electrocution experiment psychology

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?

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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
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• 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.

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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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. Contesting the "nature" of conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo's studies really show . PLoS Biol. 2012;10(11):e1001426. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001426

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Blass T. The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: some things we now know about obedience to authority . J Appl Soc Psychol. 1999;29(5):955-978. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.1999.tb00134.x

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Grzyb T, Dolinski D. Beliefs about obedience levels in studies conducted within the Milgram paradigm: Better than average effect and comparisons of typical behaviors by residents of various nations .  Front Psychol . 2017;8:1632. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01632

Caspar EA. A novel experimental approach to study disobedience to authority .  Sci Rep . 2021;11(1):22927. doi:10.1038/s41598-021-02334-8

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

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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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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Culture of Shock

Fifty years after Stanley Milgram conducted his series of stunning experiments, psychologists are revisiting his findings on the nature of obedience

By Stephen Reicher & S. Alexander Haslam

In 1961 Stanley Milgram embarked on a research program that would change psychology forever. Fueled by a desire to understand how ordinary Germans had managed to participate in the horrors of the Holocaust, Milgram decided to investigate when and why people obey authority. To do so, he developed an ingenious experimental paradigm that revealed the surprising degree to which ordinary individuals are willing to inflict pain on others.

Half a century later Milgram’s obedience studies still resonate. They showed that it does not take a disturbed personality to harm others. Healthy, well-adjusted people are willing to administer lethal electric shocks to another person when told to do so by an authority figure. Milgram’s findings convulsed the world of psychology and horrified the world at large. His work also left pressing questions about the nature of conformity unanswered. Ethical concerns have prompted psychologists to spend decades struggling to design equally powerful experiments without inflicting distress on the participants.

Researchers have now begun developing tools that allow them to probe deeper into his experimental setup. This work is pointing the way to new understandings of when and why people obey—and of the atrocities conformity can enable.

On supporting science journalism

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Obedience to Authority When he began this project, Milgram had another goal in mind. He intended to assess whether some nationalities are more willing than others to conform to the wishes of an authority figure. His plan was to start studying obedience in the U.S. and then to travel to Europe to look for differences in behavior among populations there.

The topic of conformity was not new, and indeed Milgram had been heavily influenced by psychologist Solomon Asch, with whom he had studied in 1959 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Asch had shown that when asked to make public judgments about the length of a line, people were often willing to bend to the views of their peers even when doing so meant defying the evidence of their own eyes.

Milgram suspected that Asch’s results held hidden potential that might be revealed if he studied behaviors of greater social significance than simply judging lines. So Milgram designed an experiment in which participants—most of whom were men living near Yale University’s psychology department, where the study was conducted—were told to act as a “teacher” assisting an experimenter in a study of memory. Their task was to administer a memory test to a learner, who in reality was an actor employed by Milgram. When this learner supplied an incorrect answer, the participant was to give him an electric shock. The ostensible goal was to investigate the impact of punishment on learning: Would the shocks improve the learners’ performance or not?

To administer the shocks, the teacher had in front of him a shock generator with 30 switches on its front panel. The buttons were arranged in ascending order from 15 volts, labeled with the words “slight shock,” all the way up to 450 volts, ominously labeled “XXX.” After each error the teacher had to depress the next switch to the right, increasing the jolt by 15 volts. Milgram was interested in seeing how far they would go. Would they administer a “strong shock” of 135 volts? What about an “intense shock” of 225 volts? Perhaps they would instead stop at 375 volts: “danger: severe shock.” Surely, Milgram thought, very few subjects would go all the way—although people from some countries might go further than residents of other nations. In particular, he posited that Germans might be willing to deliver bigger shocks than Americans typically would.

Milgram was taken aback by what he found next. His initial pilot studies with Yale students showed that people regularly followed the experimenter’s instructions. Indeed, the vast majority continued pressing switches all the way to the highest voltage—well beyond the point at which the shocks would prove lethal.

Of course, the shock generator was not real, so the learners never really suffered. But the participants did not know this, so by all appearances Milgram’s subjects seemed willing to deliver shocks sufficient to kill a person simply because they were asked to do so by a gray-coated lab assistant in a science experiment.

Startled by these findings, at first Milgram dismissed the results as a reflection of the particular nature of “Yalies.” Only when he reran the studies with members of the broader American public did he begin to realize he was onto something big. In what became known as the baseline, or voice feedback, condition, the teacher sits in the same room as the experimenter. The learner is in another room, and communication occurs only over an intercom. As the shock levels increase, the learner expresses pain and demands to be released from the study. At 150 volts he cries out, “Experimenter, get me out of here! I won’t be in the experiment any more! I refuse to go on!” Despite these pleas, 26 of the 40 participants, or 65 percent, continued administering shocks to the maximum, 450-volt level.

This discovery completely transformed Milgram’s career. He abandoned his plans to run the study in Europe—if Americans were already so highly obedient, clearly Germans could not conform much more. Instead he concentrated on examining exactly what about his experiment had led ordinary Americans to behave so unexpectedly. As Milgram put it, he was determined to worry this phenomenon to death.

Science of Defiance Popular accounts of Milgram’s work most often mention only the baseline study, with its 65 percent compliance. In fact, he conducted a very large number of studies. In his book from 1974, Obedience to Authority , Milgram describes 18 variants. He also conducted many studies to develop the paradigm that were never published. In one pilot experiment the learner provided no feedback to the participants—and almost every teacher went all the way to 450 volts. Another variant, in which participants  helped in the study but did not actually depress the lever to deliver the shock, produced similar results.

When the subjects sat in the same room as the learner and watched as he was shocked, however, the percentage of obedient teachers went down to 40. It fell further when the participant had to press the learner’s hand onto an electric plate to deliver the shock. And it went below 20 percent when two other “participants”—actually actors—refused to comply. Moreover, in three conditions nobody went up to 450 volts: when the learner demanded that shocks be delivered, when the authority was the victim of shocks, or when two authorities argued and gave conflicting instructions.

In short, Milgram’s range of experiments revealed that seemingly small details could trigger a complete reversal of behavior—in other words, these studies are about both obedience and dis obedience. Instead of only asking why people obey, we need to ask when they obey and also when they do not.

In his various papers describing the studies, Milgram provides a rich and diverse set of explanations for his findings. He describes how the participants are presented with the experiments’ worthy purpose to advance understanding, a goal the participants respect. He notes how a subject is often torn between the demands of the experimenter and the victim, with the one urging him to go on and the other pleading him to stop. He also expressed interest in the way other factors, such as the physical distance between the parties involved, might influence whom the participant listens to.

In the public eye, however, one theory has come to dominate: the idea that participants in the experiment enter into what Milgram terms an “agentic state” in which they cede authority to the person in charge. He developed this idea partly from Hannah Arendt’s famous analysis of Adolf Eichmann, a perpetrator of the Nazi Holocaust. As Milgram put it, “the ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation—a conception of his duties as a subject—and not from any peculiarly aggressive tendencies.” In the face of authority, humans focus narrowly on doing as they are told and forget about the consequences of their actions. Their concern is to be a good follower, not a good person.

Milgram was a brilliant experimentalist, but many psychologists are profoundly skeptical of the idea of the agentic state. For one thing, the hypothesis cannot explain why the levels of conformity varied so greatly across different versions of the study. More broadly, this analysis focuses only on participants’ obligations to the experimenter, although at several points in the studies they were also attuned to the fate of the learner.

When you examine the grainy footage of the experiments, you can see that the participants agonize visibly over how to behave. As Milgram recognized early on, the dilemma comes from their recognition of their duties to both the experimenter and the learner. They argue with the experimenter. They reflect the learner’s concerns back to him. They search for reassurance and justification.

In fact, in designing the studies, Milgram anticipated this process. To make it somewhat more controlled, he devised four verbal prods, which the experimenter would use if the participant expressed doubts. A simple “please continue” was followed by “the experiment requires that you continue” and then “it is absolutely essential that you continue.” The most extreme prompt was “you have no other choice, you must go on.”

As psychologist Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University has observed, of these four instructions only the last is a direct order. In Obedience , Milgram gives an example of one reaction to this prod: Experimenter : You have no other choice, sir, you must go on.

Subject : If this were Russia maybe, but not in America.

(The experiment is terminated.)

In a recent partial replication of Milgram’s study, Burger found that every time this prompt was used, his subjects refused to go on. This point is critically important because it tells us that individuals are not narrowly focused on being good followers. Instead they are more focused on doing the right thing.

The irony here is hard to miss. Milgram’s findings are often portrayed as showing that human beings mindlessly carry out even the most extreme orders. What the shock experiments actually show is that we stop following when we start getting ordered around. In short, whatever it is that people do when they carry out the experimenter’s bidding, they are not simply obeying orders.

Morality and Leadership The fact that we could so easily be led to act in such extreme ways makes it all the more important to explore when and why this happens. But at the same time, it raises acute ethical issues that in fact render the necessary research unacceptable. As much as we wish to help society understand human atrocity, and thus prevent it, we also must not distress the participants in our studies who afterward will have to confront their own actions.

For a long time, researchers conducted secondary analyses of Milgram’s data, studied historical events, and designed experiments with less extreme behaviors, such as having subjects be negative about job applicants or squash bugs. No matter how clever the design, none of these studies investigated how humans can inflict extreme harm on one another as directly as Milgram’s did, nor did they have the same impact or social relevance.

Recently this stalemate has begun to shake loose. Mel Slater, a computer scientist at University College London, has developed a virtual-reality simulation of the obedience paradigm. He has shown that people behave much the same way in this environment as they do in real contexts, and he has suggested that his simulation can serve as a new venue for carrying out obedience experiments. Moreover, Burger has argued persuasively that those who obey the experimenter’s instructions at 150 volts are most likely to carry on obeying right up to XXX. By stopping the trials at this level, then, we can address the same issues that Milgram did without actually asking people to inflict extreme harm on others—and having those individuals suffer later from the knowledge that they are willing to do so.

The key issue remains: how to define the circumstances that enable people to inflict pain on others. Milgram himself suggested that group formation and identification might play a role in determining whether we side more with authority or its victims. Other studies closely related to Milgram’s have flagged these same processes–notably Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment at Stanford University in 1971 [see “ The Psychology of Tyranny ,” by S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher; Scientific American Mind , October 2005]. Evidence suggests that we enact an authority figure’s wishes only when we identify with that person and his or her goals. In essence, obedience is a consequence of effective leadership. Followers do not lose their moral compass so much as choose particular authorities to guide them through the ethical dilemmas of everyday life. Obedient people are not mindless zombies after all.

This radical reinterpretation of Milgram’s studies clearly requires more data to support it, as well as further debate. Sadly, the need for this debate is no less pressing today than it was in 1961. With the recent government-led massacres in Libya and Syria and the shadows of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay hanging over us, we need more than ever to understand how people can be led to harm others—and how we can stop them.

Experimenting with Ethics In a biography of Milgram, psychologist Thomas Blass of the University of Maryland described the furor that ensued after the New York Times ran an article on Milgram’s studies in 1963. An editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described the studies as “open-eyed torture.” The famous psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim called Milgram’s work “vile” and “in line with the human experiments of the Nazis.” He was even attacked in The Dogs of Pavlov , a 1973 play by Welsh poet Dannie Abse. One character, Kurt, describes the setup of the obedience studies as “bullshit,” “fraudulent” and a “cheat.”

Milgram responded robustly, claiming that “no one who took part in the obedience study suffered damage, and most subjects found the experience to be instructive and enriching.” The data he collected from a questionnaire completed after each experiment are nuanced, however. Of the 656 participants in the studies, 84 percent said they were glad to have taken part, 15 percent were neutral, and a mere 1 percent were sorry. More than half admitted to some level of discomfort during the studies, but only about one third admitted to having felt troubled by them since—in this latter group, only 7 percent agreed that they had been “bothered by it quite a bit.” Although Milgram was probably right in saying that most people were fine, it is equally probable that a minority suffered to some degree.

Still, the fact that Milgram collected these data demonstrates that he was attuned to the ethical issues and aware of their importance.

Stephen Reicher is Wardlaw professor of psychology at the University of Saint Andrews, a fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Social Sciences. He has been studying issues of social identity and collective behavior for nearly 40 years, including crowd behavior, nationalism, leadership, tyranny, intergroup hatred and, latterly, obedience and resistance.

S. Alexander Haslam is a professor of psychology and Australian Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland.

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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Explanations for Obedience - Milgram (1963)

Last updated 22 Mar 2021

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Milgram (1963) conducted one of the most famous and influential psychological investigations of obedience. He wanted to find out if ordinary American citizens would obey an unjust order from an authority figure and inflict pain on another person because they were instructed to.

Milgram’s sample consisted of 40 male participants from a range of occupations and backgrounds. The participants were all volunteers who had responded to an advert in a local paper, which offered $4.50 to take part in an experiment on ‘punishment and learning’.

The 40 participants were all invited to a laboratory at Yale University and upon arrival they met with the experimenter and another participant, Mr Wallace, who were both confederates.

The experimenter explained that one person would be randomly assigned the role of teacher and the other, a learner. However, the real participant was always assigned the role of teacher. The experimenter explained that the teacher, the real participant, would read the learner a series of word pairs and then test their recall. The learner, who was positioned in an adjacent room, would indicate his choice using a system of lights. The teacher was instructed to administer an electric shock ever time the learner made a mistake and to increase the voltage after each mistake.

The teacher watched the learner being strapped to the electric chair and was given a sample electric shock to convince them that the procedure was real. The learner wasn’t actually strapped to the chair and gave predetermined answers to the test. As the electric shocks increased the learner’s screams, which were recorded, became louder and more dramatic. At 180 volts the learner complained of a weak heart. At 300 volts he banged on the wall and demanded to leave and at 315 volts he became silent, to give the illusions that was unconscious, or even dead.

The experiment continued until the teacher refused to continue, or 450 volts was reached. If the teacher tried to stop the experiment, the experimenter would respond with a series of prods, for example: ‘The experiment requires that you continue.’ Following the experiment the participants were debriefed.

Milgram found that all of the real participants went to at least 300 volts and 65% continued until the full 450 volts. He concluded that under the right circumstances ordinary people will obey unjust orders.

Milgram’s study has been heavily criticised for breaking numerous ethical guidelines, including: deception , right to withdraw and protection from harm.

Milgram deceived his participants as he said the experiment was on ‘punishment and learning’, when in fact he was measuring obedience, and he pretended the learner was receiving electric shocks. In addition, it was very difficult for participants with withdraw from the experiment, as the experimenter prompted the participants to continue. Finally, many of the participants reported feeling exceptionally stressed and anxious while taking part in the experiment and therefore they were not protect from psychological harm. This is an issue, as Milgram didn’t respect his participants, some of whom felt very guilt following the experiment, knowing that they could have harmed another person. However, it must be noted that it was essential for Milgram to deceive his participants and remove their right to withdraw to test obedience and produce valid results. Furthermore, he did debrief his participants following the experiment and 83.7% of participants said that they were happy to have taken part in the experiment and contribute to scientific research.

Milgram’s study has been criticised for lacking ecological validity. Milgram tested obedience in a laboratory, which is very different to real-life situations of obedience, where people are often asked to follow more subtle instructions, rather than administering electric shocks. As a result we are unable to generalise his findings to real life situations of obedience and cannot conclude that people would obey less severe instructions in the same way.

Finally, Milgram’s research lacked population validity. Milgram used a bias sample of 40 male volunteers, which means we are unable to generalise the results to other populations, in particular females, and cannot conclude if female participants would respond in a similar way.

• Ethical Issues
• Right to withdraw
• Protection from harm

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The Psychology Experiment That Shocked the World: Milgram’s Obedience Study (1961)

in Psychology , Science | November 11th, 2013 13 Comments

For decades fol­low­ing World War II,  the world was left won­der­ing how the atroc­i­ties of the Holo­caust could have been per­pe­trat­ed in the midst of—and, most hor­rif­i­cal­ly, by—a mod­ern and civ­i­lized soci­ety.  How did peo­ple come to engage in a will­ing and sys­tem­at­ic exter­mi­na­tion of their neigh­bors? Psy­chol­o­gists, whose field had grown into a grudg­ing­ly respect­ed sci­ence by the mid­point of the 20 th cen­tu­ry, were eager to tack­le the ques­tion.

In 1961, Yale University’s Stan­ley Mil­gram began a series of infa­mous obe­di­ence exper­i­ments. While Adolf Eichmann’s tri­al was under­way in Jerusalem (result­ing in Han­nah Arendt’s five-piece reportage , which became one of The New York­er magazine’s most dra­mat­ic and con­tro­ver­sial arti­cle series), Mil­gram began to sus­pect that human nature was more straight­for­ward than ear­li­er the­o­rists had imag­ined; he won­dered, as he lat­er wrote , “Could it be that Eich­mann and his mil­lion accom­plices in the Holo­caust were just fol­low­ing orders? Could we call them all accom­plices?”

In the most famous his exper­i­ments, Mil­gram osten­si­bly recruit­ed par­tic­i­pants to take part in a study assess­ing the effects of pain on learn­ing. In real­i­ty, he want­ed to see how far he could push the aver­age Amer­i­can to admin­is­ter painful elec­tric shocks to a fel­low human being.

When par­tic­i­pants arrived at his lab, Milgram’s assis­tant would ask them, as well as a sec­ond man, to draw slips of paper to receive their roles for the exper­i­ment. In fact, the sec­ond man was a con­fed­er­ate ; the par­tic­i­pant would always draw the role of “teacher,” and the sec­ond man would invari­ably be made the “learn­er.”

The par­tic­i­pants received instruc­tions to teach pairs of words to the con­fed­er­ate. After they had read the list of words once, the teach­ers were to test the learner’s recall by read­ing one word, and ask­ing the learn­er to name one of the four words asso­ci­at­ed with it. The exper­i­menter told the par­tic­i­pants to pun­ish any learn­er mis­takes by push­ing a but­ton and admin­is­ter­ing an elec­tric shock; while they could not see the learn­er, par­tic­i­pants could hear his screams. The con­fed­er­ate, of course, remained unharmed, and mere­ly act­ed out in pain, with each mis­take cost­ing him an addi­tion­al 15 volts of pun­ish­ment. In case par­tic­i­pants fal­tered in their sci­en­tif­ic resolve, the exper­i­menter was near­by to urge them, using four author­i­ta­tive state­ments:

Please con­tin­ue.

The exper­i­ment requires that you con­tin­ue.

It is absolute­ly essen­tial that you con­tin­ue.

You have no oth­er choice, you must go on.

In a jar­ring set of find­ings, Mil­gram found that 26 of the 40 par­tic­i­pants obeyed instruc­tions, admin­is­ter­ing shocks all the way from “Slight Shock,” to “Dan­ger: Severe Shock.” The final two omi­nous switch­es were sim­ply marked “XXX.” Even when the learn­ers would pound on the walls in agony after seem­ing­ly receiv­ing 300 volts, par­tic­i­pants per­sist­ed. Even­tu­al­ly, the learn­er sim­ply stopped respond­ing.

Although they fol­lowed instruc­tions, par­tic­i­pants repeat­ed­ly expressed their desire to stop the exper­i­ment, and showed clear signs of extreme dis­com­fort :

“I observed a mature and ini­tial­ly poised busi­ness­man enter the lab­o­ra­to­ry smil­ing and con­fi­dent. With­in 20 min­utes he was reduced to a twitch­ing, stut­ter­ing wreck, who was rapid­ly approach­ing a point of ner­vous col­lapse… At one point he pushed his fist into his fore­head and mut­tered: “Oh God, let’s stop it.” And yet he con­tin­ued to respond to every word of the exper­i­menter, and obeyed to the end.” 

Milgram’s study set off a pow­der keg whose impact remains felt to this day. Eth­i­cal­ly, many object­ed to the decep­tion and the lack of ade­quate par­tic­i­pant debrief­ing . Oth­ers claimed that Mil­gram overem­pha­sized human nature’s propen­si­ty for blind obse­quious­ness, with the exper­i­menter often urg­ing par­tic­i­pants to con­tin­ue many more times than the four stock phras­es allowed.

In the clip above, you can watch orig­i­nal footage from Milgram’s  exper­i­ment, fright­en­ing in its insid­i­ous sim­plic­i­ty. (See a full doc­u­men­tary on the study below.) The man admin­is­ter­ing the shock grows increas­ing­ly uncom­fort­able with his part in the pro­ceed­ings, and almost walks out, ask­ing “Who’s going to take the respon­si­bil­i­ty for any­thing that hap­pens to that gen­tle­man?” When the exper­i­menter replies, “I’m respon­si­ble,” the man, absolv­ing him­self, con­tin­ues. As the per­son receiv­ing the shocks grows increas­ing­ly pan­icked, com­plain­ing about his heart and ask­ing to be let out, the par­tic­i­pant makes his objec­tions known but appears par­a­lyzed, sheep­ish­ly turn­ing to the exper­i­menter, unable to leave.

Although Milgram’s work has drawn crit­ics, his results endure. While chang­ing the experiment’s pro­ce­dure may alter com­pli­ance (e.g., hav­ing the exper­i­menter speak to par­tic­i­pants over the phone rather than remain in the same room through­out the exper­i­ment decreased obe­di­ence rates), repli­ca­tions have tend­ed to con­firm Milgram’s ini­tial find­ings. Whether one is urged once or a dozen times, peo­ple tend to take on the yoke of author­i­ty as absolute, relin­quish­ing their per­son­al agency in the pain they impart. Human nature, it seems, has no Manichean leanings—merely a pli­ant bent.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Famous Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment on YouTube

Psy­chol­o­gist Philip Zim­bar­do Says to Young Men: You’re Edu­ca­tion­al­ly and Sex­u­al­ly Doomed

Her­mann Rorschach’s Orig­i­nal Rorschach Test: What Do You See? (1921)

Carl Gus­tav Jung Explains His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries About Psy­chol­o­gy in Rare Inter­view (1957)

Free Online Cours­es Psy­chol­o­gy

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based sci­ence and cul­ture writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman

by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Comments (13) |

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Comments (13), 13 comments so far.

Yes, it was “infa­mous” and it has influ­enced ethics in psy­chol­o­gy pro­found­ly. Now we have insti­tu­tion­al review boards (IRB) who use these exper­i­ments of exem­plary case of what is con­sid­ered ‘prob­lem­at­ic’. How­ev­er, I think these exper­i­ments were invalu­able in shed­ding light on an impor­tant issue — it’s not an author­i­tar­i­an per­son­al­i­ty that makes peo­ple do ter­ri­ble things, no char­ac­ter defect some socio­path­ic indi­vid­u­als have, it’s some­thing many peo­ple are vul­ner­a­ble to. Up to 2/3s of the par­tic­i­pants would have killed a per­son. Know­ing this allows peo­ple to learn to deal with it, remind­ing one­self of one’s per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty and moral judg­ment — which can­not be del­e­gat­ed or sus­pend­ed. And while prob­a­bly no IRB would allow these exper­i­ments to be done today, it would be very inter­est­ing to see what if any­thing has changed since Mil­gram’s exper­i­ments — and why.

Radi­o­lab did a great seg­ment on the Mil­gram exper­i­ments which revealed that most peo­ple have mis­un­der­stood the lessons from it: http://www.radiolab.org/story/180103-whos-bad/

Gina Per­ry, the author of “Behind the Shock Machine,” researched Mil­gram’s exper­i­ment and found seri­ous prob­lems with the method­ol­o­gy that this arti­cle mentions.nnEven Mil­gram him­self admit­ted, accord­ing to the arti­cle, “that his work was more art than sci­ence, and described him­self as a u201chopeful poet.u201d Hard­ly proof pos­i­tive that peo­ple are moral­ly weak and will­ing to bend to authority.nnhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2013/10/02/the-shocking-truth-of-the-notorious-milgram-obedience-experiments/

The “yolk of author­i­ty”? Is that cor­rect? Good arti­cle, but this made me laugh. :)

what I got from this is that US econ­o­my was in bad shape if peo­ple would spend an hour doing this for $4.50. A joke per­pe­trat­ed on The New York­er and the Amer­i­can pub­lic but I’m not falling for it

It was 1961. That’s the equiv­a­lent of $35.24 today.nnhttp://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

Did the man die?n

How does this relate to mil­i­tary train­ing of any kind , and by any coun­try. What does mil­i­tary train­ing actu­al­ly involve, and where are the sim­i­lar­i­ties to Pro­fes­sor Mil­gram’s approach?Are there sim­i­lar­i­ties in large cor­po­rate busi­ness cul­tures?

Yes. The man died. They went through sev­er­al humans in the exper­i­ment, but the impor­tant thing is we learned that peo­ple are will­ing to kill oth­er peo­ple for $4/hr.

(now that I have that sar­casm out of my sys­tem…)

No. The man on the oth­er side of the screen was a paid actor. He received no elec­tric shock.

If you have ever tak­en part in haz­ing for a club, it is scary how sadis­tic some peo­ple can be when giv­en the chance.

Mil­gram’s exper­i­ments were ground break­ing in the study of human obe­di­ence.

Hey guys this is very inter­est­ing, but you guys don’t know what youre talkin bout.

Youre damn straight!

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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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Humans prefer an electric shock to being left alone with their thoughts

One man shocked himself 190 times.

By Arielle Duhaime-Ross

Source Science | Via The Washington Post

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The experiment was simple. All the participants had to do was enter an empty room, sit down, and think for six to 15 minutes. But without a cellphone, a book, or a television screen to stare at, the assignment quickly became too much to handle. In fact, even when individuals were given time to "prepare" for being alone — meaning that they were able to plan what they would think about during their moments of solitude — the participants still "found it hard," Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and lead author of the study, told The Washington Post . "People didn’t like it much."

they could shock themselves as often as they liked

So the researchers decided to give each participant the option of doing something else, besides just thinking. But what they came up with wasn’t exactly pleasant because, instead of just sitting there, participants were now also allowed to shock themselves as many times as they liked with a device containing a 9 volt battery. Still, for many, that option seemed like a better deal.

Most of the people who decided to shock themselves did so seven times. These results baffled the researchers. "I mean, no one was going to shock themselves by choice," Wilson, told The Washington Post in reference to his initial position during the conception of the study , published yesterday in Science . One man even gave himself 190 electric shocks over a period of 15 minutes, Wilson told The Atlantic , but his data points weren’t included in the final analysis. "I’m still just puzzled by that."

One guy used the device 190 times

Still, the fact that they chose to shock themselves at all, on their own, was unexpected. And this had nothing to do with curiosity about what the shocks would feel like, because the researchers made sure that each individual received a shock before the beginning of the session.

Yet, people voluntarily shocking themselves repeatedly wasn’t the only surprise. According to the researchers, men showed a marked preference for the negative stimulation. Out of 24 women, only six decided to shock themselves, but 12 out of the 18 male participants figured electric shocks were worthwhile. This, the researchers hypothesize, might have to do with the fact that men appear to be more willing to take risks for the sake of an intense and complex experiences than women.

The results of this study are tentative, however, and the sample sizes — a total of 11 experiments that included between 40 and 100 university students each — were fairly small, so researchers will need to repeat them. But for now, it would appear that humans, especially men, seem to prefer receiving negative, even painful stimulation, to suffering through the bouts of obligatory "mind-wandering" — which you could also call "boredom," depending on how you want to look at it.

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The banality of evil.

They were just following orders.

People absolve themselves of any responsibility when there is someone in charge.

These ideas have permeated our thinking, in part because of the defense many Nazi officers gave during the Nuremberg trials, and in part because of Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiments into obedience to authority. Even when the victim begged from the other room not to be shocked, so many of Milgram’s subjects kept increasing the voltage all the way to the “severe shock” setting because a man in a lab coat told them it was OK.

The Milgram experiments are probably the most famous and influential studies in all of psychology. They have been discussed in the context of the law, business ethics, and Holocaust studies. They have also whipped up a frenzy of criticism and backlash over the decades since their first partial publication in 1963 , leading researchers to argue about the ethics of deception and of causing distress to research participants—including nervous laughter, sweating and uncontrollable seizures—in the name of conducting high-impact studies into big ideas.

To this day, alternative explanations to the “just following orders” theory continue to be proposed. The fact that Milgram’s seminal explorations are still being cast in a new light over half a century after they began is an important reminder that scientific data on its own is not enough.

It needs to be interpreted.

From 0% to 93% fully obeyed the experimenter

We have all heard a version of the story of Milgram and the electric shocks. In the 1960s, participants (then known by the clinical and dehumanizing moniker “subjects”) were told by an experimenter to administer progressively higher electrical shocks to another human being when presented with wrong answers, and against expectations, most of these participants—two thirds, in fact—went all the way to the point where the victim stopped complaining and was presumed dead. Except that the participants had been deceived and no electrical shocks were actually delivered. The experimenter and victim were actors.

The reality is much more complicated. There was no one study. Milgram actually conducted over twenty of them in an exploratory process, changing variables as the results came in, to test different ways in which obedience might be curbed or encouraged, after having refined his approach through a series of pilot experiments . The notion that two thirds of participants delivered maximum shocks was the result of the first official study Milgram published on this topic, but the rest of the experiments, written about in his 1974 book Obedience to Authority , showed a wide range of complete obedience, from 0% of participants to 93% depending on the specific experimental conditions Milgram was testing.

There seems to have been two main reasons for Stanley Milgram, who had just received his doctorate in psychology and was accepted into Yale as an assistant professor, to study obedience to authority. He had worked with Solomon Asch, who had investigated conformity and shown that, when embedded in a team of actors in cahoots with the researcher, a naïve study participant would go along with the group a third of the time even though the group’s answer was clearly wrong. The problem with Asch’s research is that it focused on eyeballing the length of lines drawn on cards. Milgram was looking for something more relevant to the real world, having to do with destructive acts.

Stanley Milgram was also Jewish, and that provided an added incentive for him to research how people responded to authority. He was born in New York City in 1933, the year the Nazi Party came into power in Germany. Relatives of Milgram’s immediate family who had survived the concentration camps came to stay with his parents in 1946. And as a symbolic historical echo, the televised trial of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, began a few months before Milgram’s first research participants came to the Yale University campus to be tested. Eichmann was hanged five days after the end of Milgram’s first study.

Many members of the Nazi leadership explained away their actions as having simply followed orders, an excuse that became known as the Nuremberg defense. Milgram’s experiments certainly look at first glance as confirming the banality of evil, that the capacity to commit atrocities resides in all of us and simply awaits the right circumstances to be made manifest. The fact that Milgram’s results have been replicated time and time again, by different researchers all over the world, using both men and women, lends credence to the idea.

However, all that these replications show is that the results Milgram got were real, not that the banality of evil is necessarily true. So many of Milgram’s participants—ordinary adults from the community around Yale University—were willing to shock a stranger because he had made a mistake in a memory exercise. They were told by a man in a lab coat to please go on; that the experiment required them to continue; that it was absolutely essential to continue; that they had no other choice and had to go on. Thus, they kept flipping the switches, despite the pounding on the wall, the screams, the demands to be let out. This much is true.

But why did they do it?

A noble goal

I was recently asked by a journalist if I thought that the open data movement, which calls for the free and transparent availability of scientific data to everyone, would help solve the problem of people disbelieving scientific facts and embracing fake science and conspiracy theories. I don’t think so because a lack of data is not the main issue here. It’s how to interpret it.

Milgram wrote a whole book about his experiments, and Yale University holds an archive of the 720 individual experiments he conducted between August 1961 and May 1962, including audiotapes, questionnaires and notes . We have the data. Yet here we are, sixty years later, and psychologists still do not agree on exactly why so many of Milgram’s participants acted the way they did. There are theories, of course, but no consensus.

Milgram himself began by suspecting that his obedient subjects had chosen to cooperate with the experimenter, that “every man must be responsible for his own actions,” as he wrote, and that these experiments would help people make better choices under duress. He subsequently came to embrace a different explanation: submission. The participants willing to shock despite the feedback they were receiving from the victim had relinquished their agency, he proposed. They were, essentially, just following orders.

There is something troubling about this explanation, especially since Milgram’s experiments are often used to help make sense of how the Nazis went about killing 6 million Jews , up to a quarter of million people with disabilities, hundreds and thousands of queer people, and more. Secret tape recordings of senior German officers captured by the British provide evidence that the Nuremberg defense of “just following orders” was actually a conspiracy. It had been discussed and adopted prior to the trial as their official excuse. In truth, there were many examples of Nazi leaders reminding their people of the nobility of their cause. As a team of researchers reinterpreting Milgram’s data put it, “they did it because they believed that what they were doing was right.”

Likewise, there are valid arguments to be made that the data Milgram collected can be interpreted in a similar light, that his participants did not simply absolve themselves of all responsibility because someone else was in charge, but that they wanted to actively contribute to an important research project. Milgram, in fact, made sure that his participants saw his experiments as being worthy and noble. It can be argued that the participants wanted to help the experimenter answer important scientific questions and were willing to keep pushing because the experimenter told them it was in pursuit of this crucial goal and that the shocks would not result in permanent tissue damage. A later analysis of the data showed that one of the major points where participants decided to stop administering the shocks was when they reached 150 volts . This was the moment in the research script when the victim would first demand to be released. If the participant felt he was helping the experimenter with an important scientific goal, this is the point where this bond would be challenged. At least, that’s the hypothesis, one of many.

And while there may be a similarity between Milgram’s participants and the Nazis in that both believed they were doing the right thing, there are also many points of divergence. In Milgram’s experiments, the victim was not seen as subhuman and the shocks were said not to cause permanent harm. The Nazis had a long-term goal but Milgram’s participants didn’t, beyond carrying out the instructions of the experimenter. The Holocaust unfolded over years, while each research participant spent maybe an hour in the laboratory. Importantly, Nazi leaders were in authority while Milgram’s experimenter was seen as an authority because of the scientific context. Obedience to the man in the lab coat drastically declined when he was not in the room, whereas the Nazi’s political authority had to work at a distance.

Figuring out what is really going on in Milgram-type experiments will prove challenging, however. Research ethics in the 1960s were a lot looser than they are now. Because of abuses in medical research, such as the radiation studies of the Manhattan project and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, American guidelines on studies using human participants came about in 1966 and were extended to the social and behavioural sciences in 1971 . In 2009, psychology researcher Jerry Burger wrote that “no study using procedures similar to Milgram’s has been published in more than three decades.” He followed this up by detailing his own partial replication of Milgram’s work on obedience to authority.

How did he do it in an ethical landscape much more concerned with the well-being of research participants? He used an extensive procedure to screen out anyone who might react negatively during the experiment; repeatedly told his participants they could withdraw during the study and still get paid; stopped the experiment at 150 volts, since those who chose to administer this voltage in the past tended to go all the way to the end anyway; gave his participants a thorough debriefing right after the experiment was done; and ended an experiment if any sign of excessive stress was perceived. The specific Milgram study he was attempting to replicate had demonstrated an 82.5% obedience rate; Burger’s was not statistically different at 70%.

Burger opened the door to continuing to investigate obedience to authority in a more humane context, but his methodology was criticized by others. The subtitle to his paper was “Would people still obey today?,” and while he provided data that indicated that not much had changed since the 1960s (and, by implication, the 1930s and 40s), one of Milgram’s original research assistants disagreed . Given how widely known Milgram’s experiments are, we can wonder if this knowledge has made people more empathetic and less willing to blindly obey authority. Burger, however, specifically screened out anyone who had taken more than two psychology classes to avoid people who might suspect what was going on. He also screened out anyone who might become genuinely stressed out by the protocol. All of this means that the number of people who would disobey today might have been undercounted.

Over the course of half a century, Stanley Milgram’s seminal explorations of authority and obedience have been scrutinized, denounced, criticized, and replicated. The fake box his participants used to deliver fake shocks can now be seen at the University of Akron’s Archives of the History of American Psychology . Audio recordings of the experimental sessions have been listened to and commented on. And yet, we still do not know precisely why so many ordinary people thought they were punishing a fellow human being for a mistake they had made and kept going… or why so many refused to participate past a certain point. It’s probably not just a question of the situation they were in, nor only because of who they were as people, but rather an interaction between both situation and personality.

Psychology is often referred to as a “squishy science,” because human behaviour is so much more fluid and harder to predict than the behaviour of a single atom. That doesn’t mean psychology is useless. It means the data we accumulate on it requires careful interpretation. Knowing what happens is only part of the answer. We must know why it happens.

Take-home message: - Stanley Milgram oversaw more than 20 different sets of experiments into obedience to authority in the 1960s, where participants thought they were administering electric shocks to a victim, and depending on the study design, from 0% to 93% of participants fully obeyed to the end - There is still no consensus on why so many participants were obedient, though theories having to do with choice, submission, and the nobility of the scientific research have been put forward - Because of stricter ethical rules protecting research participants, it is now impossible to fully replicate what Milgram did in the 1960s, although full replications were done decades ago and partial replications have been done recently

@CrackedScience

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Department and University Information

Office for science and society.

• Milgram Experiment: Explaining Obedience to Authority

The Milgram experiment is a classic social psychology study revealing the dangers of obedience to authority and how the situation affects behaviour.

The Milgram experiment, led by the well-known psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, aimed to test people’s obedience to authority.

The results of the Milgram experiment, sometimes known as the Milgram obedience study, continue to be both thought-provoking and controversial.

The experimental procedure left some people sweating and trembling, leaving 10 percent extremely upset, while others broke into unexplained hysterical laughter.

What finding could be so powerful that it sent many psychologists into frenzied rebuttals?

This study has come in for considerable criticism with some saying its claims are wildly overblown.

Obedience to authority

Stanley Milgram’s now famous experiments were designed to test obedience to authority ( Milgram, 1963 ).

What Milgram wanted to know was how far humans will go when an authority figure orders them to hurt another human being.

Many wondered after the horrors of WWII, and not for the first time, how people could be motivated to commit acts of such brutality towards each other.

Not just those in the armed forces, but ordinary people were coerced into carrying out the most cruel and gruesome acts.

But Milgram didn’t investigate the extreme situation of war, he wanted to see how people would react under relatively ‘ordinary’ conditions in the lab.

How would people behave when told to give an electrical shock to another person?

To what extent would people obey the dictates of the situation and ignore their own misgivings about what they were doing?

The Milgram experiment procedure

The experimental situation into which people were put was initially straightforward.

Participants in the Milgram experiment were told they were involved in a learning experiment, that they were to administer electrical shocks and that they should continue to the end of the experiment.

Told they would be the ‘teacher and another person the ‘learner’, they sat in front of a machine with a number of dials labelled with steadily increasing voltages.

This was the famous ‘shock machine’ in the Milgram experiment.

The third switch from the top was labelled: “Danger: Severe Shock”, the last two simply: “XXX”.

During the course of the Milgram experiment, each time the ‘learner’ made a mistake the participant was ordered to administer ever-increasing electrical shocks.

Of course the learner kept making mistakes so the teacher (the poor participant) had to keep giving higher and higher electrical shocks, and hearing the resultant screams of pain until finally the learner went quiet.

Participants were not in fact delivering electrical shocks, the learner in the Milgram experiment was actually an actor following a rehearsed script.

The learner was kept out of sight of the participants so they came to their own assumptions about the pain they were causing.

They were, however, left in little doubt that towards the end of the experiment the shocks were extremely painful and the learner might well have been rendered unconscious.

When the participant baulked at giving the electrical shocks, the experimenter – an authority figure dressed in a white lab coat – ordered them to continue.

Results of the Milgram shock experiments

Before I explain the results, try to imagine yourself as the participant in the Milgram experiment.

How far would you go giving what you thought were electrical shocks to another human being simply for a study about memory?

What would you think when the learner went quiet after you apparently administered a shock labelled on the board “Danger: Severe Shock”?

How far would you go?

How ever far you think, you’re probably underestimating as that’s what most people do.

Like the Milgram experiment itself, the results shocked.

The Milgram experiment discovered people are much more obedient than you might imagine.

Fully 63 percent of the participants continued right until the end – they administered all the shocks even with the learner screaming in agony, begging to stop and eventually falling silent.

These weren’t specially selected sadists, these were ordinary people like you and me who had volunteered for the Milgram experiment.

Explanation of the Milgram experiment

At the time the Milgram experiment was big news.

Milgram explained his results by the power of the situation.

This was a social psychology experiment which appeared to show, beautifully in fact, how much social situations can influence people’s behaviour.

The Milgram experiment set off a small industry of follow-up studies carried out in labs all around the world.

Were the findings of the Milgram experiment still true in different cultures, in slightly varying situations and in different genders (only men were in the original study)?

By and large the answers were that even when manipulating many different experimental variables, people were still remarkably obedient.

One exception was that one study found Australian women were much less obedient.

Make of that what you will.

Criticism of the Milgram experiment

Now think again.

Sure, the experiment relies on the situation to influence people’s behaviour, but how real is the situation?

If it was you, surely you would understand on some level that this wasn’t real, that you weren’t really electrocuting someone, that knocking someone unconscious would not be allowed in a university study like this Milgram experiment?

Also, people pick up considerable nonverbal cues from each other.

How good would the actors have to be in the Milgram experiment in order to avoid giving away the fact they were actors?

People are adept at playing along even with those situations they know in their heart-of-hearts to be fake.

The more we find out about human psychology, the more we discover about the power of unconscious processes, both emotional and cognitive.

These can have massive influences on our behaviour without our awareness.

Alternative explanation of the Milgram experiment

Assuming people were not utterly convinced on an unconscious level that the experiment was for real, an alternative explanation is in order.

Perhaps the Milgram experiment really demonstrates the power of conformity .

The pull we all feel to please the experimenter, to fit in with the situation, to do what is expected of us.

While this is still a powerful interpretation from a brilliant experiment, it isn’t what Milgram was really looking for.

The influence of the Milgram experiment

Whether you believe the experiment shows what it purports to or not, there is no doubting that the Milgram experiment was some of the most influential and impressive carried out in psychology.

It is also an experiment very unlikely to be repeated nowadays (outside of virtual reality ) because of modern ethical standards.

Certainly when I first came across it, my view of human nature was changed irrevocably.

Now, thinking critically, I’m not so sure.

Milgram experiment repeated

The Milgram experiment has since been repeated by Doliński et al. (2017) , with the same weird result .

Of the 80 people in the study, fully 90% went all the way to the maximum level of electrocution after being ‘ordered’ to by the experimenter.

Dr Tomasz Grzyb, a study author, said:

“…half a century after Milgram’s original research into obedience to authority, a striking majority of subjects are still willing to electrocute a helpless individual.”

→ This post is part of a series on the best social psychology experiments :

• Halo Effect : Definition And How It Affects Our Perception
• Cognitive Dissonance : How and Why We Lie to Ourselves
• Robbers Cave Experiment : How Group Conflicts Develop
• Stanford Prison Experiment : Zimbardo’s Famous Social Psychology Study
• False Consensus Effect : What It Is And Why It Happens
• Social Identity Theory And The Minimal Group Paradigm
• Negotiation : 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most
• Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility
• Asch Conformity Experiment : The Power Of Social Pressure

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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Would You Electrocute An Innocent Person If Told To? New Research Says Yes

Otis Historical Archives/Flickr

More than 50 years have passed since Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted several highly controversial experiments to determine just how far people would go in the name of following orders.

Now, a new study has built on Milgram’s experiments and come to a terrifying conclusion: 90 percent of participants would electrocute an innocent person simply because they were told to do so.

The Milgram studies found a large proportion of participants willing to obey such instructions way back then, and the same apparently holds true after all these years.

Milgram’s original experiment was a behavioral study of obedience — a subject which some say became of great interest following the Holocaust and the lingering question of how many Nazis were simply following orders. Published in 1963 , the study consisted of a series of experiments that measured a person’s willingness to obey orders given by an authority figure, even at the cost of physically harming an innocent stranger.

When Milgram and his team conducted their first study, they had willing participants, each paid four dollars for their time. While all participants lived in and around the New Haven, Connecticut area, they varied in other critical ways: ages ranged from 20-50, as did their professional status.

A fellow participant would introduce other participants to one another, and they would then drew straws to determine who would be the “learner” and the “teacher,” the latter of which was placed in a room with a figure of authority — in this case, a scientist. The learner was seated in a separate room with a series of buttons placed in front of them, and the pair communicated via a microphone.

The teacher then began asking a number of predetermined questions. If the learner got the answer to any of the questions wrong, the teacher administered a shock, which was sent to the learner via electrodes affixed to the skin. The learner could be seen wincing in pain each time a shock was delivered, yet the teacher was instructed to continue doling out such punishment with every incorrect answer.

Wikimedia Commons A participant recruitment flyer for one of the original Milgram experiments.

As far as the severity of the punishments, teachers were presented with 30 knobs, each labeled with varying degrees of voltage ranging from 15 to 450. Learners could be seen and heard grunting, contorting in pain, screaming, and pleading for their tormentor to stop. Some even complained of heart pain when the voltage got high enough.

So what could convince a person to continue to shock a stranger who was pleading with them to relent? Orders from an authority figure.

As the experiment continued, most teachers became less inclined to go on. Scientists often met this resistance with specific prompts , or prods. At the first sign of dissent, the scientists simply asked the teachers to please continue. Next, the scientists told the teachers they were required to continue. In the third prod, the scientists stated that it was absolutely essential that they continue. And ultimately, the fourth and final prod informed the teachers that they had no other choice but to continue.

Sixty-five percent of the teachers continued to the highest level of 450 volts under such orders. One hundred percent made it to 300 volts before finally refusing to continue.

While this certainly sounds sinister, it’s important to note that the “learners” involved in each experiment were actors, all of whom were in on the game from the jump. While they received minor shocks to elicit a more “authentic” reaction, for the most part, the grimaces, twitches, and outward exclamations of pain were fabricated. Even the drawing of straws in the earliest experiment was rigged to produce a fixed outcome: It always placed a confidant of Milgram’s in the learner’s seat.

This news, when it was finally revealed at experiment’s end, certainly came as a relief to the teachers who had inflicted pain and suffering on their learners. Many believed they had actually killed their counterpart in the name of a four-dollar science experiment.

Some teachers, however, reacted surprisingly, either justifying their actions, blaming the experimenter doling out orders, or even blaming the learners themselves , calling them stupid and deserving of such a punishment. Very few questioned the experimenter’s authority.

Milgram conducted the experiment 18 times, and the consistently large percentage of participants willing to go all the way baffled him and his colleagues.

The recent study, which yielded an even larger percentage of compliant followers, elicited the same response among researchers.

“Upon learning about Milgram’s experiments, a vast majority of people claim that ‘I would never behave in such a manner,’ wrote Tomasz Grzyb , a social psychologist involved in the research. “Our study has, yet again, illustrated the tremendous power of the situation the subjects are confronted with and how easily they can agree to things which they find unpleasant.”

The latest experiment — whose results were published in the journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology — was nearly identical to Milgram’s, save for the fact that only 80 people participated and the experiments took place in Poland.

Interestingly, and perhaps symptomatic of another aspect of human behavior that has not vanished over the years, researchers noted that the number of people who refused to administer shocks grew to three times greater when faced with a female learner.

For more scary experiments, check out the human radiation tests that the U.S. government secretly conducted on U.S. citizens . Then, discover four of the most evil science experiments ever performed .

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