began his experiments in July 1961, the same month that the trial of Adolf Eichmann—the German bureaucrat responsible for transporting Jews to the extermination camps during the Holocaust—concluded in Jerusalem. The trial was made famous by the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s reports, later published in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem . Arendt claimed that Eichmann was a colorless bureaucrat who blandly followed orders without much thought for the consequences, and whose obedient behavior demonstrated the “banality of evil.”

Milgram himself was Jewish, and his original question was whether nations other than Germany would differ in their degrees of conformity to authority. He assumed that the citizens of America, home of rugged individualism and apple pie, would display much lower levels of conformity when commanded by authorities to engage in behavior that might harm others. His Yale experiments were designed to set a national baseline.

Half of a century after Milgram probed the nature of destructive obedience to authority, we are faced with the unsettling question: What would citizens do today?

The Original Experiment

In Milgram’s original experiment, participants took part in what they thought was a “learning task.” This task was designed to investigate how punishment—in this case in the form of electric shocks—affected learning. Volunteers thought they were participating in pairs, but their partner was in fact a confederate of the experimenter. A draw to determine who would be the “teacher” and who would be the “learner” was rigged; the true volunteer always ended up as the teacher and the confederate as learner.

The pairs were moved into separate rooms, connected by a microphone. The teacher read aloud a series of word pairs, such as “red–hammer,” which the learner was instructed to memorize. The teacher then read the target word (red), and the learner was to select the original paired word from four alternatives (ocean, fan, hammer, glue).

Did Milgram’s experiment demonstrate that humans have a universal propensity to destructive obedience or that they are merely products of their cultural moment?

If the learner erred, the teacher was instructed to deliver an electric shock as punishment, increasing the shock by 15-volt increments with each successive error. Although the teacher could not see the learner in the adjacent room, he could hear his responses to the shocks as well as to the questions. According to a prearranged script, at 75 volts, the learner started to scream; from 150 volts to 330 volts, he protested with increasing intensity, complaining that his heart was bothering him; at 330 volts, he absolutely refused to go on. After that the teacher’s questions were met by silence. Whenever the teacher hesitated, the experimenter pressed the teacher to continue, insisting that the “the experiment requires that you continue” and reminding him that “although the shocks may be painful, they cause no permanent tissue damage.”

Milgram was horrified by the results of the experiment . In the “remote condition” version of the experiment described above, 65 percent of the subjects (26 out of 40) continued to inflict shocks right up to the 450-volt level, despite the learner’s screams, protests, and, at the 330-volt level, disturbing silence. Moreover, once participants had reached 450 volts, they obeyed the experimenter’s instruction to deliver 450-volt shocks when the subject continued to fail to respond.

Putting Milgram’s Work in Context

Milgram’s experiment became the subject of a host of moral and methodological critiques in the 1960s. These became somewhat moot with the publication of the American Psychological Association’s ethical principles of research with human subjects in 1973 and the restrictions on the use of human subjects included in the National Research Act of 1974, which effectively precluded psychologists from conducting experiments that, like Milgram’s, were likely to cause serious distress to subjects. This was undoubtedly a good thing for experimental subjects, but it also blocked attempts to answer a question that many were asking: Did Milgram’s experiment demonstrate that humans have a universal propensity to destructive obedience or that they are merely products of their cultural moment?

Cross-cultural studies at the time provided a partial answer. The U.S. mean obedience rate of 60.94 percent was not significantly different from the foreign mean obedience rate of 65.94 percent, although there was wide variation in the results (rates ranged from 31 to 91 percent in the U.S. and from 28 to 87.5 percent in foreign studies) and design of the studies. However, a historical question remained: Would subjects today still display the same levels of destructive obedience as the subjects of fifty years ago?

There are grounds to believe they would not. In the 1950s, psychologists and the general public were shocked by the results of Solomon Asch’s experiments on conformity . In a series of line-judgement studies, subjects were asked to decide which of three comparison lines matched a target line. Crucially, these judgements were made in a social context, among other participants. Only one of the subjects in the experiment was a naive subject, while the other six were confederates of the experimenter instructed to give incorrect answers. When they gave answers that were incorrect, and seemed plainly incorrect to the naive subjects, about one-third of the naive subjects gave answers that conformed with the majority. In other words, people were happy to ignore the evidence before their eyes in order to conform to the group consensus.

For some observers, these results threatened America’s image as the land of individualism and autonomy. Yet in the 1980s, replications of Asch’s experiment failed to detect even minimal levels of conformity, suggesting that Asch’s results were a child of 1950s, the age of “other-directed” people made famous by David Reisman in his 1950 work The Lonely Crowd . Might the same failure to replicate be true today if people faced Milgram’s experiment anew?

Understanding Milgram’s Work Today

Although full replications of Milgram’s experiment are precluded in the United States because of ethical and legal constraints on experimenters, there have been replications attempted in other countries, and attempts by U.S. experimenters to sidestep these constraints.

A replication conducted by Dariusz Dolinski and colleagues in 2015 generated levels of obedience higher than the original Milgram experiment , although the study may be criticized because it employed lower levels of shock.

More intriguing was the 2009 replication by Jerry Burger, who found an ingenious way of navigating the ethical concerns about Milgram’s original experiment . Burger noted that in the original experiment 79 percent of subjects who continued after the 150 volts—after the learner’s first screams—continued all the way to the end of the scale, at 450 volts. Assuming that the same would be true of subjects today, Burger determined how many were willing to deliver shocks beyond the 150-volt level, at which point the experiment was discontinued.

Given social support, most subjects refused to continue to administer shocks, suggesting that social solidarity serves as a kind of a defense against destructive obedience to authority.

About 70 percent were willing to continue the experiment at this point, suggesting that subjects remain just as compliant in the 21st century. Nonetheless, Burger’s study was based upon a questionable assumption, namely that 150-volt compliance has remained a reliable predictor of 450-volt compliance. Subjects today might be willing to go a bit beyond 150 volts, but perhaps not to the far end of the scale (after learners demand that the experiment be discontinued etc.). In fact, this assumption begs the critical question at issue.

However, French television came to the rescue. One game show replicated Milgram’s experiment , with the game show host as the authority and the “questioner” as the subject. In a study reported in the 2012 European Review of Applied Psychology , J.-L. Beauvois and colleagues replicated Milgram’s voice feedback condition , with identical props, instructions, and scripted learner responses and host prods. One might question whether a game show host has as much authority as a scientific experimenter, but whatever authority they had managed to elicit levels of obedience equivalent to Milgram’s original experiment (in fact somewhat higher, 81 percent as opposed to the original 65 percent). It would seem that at least French nationals are as compliant today as Milgram’s original subjects in the 1960s.

In fact, the replication suggests a darker picture. One of the optimistic findings of the original Milgram experiment was his condition 7, in which there were three teachers, two of whom (both confederates of the experimenter) defied the experimenter. Given this social support, most subjects refused to continue to administer shocks, suggesting that social solidarity serves as a kind of a defense against destructive obedience to authority. Unfortunately, this did not occur in the French replication, in which the production assistant protested about the immorality of the procedure with virtually no effect on levels of obedience. And unfortunately, not in the Burger study either: Burger found that the intervention of an accomplice who refused to continue had no effect on the levels of obedience. So it may be that we are in fact more compliant today than Milgram’s original subjects, unmoved by social support. A dark thought for our dark times.

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November 1, 2012

What Milgram’s Shock Experiments Really Mean

Replicating Milgram's shock experiments reveals not blind obedience but deep moral conflict

By Michael Shermer

In 2010 I worked on a Dateline NBC television special replicating classic psychology experiments, one of which was Stanley Milgram's famous shock experiments from the 1960s. We followed Milgram's protocols precisely: subjects read a list of paired words to a “learner” (an actor named Tyler), then presented the first word of each pair again. Each time Tyler gave an incorrect matched word, our subjects were instructed by an authority figure (an actor named Jeremy) to deliver an electric shock from a box with toggle switches that ranged in 15-volt increments up to 450 volts (no shocks were actually delivered). In Milgram's original experiments, 65 percent of subjects went all the way to the end. We had only two days to film this segment of the show (you can see all our experiments at http://tinyurl.com/3yg2v29 ), so there was time for just six subjects, who thought they were auditioning for a new reality show called What a Pain!

Contrary to Milgram's conclusion that people blindly obey authorities to the point of committing evil deeds because we are so susceptible to environmental conditions, I saw in our subjects a great behavioral reluctance and moral disquietude every step of the way. Our first subject, Emily, quit the moment she was told the protocol. “This isn't really my thing,” she said with a nervous laugh. When our second subject, Julie, got to 75 volts and heard Tyler groan, she protested: “I don't think I want to keep doing this.” Jeremy insisted: “You really have no other choice. I need you to continue until the end of the test.” Despite our actor's stone-cold authoritative commands, Julie held her moral ground: “No. I'm sorry. I can just see where this is going, and I just—I don't—I think I'm good. I think I'm good to go.” When the show's host Chris Hansen asked what was going through her mind, Julie offered this moral insight on the resistance to authority: “I didn't want to hurt Tyler. And then I just wanted to get out. And I'm mad that I let it even go five [wrong answers]. I'm sorry, Tyler.”

Our third subject, Lateefah, became visibly upset at 120 volts and squirmed uncomfortably to 180 volts. When Tyler screamed, “Ah! Ah! Get me out of here! I refuse to go on! Let me out!” Lateefah made this moral plea to Jeremy: “I know I'm not the one feeling the pain, but I hear him screaming and asking to get out, and it's almost like my instinct and gut is like, ‘Stop,’ because you're hurting somebody and you don't even know why you're hurting them outside of the fact that it's for a TV show.” Jeremy icily commanded her to “please continue.” As she moved into the 300-volt range, Lateefah was noticeably shaken, so Hansen stepped in to stop the experiment, asking, “What was it about Jeremy that convinced you that you should keep going here?” Lateefah gave us this glance into the psychology of obedience: “I didn't know what was going to happen to me if I stopped. He just—he had no emotion. I was afraid of him.”

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Our fourth subject, a man named Aranit, unflinchingly cruised through the first set of toggle switches, pausing at 180 volts to apologize to Tyler—“I'm going to hurt you, and I'm really sorry”—then later cajoling him, “Come on. You can do this…. We are almost through.” After completing the experiment, Hansen asked him: “Did it bother you to shock him?” Aranit admitted, “Oh, yeah, it did. Actually it did. And especially when he wasn't answering anymore.” When asked what was going through his mind, Aranit turned to our authority, explicating the psychological principle of diffusion of responsibility: “I had Jeremy here telling me to keep going. I was like, ‘Well, should be everything's all right….’ So let's say that I left all the responsibilities up to him and not to me.”

Human moral nature includes a propensity to be empathetic, kind and good to our fellow kin and group members, plus an inclination to be xenophobic, cruel and evil to tribal others. The shock experiments reveal not blind obedience but conflicting moral tendencies that lie deep within.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE Comment on this article at ScientificAmerican.com/nov2012

The Secrets Behind Psychology’s Most Famous Experiment

What you didn't know about the milgram experiments..

Posted January 22, 2013 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

If you were asked to name the most famous psychology investigation ever to be conducted, the chances are good that you’d come up with the “obedience to authority” experiment as your answer. From this study, you learned that ordinary people are capable of inflicting pain on their fellow humans if someone gives them orders to do so. Yet, in this fascinating new book, Behind the Shock Machine , we learn that the study, if not the conclusion, is highly flawed.

Even if you never took introductory psychology or even high school psychology, you must certainly have heard at some point in your life about this well-known investigation. A Yale psychologist brought ordinary citizens into his lab and instructed them to act as teachers, administering what they believed to be painful electric shocks when the “learner” failed at a simple memory task. In reality, of course, the situation was all a setup. The electric shock machine was a fake, the learner was hired by the experimenter to pretend to make the punishment -deserving mistakes, and the person acting as the experimenter was an actor hired by the psychologist. The psychologist, Stanley Milgram, was motivated by his reading of actions of Nazi concentration camp guards to find out if the tendency to obey authority (“I was only following orders”) was a general human trait or some specific feature of the German psyche.

Psychology students have, for the past 40 years or so, memorized the statistic that 65% of all participants in the Milgram experiments not only administered what they thought was an electric shock but went “all the way,” letting loose the maximum and potentially lethal dose in the face of the learner’s repeated mistakes. They’ve also learned that, as a result of much public outcry following the study’s publication, the American Psychological Association has enacted a set of stringent ethical guidelines that require research participants to be informed of a study’s purposes ahead of time, to be allowed to withdraw without penalty during the experiment if they don’t want to continue, and to receive a complete debriefing after the study ends explaining exactly what was done, and why.

Even though the Milgram study seemed to provide compelling evidence for the human tendency to exert cruel punishment while under orders, there were occasional reports questioning the validity of its findings. Many of these concerns were addressed by a replication study conducted by Santa Clara University psychologist Jerry Burger .

This study, the subject of a 2007 ABC 20-20 documentary, and published in 2009 in the prestigious journal American Psychologist, supported the finding that the majority of participants were willing to punish the learner by administering what they thought was a painful electric shock. However, the Burger replication differed from Milgram’s study in the important way that the maximum level of shock that “teachers” could administer was 150 volts, or 1/3 the amount used as the cutoff in the original studies.

For many in the psychological community, the Burger replication seemed to put to rest questions about whether the Milgram findings described something fundamental to the human psyche. We were safe again to teach our students and write our own scientific papers, confident that the general tendency to conform is something real in our social attitudes and behavior. The publication by Australian author and journalist Gina Perry of Behind the Shock Machine (2012) shatters that conclusion.

This 395-page book with its 21 pages of references documents in extensive detail the author’s journey to understand the purpose, findings, and interpretations of all 24 conditions of what we now know as “the” Milgram experiment. Perry spent months tracking down former participants, Milgram students, and relatives of the men who served as the experimenter and learners. In addition, she pored through volumes of archives, papers, and notes that up until now have received very little public (if not professional) attention. Perry provides enough of her personal observations to give the reader a sense of who she is and how the experience of writing the book affected her. However, her focus remains unswervingly on the science behind the study and the man behind the science. It’s a complex mixture of compelling drama, unexpected revelations, and just plain old good storytelling.

I’ve been reading this book over the past few months, thanks to Ms. Perry’s kindly sending me a copy for my review. At the time, the book was not available in the U.S., but luckily it now is . While reading it, I wondered how I could ever do it justice. I’ve decided to focus on these four themes:

1. Findings Not Generally Known

As I stated earlier, nearly everyone who teaches and/or learns about the Milgram experiments comes away with the figure “65%.” This was the percentage of teachers who, in one of the study’s conditions, administered the maximum amount of shock possible. It’s fairly well known, though, that many participants refused to go to that level, particularly in the conditions when the study participants felt less pressured to conform. For example, if the learner and the teacher were in the same room, fewer teachers moved up the shock scale to its maximum voltage. What is less well broadcasted is the fact that many participants sensed that the learner wasn’t really receiving any shock. The psychological term for this is “participant expectations.”

All human participants go into psychology experiments with a certain amount of skepticism about what the experimenter is up to, so as a result, their behavior doesn’t reflect what they would actually do in the real world. Many of Milgram’s participants believed it to be impossible that the prestigious Yale University experimenter would allow real harm to be inflicted on an experimental subject. Although Milgram claimed that 75% of his participants thought they were administering painful shocks, Perry’s re-analysis of the data showed that “It’s more truthful to say that only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real, and of those, two-thirds disobeyed the experimenter” (p. 163). Furthermore, she argues that many of those who did administer the maximum amount of shock did so because they were confident the shock wasn’t real or that the experiment was an elaborate ruse.

Perry spoke to one of Milgram’s former research assistants whose own unpublished analysis led him to conclude that “in 18 of 23 conditions, those who wrote that they fully believed the learner was receiving painful shocks gave lower levels of shock than those who said they thought the learner was faking it” (p. 164).

2. Ethical Issues

Soon after completing his experiments, Milgram was investigated by the American Psychological Association for ethical violations in the treatment of his participants, primarily due to the lack of proper attention given to the phase of the experiment called “debriefing.” At the time, Milgram argued that he had “de-hoaxed” his participants, meaning that he had told them that the experiment had all been a “hoax.” However, as Perry reveals, Milgram didn’t completely reveal the purpose of the study to his participants nor did he comfort their ethical qualms about having supposedly inflicted pain on a fellow human. Not only that, but the authority figure in the room, the actor hired to portray the experimenter, didn’t offer his participants an opportunity to opt-out of the study. This is now a mandatory requirement of all human research.

If participants want to discontinue their involvement in the study, they must be allowed to do so without any penalty or question. Yet, for Milgram, participants were told that they had no choice but to continue. The transcripts that Perry examined showed numerous dialogues in which the experimenter pushed the participant well beyond the point that the participant was ready to walk out, even without receiving compensation. As stated by one participant: “The experiment is not going to require me to go on. You take the money back.” The experimenter told this participant that “You have no other choice but to continue” (p. 196).

The most chilling revelation of the book to me was what happened in “Condition 24.” This was the one that most people don’t know about when the teacher and learner were either related to each other, neighbors, or friends. Of all the conditions, this one produced the least amount of obedience. However, those who went even partway left with grave doubts about themselves and their personal ethics . Milgram stopped short of devising a condition in which wives and husbands would be asked to shock each other. However, he kept Condition 24 a secret. Perry’s theory was that “Milgram might have kept it secret because he realized that what he’d asked subjects to do in condition 24 would be difficult to defend.” In addition, the data contradicted the results he hoped to demonstrate in the study as a whole: “When people believed someone was being hurt—and it was someone close to them—they refused to continue” (p. 202). To include their data would have lowered the estimated 65% obedience even further than was already apparent in many of the study’s variations, further challenging the study's validity.

3. Lack of Theory

As disturbing as Milgram’s experiments were in terms of ethics, you might believe that they could be justified on the basis of the underlying theory; namely, the value of showing that people would obey an authority figure, particularly if that authority figure wielded “authority” in the lab. However, according to Perry, Milgram embarked on the study without making specific predictions ahead of time.

In the chapter “In Search of a Theory,” Perry tells us that Milgram submitted his results to scientific journals only to be met by the criticism that he had “no clear theory… and therefore the psychological processes leading up to the obedient act remain a mystery” (p. 244). If he was going to get the study published, he needed to come up with a theory. According to Perry, Milgram found his inspiration in such sources as the instructions he read while on an airplane in which passengers are told how to respond to an emergency, the words of Adolf Eichmann while he was on trial for his actions during the Holocaust, and a book that he had seen in a bookstore called “How to Train Your Dog to Obey.” Although the article eventually was accepted for publication, Milgram continued to experience problems receiving funding due to the theory deficit: “Without a theory, and without an explanation of why people behaved as they did, the research seemed to shed little light on obedience to authority” (p. 247).

4. Milgram the Man

Perry’s overall portrayal of Milgram suggests that this was an individual driven by the pettiest of petty concerns that often plague academics. He became enraged when his colleagues and his participants didn’t understand or appreciate what he was trying to do. The product of a tradition in social psychology that set up elaborate unnatural scenarios in which to observe human behavior, Milgram sought to out-do his mentors and colleagues and make a permanent name for himself by concocting an experiment that would go further than all the others that preceded it. He is described as vengeful and elitist, critical of his female and working-class participants.

When Milgram's work was challenged in print by psychologist Diana Baumrind, he eventually disregarded her comments as a “tempest in a teapot,” despite the fact that the objections she raised were seminal in leading to a revised code of ethics by the American Psychological Association. Similarly, he became infuriated by a playwright who, some years after the study was published, painted a less than complimentary portrait of him. Despite all this, Milgram seemed fixated on gaining as much publicity as possible from this research, keeping press reports from his articles at bay until he was able to publish his book.

Social psychology experiments are often based on a premise of deception , including sometimes elaborate schemes to see how participants react to unusual conditions, including the pressure to conform. Philip Zimbardo, the man behind the Stanford Prison experiment , created a scenario perhaps even more extreme and disturbing than Milgram’s, pitting college students against each other as fake prisoners and guards. Unlike Milgram, however, Zimbardo realized it was time to call the whole thing off, and his experiment was discontinued when the behavior of his participants got out of hand.

It was also surprising to me to learn that Milgram was denied tenure at Harvard University because we so often associate him with his work at Yale. In fact, he spent the final years of his career at the City University of New York. According to one of his former students, Fordham University psychologist Harold Takooshian , while at CUNY, Milgram engaged in teaching methods that pushed the envelope in ways similar to his research. For example, Takooshian reports that at the end of the semester, Milgram asked the students in his graduate seminar to grade each other’s performance, and then to turn in their grades. Much to their chagrin, Milgram then read out the grades that the students each gave each other. Imagine how this experience affected the students as individuals, not to mention as a cohort of classmates. Takooshian also reports that Milgram would occasionally burst out into song or spontaneously invent other types of in-class experiments that left the students in a state of bewilderment about their professor: “The only predictable thing about Milgram was his unpredictability” (p. 278).

Perry began her journey to understand the Milgram experiments because, like many psychology students, she was fascinated with the findings and what they implied about human nature. By the end, she realized how important it was to “question the stories we’ve been told” (p. 12).

While reading the book, I felt that I was taking my own journey of psychological discovery. Each page contained a new revelation that led me to question what I thought I knew not only about Milgram, but the field of social psychology in general. You don’t have to be a psych history buff to enjoy this book, but even if you casually follow psych news, you’ll almost certainly question the stories you’ve been told as well.

Perry’s in-depth analysis makes us think about we are so fascinated with this study, so many years after its completion. Television documentaries, works of fiction, and reality shows based on the premise of the Milgram experiments continue to draw millions of viewers. However, once we start to separate the fiction from the reality perhaps, like Perry, we will be able to trade our “admiration of Milgram for a better view of people” (p. 388).

Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. 201

Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist, 64, 1-11.

Perry, G. (2012). Behind the shock machine. Melbourne, Australia: Scribe.

Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. , is a Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her latest book is The Search for Fulfillment.

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Author Interviews

Taking a closer look at milgram's shocking obedience study.

Behind the Shock Machine

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In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale, conducted a series of experiments that became famous. Unsuspecting Americans were recruited for what purportedly was an experiment in learning. A man who pretended to be a recruit himself was wired up to a phony machine that supposedly administered shocks. He was the "learner." In some versions of the experiment he was in an adjoining room.

The unsuspecting subject of the experiment, the "teacher," read lists of words that tested the learner's memory. Each time the learner got one wrong, which he intentionally did, the teacher was instructed by a man in a white lab coat to deliver a shock. With each wrong answer the voltage went up. From the other room came recorded and convincing protests from the learner — even though no shock was actually being administered.

The results of Milgram's experiment made news and contributed a dismaying piece of wisdom to the public at large: It was reported that almost two-thirds of the subjects were capable of delivering painful, possibly lethal shocks, if told to do so. We are as obedient as Nazi functionaries.

Or are we? Gina Perry, a psychologist from Australia, has written Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments . She has been retracing Milgram's steps, interviewing his subjects decades later.

"The thought of quitting never ... occurred to me," study participant Bill Menold told Perry in an Australian radio documentary . "Just to say: 'You know what? I'm walking out of here' — which I could have done. It was like being in a situation that you never thought you would be in, not really being able to think clearly."

In his experiments, Milgram was "looking to investigate what it was that had contributed to the brainwashing of American prisoners of war by the Chinese [in the Korean war]," Perry tells NPR's Robert Siegel.

Interview Highlights

On turning from an admirer of Milgram to a critic

"That was an unexpected outcome for me, really. I regarded Stanley Milgram as a misunderstood genius who'd been penalized in some ways for revealing something troubling and profound about human nature. By the end of my research I actually had quite a very different view of the man and the research."

Watch A Video Of One Of The Milgram Obedience Experiments

On the many variations of the experiment

"Over 700 people took part in the experiments. When the news of the experiment was first reported, and the shocking statistic that 65 percent of people went to maximum voltage on the shock machine was reported, very few people, I think, realized then and even realize today that that statistic applied to 26 of 40 people. Of those other 700-odd people, obedience rates varied enormously. In fact, there were variations of the experiment where no one obeyed."

On how Milgram's study coincided with the trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann — and how the experiment reinforced what Hannah Arendt described as "the banality of evil"

"The Eichmann trial was a televised trial and it did reintroduce the whole idea of the Holocaust to a new American public. And Milgram very much, I think, believed that Hannah Arendt's view of Eichmann as a cog in a bureaucratic machine was something that was just as applicable to Americans in New Haven as it was to people in Germany."

On the ethics of working with human subjects

"Certainly for people in academia and scholars the ethical issues involved in Milgram's experiment have always been a hot issue. They were from the very beginning. And Milgram's experiment really ignited a debate particularly in social sciences about what was acceptable to put human subjects through."

Gina Perry is an Australian psychologist. She has previously written for The Age and The Australian. Chris Beck/Courtesy of The New Press hide caption

Gina Perry is an Australian psychologist. She has previously written for The Age and The Australian.

On conversations with the subjects, decades after the experiment

"[Bill Menold] doesn't sound resentful. I'd say he sounds thoughtful and he has reflected a lot on the experiment and the impact that it's had on him and what it meant at the time. I did interview someone else who had been disobedient in the experiment but still very much resented 50 years later that he'd never been de-hoaxed at the time and he found that really unacceptable."

On the problem that one of social psychology's most famous findings cannot be replicated

"I think it leaves social psychology in a difficult situation. ... it is such an iconic experiment. And I think it really leads to the question of why it is that we continue to refer to and believe in Milgram's results. I think the reason that Milgram's experiment is still so famous today is because in a way it's like a powerful parable. It's so widely known and so often quoted that it's taken on a life of its own. ... This experiment and this story about ourselves plays some role for us 50 years later."

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How stanley milgram 'shocked the world', research news, scientists debate 'six degrees of separation'.

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Decades Later, Still Asking: Would I Pull That Switch?

By Benedict Carey

• July 1, 2008

Some of psychology’s most famous experiments are those that expose the skull beneath the skin, the apparent cowardice or depravity pooling in almost every heart.

The findings force a question. Would I really do that? Could I betray my own eyes, my judgment, even my humanity, just to complete some experiment?

The answer, if it’s an honest one, often gives rise to observations about the cruelties of the day, whether suicide bombing, torture or gang atrocities. And so a psych experiment — a mock exercise, testing individual behavior — can become something else, a changing prism through which people view the larger culture, for better and for worse.

Consider the psychologist Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies of the early 1960s that together form one of the darkest mirrors the field has held up to the human face. In a series of about 20 experiments, hundreds of decent, well-intentioned people agreed to deliver what appeared to be increasingly painful electric shocks to another person, as part of what they thought was a learning experiment. The “learner” was in fact an actor, usually seated out of sight in an adjacent room, pretending to be zapped.

Researchers, social commentators and armchair psychologists have pored through Milgram’s data ever since, claiming psychological and cultural insights. Now, decades after the original work (Milgram died in 1984, at 51), two new papers illustrate the continuing power of the shock experiments — and the diverse interpretations they still inspire.

In one, a statistical analysis to appear in the July issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, a postdoctoral student at Ohio State University verifies a crucial turning point in Milgram’s experiments, the voltage level at which participants were most likely to disobey the experimenter and quit delivering shocks.

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New Study Replicates Stanley Milgram’s Infamous Shock Experiments

In the early 1960s, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram recruited hundreds of men for a series of experiments on obedience and authority. He asked them to administer a series of increasingly powerful shocks to a person in another room. The man being “shocked” was, in reality, an actor hired by the lab, and the screams of pain the participants could hear from the other room were pre-recorded. Perversely, plenty of the participants obeyed the experimenters’ prompts to hurt strangers.

Half a century later, the Milgram experiments are, though controversial , a bastion of the psychology canon, and a number of modern researchers have set out to replicate his findings. In the latest iteration, a group of Polish researchers found that 90 percent of participants were willing to administer the highest voltage shocks available to another person when asked to—a similarly high number as in Milgram’s original experiments.

In a study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science , researchers from the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Wrocław, Poland recruited 40 men and 40 women to participate in a re-make of Milgram’s study. However, in this case, both those administering the shocks and those “receiving” the shocks were a mix of men and women, while in Milgram’s experiments both the participants and the actors were men.

Like Milgram’s subjects, they were told they were participating in a study on memory and learning and that they would be playing the part of the teacher, while the other person in the lab (an actor) would be the student. The “student” was supposed to learn associations between certain syllables, and the "teacher" was instructed to read a set of those syllables aloud. The teacher was given 10 buttons that they were told would administer shocks of increasing intensity. When the student made a mistake, the experimenter instructed the participant to shock him or her. The student was hidden behind a wall, but the participants could hear pre-recorded screams of pain.

The participants were initially told they could stop the experiment at any time and that stopping would not require them to give back the $15 they had received for their participation. But once the shocks started, the experimenters urged the participants to continue shocking the student despite any reservations they expressed. The experimenters used phrases similar to those Milgram employed, such as “The experiment requires that you continue,” “It is absolutely essential that you continue,” and “You have no other choice, you must go on.”

A full 90 percent of the participants went on to press the 10th button, administering what they thought was the highest voltage of shock.

Whether or not people were willing to continue shocking strangers may have been influenced by the gender of the stranger, the study’s authors write, though the effect was small. “When it was a woman being ‘zapped,’ participants were 3 times more likely to withdraw from the experiment (regardless of their own sex). However, the fact that only 10 percent of our participants failed to perform all of the experimenter’s commands means that this difference is far from statistically significant.”

According to the study, this is the first time Milgram’s experiments have been replicated in Central Europe, where relationships to authority may be different than in the New Haven, Connecticut community Stanley Milgram recruited from. As a Soviet state for decades, Polish freedoms were severely restricted, and both in school curriculums and in the culture at large, there was a strong emphasis on obedience to authority. Though the collapse of the Soviet Union brought democratic elections, free speech, and a free press, some of those liberal ideals have seen a reversal in recent years as the hard-right Law and Justice party has gained power.

This study was relatively small, and larger studies might be able to confirm whether the gender of the person being shocked might influence people’s willingness to go along with the experiment. The high percentage of people who followed instructions, though, suggests that Milgram’s dim view of human nature wasn’t wrong. People really can be bullied into hurting other people pretty easily. Still, it would be interesting to replicate these studies with larger, more culturally diverse groups of people, examining how participants’ inherent views on authoritarianism and obedience might influence their responses.

The Milgram Shock Experiment

Would you give someone a deadly electric shock? Would you follow orders to commit a violent crime against an innocent person? Would you support an unjust cause, just because you are told to?

People rarely see themselves as violent or capable of committing violent acts. People rarely see themselves on the wrong side of history. And yet, human history is full of violence, genocides, and atrocities. You might see friends and family now, people that you believe are good people, supporting violence. How does this happen?

I’m going to tell you about an experiment in psychology that set out to explain why people commit violence against others. And then I’ll ask you these questions again. The true answers to these questions might surprise you.

History of the Milgram Shock Study

This study is most commonly known as the Milgram Shock Study or the Milgram Experiment. Its name comes from Stanley Milgram, the psychologist behind the study.

Milgram was born in the 1930s in New York City to Jewish immigrant parents. As he grew up, he witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust from thousands of miles away. How could people commit such atrocities? How could people see the horror in front of them and continue to participate in it?

These questions followed him as he became a psychologist at Yale University. In 1961, he decided to set up a study that might show how people follow orders from authority, even if it goes against their morals.

How Did the Study Work?

Over the course of two years, Milgram recruited men to participate in a study. Milgram created a few variations of the study, but in general, they involved the participant, a “learner,” and an experimenter. The participant acted as a “teacher,” reading out words to the learner. The learner would have to repeat the words back to the participant. If the learner got it wrong, the teacher had to deliver an electric shock.

These shocks increased in voltage. At first, the shocks were around 15 volts - just a mild sensation. But the shocks reached up to 450 volts, which is extremely dangerous. (Of course, these shocks weren’t real. The learner was an actor who played along with the study.)

The experimenter encouraged the participants to administer the shocks whenever the learner was incorrect. As the voltages increased, some participants resisted. In some variations of the study, the experimenter would urge the participants to administer the shocks. This happened in stages. Some participants were told to please continue, and eventually told that they had no choice but to continue.

In some variations of the study, the participant would beg the participant not to administer the shocks, complaining of a heart problem. The participant would even fake death once the highest voltages were reached.

Conclusions

You might be surprised to hear that this study even took place - there are obviously some ethical concerns behind asking participants to deliver dangerous electric shocks. The trauma of that study could impact participants, some of whom did not learn the truth about the study for months after it was over.

But you also might be surprised to hear that a lot of the participants did administer the most dangerous shocks.

After the experiment was complete, Milgram asked a group of his students how many participants they thought would deliver the highest shock. The students predicted 3%. But in the most well-known variation of the study, a shocking 65% of participants reached the highest level of shocks. All of the participants reached the 300-volt level.

Legacy of the Study

The Milgram Shock Study took place over 50 years ago, and it is still considered one of the most controversial and infamous studies in modern history. The study even inspired made-for-TV movies!

But not everyone praises Milgram for his boldness.

Critiques of the Study

The results of this study aren’t particularly optimistic, and there have been critiques from psychologists over the years. After all, Milgram’s selection of participants wasn’t perfect. All of the participants were male, a group that only represents 50% of the population. Would the results be different if women were asked to deliver the electric shocks? Another factor to consider is that, like in the Stanford Prison Experiment, all of the participants answered a newspaper ad to participate in the study for money. Would the results be different if the participants were not the type to volunteer for an unknown study?

Other critics believe that documentation of Milgram’s experiment suggest that some participants were coerced into completing the study. Psychologist Gina Perry believes that participants were even “bullied” into completing the study.

Perry also believes that Milgram failed to tell participants the truth about the study. Rather than telling participants that the learner was an actor and shocks were never delivered, experimenters simply allowed participants to calm down after the study and sent them home. Many were never told the truth. That’s not very ethical, especially when their participation could have meant injuring another person.

Replications

With most studies from 50 years ago, psychologists have attempted to retest Milgram’s theories. It’s been hard to replicate the study because of its controversial methods. But similar studies that have slightly tweaked Milgram’s methods have yielded similar results. Other replications take Milgram’s findings a step further. People are more obedient than they might seem.

Does this mean that we’re all bad people, just hiding under a mirage of sound judgement? Not exactly. Five years after the publication of Milgram’s experiment, psychologist Walter Mischel published Personality and Assessment. It suggested that trait theorists were looking at personality theory all wrong. Mischel suggested that different situations could drive different behaviors. Thus, situationism was born. Studies like Milgram’s experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment are still considered supporting evidence of situationism.

So let me ask the questions that I asked at the beginning of this video. Would you give someone a deadly electric shock? Would you follow orders to commit a violent crime against an innocent person? Would you support an unjust cause, just because you are told to? Would it just depend on the situation?

Related posts:

• Stanley Milgram (Psychologist Biography)
• The Psychology of Long Distance Relationships
• The Monster Study (Summary, Results, and Ethical Issues)
• Beck’s Depression Inventory (BDI Test)
• Operant Conditioning (Examples + Research)

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(CNN) -- If someone told you to press a button to deliver a 450-volt electrical shock to an innocent person in the next room, would you do it?

Stanley Milgram began conducting his famous psychology experiments in 1961.

Common sense may say no, but decades of research suggests otherwise.

In the early 1960s, a young psychologist at Yale began what became one of the most widely recognized experiments in his field. In the first series, he found that about two-thirds of subjects were willing to inflict what they believed were increasingly painful shocks on an innocent person when the experimenter told them to do so, even when the victim screamed and pleaded.

The legacy of Stanley Milgram, who died 24 years ago on December 20, reaches far beyond that initial round of experiments. Researchers have been working on the questions he posed for decades, and have not settled on a brighter vision of human obedience.

A new study to be published in the January issue of American Psychologist confirmed these results in an experiment that mimics many of Milgram's original conditions. This and other studies have corroborated the startling conclusion that the majority of people, when placed in certain kinds of situations, will follow orders, even if those orders entail harming another person.

"It's situations that make ordinary people into evil monsters, and it's situations that make ordinary people into heroes," said Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University and author of "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil."

How Milgram's experiments worked

Milgram, who also came up with the theory behind "six degrees of separation" -- the idea that everyone is connected to everyone else through a small number of acquaintances -- set out to figure out why people would turn against their own neighbors in circumstances such as Nazi-occupied Europe. Referring to Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, Milgram wrote in 1974, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

His experiment in its standard form included a fake shock machine, a "teacher," a "learner" and an experimenter in a laboratory setting. The participant was told that he or she had to teach the student to memorize a pair of words, and the punishment for a wrong answer was a shock from the machine.

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The teacher sat in front of the shock machine, which had 30 levers, each corresponding to an additional 15 volts. With each mistake the student made, the teacher had to pull the next lever to deliver a more painful punishment.

While the machine didn't generate shocks and a recorded voice track simulated painful reactions, the teacher was led to believe that he or she was shocking a student, who screamed and asked to leave at higher voltages, and eventually fell silent.

If the teacher questioned continuing as instructed, the experimenter simply said, "The experiment requires that you go on," said Thomas Blass, author of the biography "The Man Who Shocked The World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram" and the Web site StanleyMilgram.com .

About 65 percent of participants pulled levers corresponding to the maximum voltage -- 450 volts -- in spite of the screams of agony from the learner.

"What the experiment shows is that the person whose authority I consider to be legitimate, that he has a right to tell me what to do and therefore I have obligation to follow his orders, that person could make me, make most people, act contrary to their conscience," Blass said.

His study's design imitated Milgram's, even using the same scripts for the experimenter and suffering learner, but the key difference was that this experiment stopped at 150 volts -- when the learner starts asking to leave. In Milgram's experiment, 79 percent of participants who got to that point went all the way to the maximum shock, he said.

To eliminate bias from the fame of Milgram's experiment, Burger ruled out anyone who had taken two or more college-level psychology classes, and anyone who expressed familiarity with it in the debriefing. The "teachers" in this recent experiment, conducted in 2006, also received several reminders that they could quit whenever they wanted, unlike in Milgram's study.

The new results correlate well with Milgram's: 70 percent of the 40 participants were willing to continue after 150 volts, compared with 82.5 percent in Milgram's study -- a difference that is not statistically significant, Burger said.

Still, some psychologists quoted in the same issue of American Psychologist questioned how comparable this study is to Milgram's, given the differences in methods.

The idea of blind obedience isn't as important in these studies as the larger message about the power of the situation, Burger said. It's also significant that the participant begins with small voltages that increase in small doses over time.

"It's that gradual incremental nature that, as we know, is a very powerful way to change attitudes and behaviors," he said.

Stanford Prison Experiment

This idea of circumstances driving immoral behavior also came out in the Stanford Prison Experiment, a study done in 1971 that is the subject of a film in preproduction, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Work on the film will resume in 2009 after McQuarrie's "Valkyrie" is released, his spokesperson said.

In this study, designed by Stanford's Zimbardo, two dozen male college students were randomly designated as either prison guards or prisoners, and lived in the basement of the university's psychology building playing these roles in their respective uniforms.

Within three days, participants had extreme stress reactions, Zimbardo said. The guards became abusive to the prisoners -- sexually taunting them, asking them to strip naked and demanding that they clean toilet bowls with their bare hands, Zimbardo said. Five prisoners had to be released before the study was over.

Zimbardo's own role illustrated his point: Because he took on the role of prison administrator, he became so engrossed in the jail system that he didn't stop the experiment as soon as this cruelty began, he said.

"If I were simply the principal experimenter, I would have ended it after the second kid broke down," he said. "We all did bad things in this study, including me, but it's diagnostic of the power situation."

Turning the principle around

But while ordinary people have the potential to do evil, they also have the power to do good. That's the subject of the Everyday Heroism project, a collection of social scientists, including Zimbardo, seeking to understand heroic activity -- an area in which almost no research has been done, he said.

Acts such as learning first aid, leading others to the exit in an emergency and encouraging family members to recycle are some heroic behaviors that Zimbardo seeks to encourage.

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Infamous 1960s Study Repeated: How Far Would You Go to Obey Authority?

In an infamous series of experiments first conducted in the 1960s, Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist, asked study participants to deliver painful electric shocks to other people.

The shock was not real, but the people in the study didn't know that.

Milgram found that the study participants were willing to deliver the shocks, as long as an authority figure asked them to do so. [ Bone-Chilling Science: The Scariest Experiments Ever ]

The Milgram experiment, as it is now called, was considered a turning point in social psychology and the science of obedience.

In a new study from Poland, a group of researchers wanted to see if the premise held up. That is, 50 years later, would people still respond to an authority figure in the same way as they did in Milgram's original experiment?

"Upon learning about Milgram's experiments, a vast majority of people claim that 'I would never behave in such a manner,'" study co-author Tomasz Grzyb, a social psychologist at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Poland, said in a statement. In other words, people think that they would say no to an authority figure who ordered them to shock a person.

In the new study, the researchers noted that the Milgram experiments had never been conducted in central European countries, which were once a part of the Soviet Union. The leaders of the region placed people there under communist rule and demanded "strict obedience to authority," making the region a good place to test such obedience, the researchers wrote in the study. The research was published today (March 14) in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

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In the study, the researchers designed an experiment that was similar to original Milgram experiments. They recruited 40 men and 40 women, who were all unfamiliar with the original experiments. The participants were told that the experiment was focused on "the impact of punishments on learning and memory processes ," according to the study.

In the experiment, each person was paired up with an actor and asked to select slips of paper that would dictate each person's role. Both of the slips said "teacher," but in each case, the actor announced that his or her slip said "learner." The learner's job was to memorize certain associations between syllables: The teacher was given syllables to read, and the learner was supposed to reply to each syllable by giving a specific answer.

At this point, the participant was then told that she or he could stop the experiment at any point, but would still be paid for the time.

Revisiting the Milgram experiment

The experiment took place in two neighboring rooms. In one, the learner/actor was hooked up to electrodes , to give the study participant the impression that the learner would be shocked. In the other room, the participant (who thought he or she was taking on the role of the "teacher") was given levers to control, and told that the levers determined the intensity of the shock that the "learner" would receive.

The teacher was told to administer an electronic shock to the learner whenever the learner made a mistake. Prerecorded screams of pain played when the shock was delivered, according to the study.

As the experiment proceeded, the teacher was told to increase the intensity of the shocks with each subsequent mistake that the "learner" made. The screams also became more intense, but if the teacher seemed to hesitate to administer a shock, the experimenter would prod the individual with comments, such as, "Please continue," "It is absolutely essential that you continue," or "You have no choice — you must go on."

Just after the teacher pressed the last button, the experimenter asked, "Do you think it hurts?"

The researchers found that 90 percent of the participants were willing to press the 10th lever in the experiment — that is, deliver the strongest shock to another individual.

"It is exceptionally interesting that in spite of the many years which have passed since the original Milgram experiments, the proportion of people submitting themselves to the authority of [the] experimenter remains very high," the researchers wrote.

However, the researchers also noted that when the person being shocked was a woman, people were three times more likely to refuse to obey the experiment and deliver the shocks. Because the sample size was small, though, the researchers were unable to say if this was a statistically significant finding or due to chance.

The researchers noted the the experiment was approved by an ethics commission. In addition, after the experiment was completed, each participant individually went through a "detailed and painstaking debriefing" with a clinical psychologist, according to the study. "During this debriefing, [the] participants were told of the details of the procedure, apologized [to] for being deceived at the start of the experiment … and received an explanation of why it was done in that way," the researchers wrote. The participants were also told that they could contact the researchers at any point after the study if they still had questions or concerns.

Overall, the new findings suggest that society has not changed much in since Milgram first conducted his experiments, the researchers said.

"Half a century after Milgram's original research into obedience and authority, a striking majority of subjects are still willing to electrocute a helpless individual," Grzyb said.

"In summary, it can be said that such a high level of obedience among participants, very similar to that attained in the 1960s in the original Milgram studies, is exceptionally fascinating," the researchers wrote.

Originally published on Live Science .

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Milgram Experiment - Obedience to Authority

The Stanley Milgram Experiment was created to explain some of the concentration camp-horrors of the World War 2, where Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs and other enemies of the state were slaughtered by Nazis.

This article is a part of the guide:

• Social Psychology Experiments
• Bobo Doll Experiment
• Stanford Prison Experiment
• Asch Experiment
• Milgram Experiment Ethics

Browse Full Outline

• 1 Social Psychology Experiments
• 2.1 Asch Figure
• 3 Bobo Doll Experiment
• 4 Good Samaritan Experiment
• 5 Stanford Prison Experiment
• 6.1 Milgram Experiment Ethics
• 7 Bystander Apathy
• 8 Sherif’s Robbers Cave
• 9 Social Judgment Experiment
• 10 Halo Effect
• 11 Thought-Rebound
• 12 Ross’ False Consensus Effect
• 13 Interpersonal Bargaining
• 14 Understanding and Belief
• 15 Hawthorne Effect
• 16 Self-Deception
• 17 Confirmation Bias
• 18 Overjustification Effect
• 19 Choice Blindness
• 20.1 Cognitive Dissonance
• 21.1 Social Group Prejudice
• 21.2 Intergroup Discrimination
• 21.3 Selective Group Perception

Do as you’re told

Many war-criminals claimed they were merely following orders and could not be held responsible for their actions, in the trials following the World War 2.

Were the Germans in fact evil and cold-hearted, or is this a group phenomenon which could happen to anyone, given the right conditions?

Preparation of the Stanley Milgram Experiment

The psychologist Stanley Milgram created an electric ‘shock generator’ with 30 switches. The switch was marked clearly in 15 volt increments, ranging from 15 to 450 volts.

He also placed labels indicating the shock level, such as ‘Moderate’ (75-120 Volts) and ‘Strong’ (135-180 Volts). The switches 375-420 Volts were marked ‘Danger: Severe Shock’ and the two highest levels 435-450, was marked ‘XXX’.

The ‘shock generator’ was in fact phony and would only produce sound when the switches were pressed.

40 subjects (males) were recruited via mail and a newspaper ad. They thought they were going to participate in an experiment about ‘memory and learning’.

In the test, each subject was informed clearly that their payment was for showing up, and they could keep the payment “no matter what happens after they arrive[d]”.

Next, the subject met an ‘experimenter’, the person leading the experiment, and another person told to be another subject. The other subject was in fact a confederate acting as a subject. He was a 47 year old male accountant.

The two subjects (the real subject and the con-subject) drew slips of paper to indicate who was going to be a ‘teacher’ and who was going to be a ‘learner’. The lottery was in fact a set-up, and the real subject would always get the role of ‘the teacher’.

The teacher saw that the learner was strapped to a chair and electrodes were attached. The subject was then seated in another room in front of the shock generator, unable to see the learner.

Research Question

The Stanley Milgram Experiment aimed at getting an answer to the question:

“For how long will someone continue to give shocks to another person if they are told to do so, even if they thought they could be seriously hurt?” (the dependent variable )

Remember that they had met the other person, a likable stranger, and that they thought that it could very well be them who were in the learner-position receiving shocks.

The Experiment

The subject was instructed to teach word-pairs to the learner. When the learner made a mistake, the subject was instructed to punish the learner by giving him a shock, 15 volts higher for each mistake.

The learner never received the shocks, but pre-taped audio was triggered when a shock-switch was pressed.

If the experimenter, seated in the same room, was contacted, the experimenter would answer with predefined ‘prods’ (“Please continue”, “Please go on”, “The experiment requires that you go on”, “It is absolutely essential that you continue”, “You have no other choice, you must go on”), starting with the mild prods, and making it more authoritarian for each time the subject contacted the experimenter.

If the subject asked who was responsible if anything would happen to the learner, the experimenter answered “I am responsible”. This gave the subject a relief and many continued.

During the Stanley Milgram Experiment, many subjects showed signs of tension. 3 subjects had “full-blown, uncontrollable seizures”.

Although most subjects were uncomfortable doing it, all 40 subjects obeyed up to 300 volts.

25 of the 40 subjects continued to complete to give shocks until the maximum level of 450 volts was reached.

Conclusion - Obedience to Authority

Before the Stanley Milgram Experiment, experts thought that about 1-3 % of the subjects would not stop giving shocks. They thought that you’d have to be pathological or a psychopath to do so.

Still, 65 % never stopped giving shocks. None stopped when the learner said he had heart-trouble. How could that be? We now believe that it has to do with our almost innate behavior that we should do as told, especially from authority persons.

Pre-Taped Audio (Transcription)

What the learner said when the teacher triggered the shock at some levels.

• 75 volts: “Ugh!!!”
• 90 volts: “Ugh!!!”
• 105 volts: “Ugh!!!” (Louder)
• 120 volts: “Ugh!!! Hey, this really hurts.”
• 135 volts: “Ugh!!!”
• 150 volts: “Ugh!!! Experimenter! That's all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart's starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please. My heart's starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out.”
• 165 volts: (Shouting) “Ugh!!! Let me out!”
• 180 volts: (Shouting) “Ugh!!! I can't stand the pain. Let me out of here!”
• 195 volts: “Ugh!!! Let me out of here. Let me out of here. My heart's bothering me. Let me out of here! You have no right to keep me here! Let me out! Let me out of here! Let me out! Let me out of here! My heart's bothering me. Let me out! Let me out!”
• 210 volts: “Ugh!! Experimenter! Get me out of here. I've had enough. I won't be in the experiment any more.”
• 225 volts: “Ugh!!!”
• 240 volts: “Ugh!!!”
• 255 volts: “Ugh!!! Get me out of here.”
• 270 volts (Screaming) “Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out. Do you hear? Let me out of here.”
• 285 volts: (Screaming)
• 300 volts: (Screaming) “I absolutely refuse to answer any more. Get me out of here. You can't hold me here. Get me out. Get me out of here.”
• 315 volts: (Intense scream) “I told you I refuse to answer. I'm no longer part of this experiment.”
• 330 volts: (Intense and prolonged screaming) “Let me out of here. Let me out of here. My heart's bothering me. Let me out, I tell you. (Hysterically) Let me out of here. Let me out of here. You have no right to hold me here. Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out of here! Let me out. Let me out.”
• 345-435 volts: (Silence)
• 450 volts: (Silence)

The experiment was terminated by the experimenter after 3 shocks at 450 volts

(The Original Stanley Milgram Experiment)

A psychological study like this would never be allowed in most countries today, due to ethical considerations. Ethics today critique the study about misleading the participants. Critics also frequently point out the possible harm the study did to the participants.

Read more about the ethics of the Milgram Experiment.

Further Studies Determined

• Women are about the same obedient as men
• Distance to the victim affects the obedience
• Distance to the person ordering you affects the obedience
• The appearance of the authority person and his rank can increase or decrease the obedience

Original Literature - Stanley Milgram Experiment

Stanley Milgram, 1974: Obedience to Authority . New York: Harper & Row.

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Explorable.com (Feb 6, 2008). Milgram Experiment - Obedience to Authority. Retrieved Sep 12, 2024 from Explorable.com: https://explorable.com/stanley-milgram-experiment

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Do people choose pain over boredom?

• Published 4 July 2014

How would you cope with 15 minutes in an empty room?

People are unhappy in their own company and some prefer painful experiences to their own thoughts, a new study claims.

In one test, nearly half the subjects gave themselves mild electric shocks during 15 minutes of quiet time.

The findings, which came from shutting people away with no distractions and then quizzing them, have attracted criticism from some other researchers.

The contentious paper, in the journal Science , external , argues we are not very good at enjoyable, recreational thought.

Prof Timothy Wilson, who led the research at the University of Virginia, US, said: "Our study participants consistently demonstrated that they would rather have something to do than to have nothing other than their thoughts for even a fairly brief period of time."

This might not be a surprise if you are easily bored, or have ever picked at a painful scab in a quiet moment.

In fact, other researchers in the field have said the findings are overstated.

But the authors write that the question of whether people enjoy "just thinking" has been overlooked in psychological research.

Voluntary shocks

Their work began with several trials involving university students, who were shut in a small room with blank walls and asked to sit at a table "entertaining themselves with their own thoughts".

After six, 12 or 15 minutes, they were asked whether the time was enjoyable and whether it was difficult to concentrate. On average, their answers were near the middle of a nine-point scale or worse.

To show that this was not a problem arising from the poky laboratory room, or a character flaw unique to flighty students, other experiments required a wider pool of volunteers, aged up to 77, to complete a similar test at home, sitting at a computer. Unpoliced in their own homes, many of them "cheated" by checking their phones or listening to music.

A control group was asked to find an external distraction, alone, like watching TV or browsing the internet, and they had a much better time than those left to try to daydream.

Finally, Prof Wilson's team did the electric shock experiment to try to find out if quiet, solo thinking was unpleasant enough that people would actually prefer something nasty to happen. Sure enough, 18 of 42 people, more of them men than women, chose to give themselves at least one mild shock on the ankle when left alone for 15 minutes.

"It was kind of like a severe static shock, it was not a huge jolt, but it was a little painful," Prof Wilson told the BBC's Naked Scientists programme , external . "They seem to want to shock themselves out of boredom, so to speak."

Participants who did the task at home tended to "cheat" and look at their phones or listen to music

These were all people who had experienced the same shock already and declared that, if given $5, they would part with some of it in order not to be zapped again. People who didn't think they'd pay to avoid the shock were excluded - as was one man who pushed the button 190 times.

"I'm not sure what was up with him," Prof Wilson said.

Some UK researchers have questioned aspects of the study, including the level of shock delivered, which was higher for men than women (based on early results in which women rated shocks as more painful) but was not varied between individuals. They point to the fact that individual pain thresholds vary widely, and that hypothetical payments can exaggerate people's answers , external .

Sense of purpose

Prof Wilson says he isn't declaring humans incapable of contemplation. "I don't want to exaggerate this. I do think that all of us, in our daily lives, do find our minds wandering to pleasant topics or thinking about something we're looking forward to. I think what's hard... is doing this on the spot."

Prof Ivo Vlaev, a behavioural psychologist at Warwick University and Imperial College, London, thinks the findings are "very interesting" but the electric shocks could be over-emphasised.

"The bottom line is that they felt miserable," he told BBC News. "Research has shown that happiness is not only about experiencing pleasure. You need a sense of meaning and purpose - which you lack in these conditions. And when you have a task to do, you do have that sense - even if it's a simple task."

Dr Chris Chambers, a senior research fellow at Cardiff University's School of Psychology, was less impressed with the results.

"This is essentially a study showing that people don't like to be bored," he told BBC News. "How this could take up 11 experiments in a major scientific journal is a little mystifying.

"The most interesting aspect to the study is that their research subjects preferred to give themselves electric shocks rather than experience boredom. Perhaps the subjects simply did it to stay awake, and having now read the author's paper from beginning to end I can understand their plight."

More on this story

The headband that measures boredom. Video, 00:02:15 The headband that measures boredom

• Published 27 May 2014

The danger of rumination

• Published 17 October 2013

People Choose Electric Shocks Over Sitting Quietly for 15 Minutes and Thinking

In psychology experiment one man shocked himself 190 times rather than sit doing nothing.

Most people would rather be doing something than sitting alone thinking, a new study finds, even if it involves self-administering a painful electric shock.

Across 11 studies, psychologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard University had people sitting on their own in a featureless room for between 6 and 15 minutes ( Wilson et al., 2014 ).

Professor Timothy Wilson, who led the study, which is published in the journal Science , said:

“Those of us who enjoy some down time to just think likely find the results of this study surprising — I certainly do — but our study participants consistently demonstrated that they would rather have something to do than to have nothing other than their thoughts for even a fairly brief period of time.”

People consistently said that the short thinking period was not enjoyable and they found it difficult to concentrate.

Most people said they’d rather be listening to music or using their smartphones.

In the most dramatic finding from the research, participants were left alone in the room with a button which administered a mild electric shock to them.

Of the 18 men in the study, 12 gave themselves at least one shock over a 15-minute ‘thinking period’.

One unusually bored man pressed the button 190 times, although this was not typical.

Of the 24 women in the study, 6 gave themselves at least one shock.

The much higher rate amongst men is likely down to greater sensation-seeking amongst males.

The authors note that:

“What is striking is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid.” (Wilson et al., 2014).

Distracted generation?

This might look like evidence of a chronically distracted generation, but the findings were not confined to young people.

In one of the studies, people from 18 to 77-years-old, and from a wide range of backgrounds, took part.

The results were the same, Wilson said:

“That was surprising — that even older people did not show any particular fondness for being alone thinking.”

Wilson does not think these findings reflect the fast pace of modern society, rather a fundamental aspect of the way the mind works:

“The mind is designed to engage with the world. Even when we are by ourselves, our focus usually is on the outside world. And without training in meditation or thought-control techniques, which still are difficult, most people would prefer to engage in external activities.”

It may also be that it’s difficult to daydream or let the mind wander when you are forced into it.

However, in one of the studies people were allowed to try the period of quiet reflection at home.

Wilson explained that the results were much the same:

“We found that about a third admitted that they had ‘cheated’ at home by engaging in some activity, such as listening to music or using a cell phone, or leaving their chair.” And they didn’t enjoy this experience any more at home than at the lab.”

Author: Dr Jeremy Dean

Psychologist, Jeremy Dean, PhD is the founder and author of PsyBlog. He holds a doctorate in psychology from University College London and two other advanced degrees in psychology. He has been writing about scientific research on PsyBlog since 2004. View all posts by Dr Jeremy Dean

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