the milgram experiment aim

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.

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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
• Verywell Mind - What was the Milgram Experiment?
• BCcampus Open Publishing - Ethics in Law Enforcement - The Milgram Experiment
• Nature - Modern Milgram experiment sheds light on power of authority
• SimplyPsychology - Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment: Summary, Results, & Ethics
• University of California - College of Natural Resources - Milgrams Experiment on Obedience to Authority

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understand the infamous study and its conclusions about human nature

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

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

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

Key Takeaways: The Milgram Experiment

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

Detailed Milgram’s Experiment Summary

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

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

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

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

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

Critiques of the Milgram Experiment

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

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

Variations on the Milgram Experiment

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

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

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

Replicating the Milgram Experiment

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

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

The Legacy of the Milgram Experiment

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

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

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

Milgram Experiment

The Milgram Experiment: Understanding Obedience to Authority

The Milgram Experiment, conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s, remains one of the most controversial and influential studies in the history of psychology. This groundbreaking experiment aimed to investigate the extent to which individuals would comply with authority figures, even when their actions conflicted with their personal conscience.

Milgram’s basic premise was that “the person who, with inner conviction, loathes stealing, killing, and assault may find himself performing these acts with relative ease when commanded by authority. Behavior that is unthinkable in an individual who is acting on his own may be executed without hesitation when carried out under orders” ( Milgram, 1974 ).

Key Definition:

Stanley Milgram’s experiments were a series of controversial psychological studies conducted in the 1960s at Yale University. The most well-known of these experiments involved participants being instructed to administer what they believed to be increasingly painful electric shocks to another person, who was actually an actor and not receiving any shocks. The study aimed to investigate the willingness of participants to obey authority figures, even when their actions caused harm to others.

Society, Rules, and Obedience

Milgram explains that “obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority” ( Milgram, 1974 ). Humans need each other. Human societies provides tremendous benefits to the members. Rules, and obedience to the the rules, are necessary ingredients for the smooth functioning of the group. Governments, families, and employers all create rule based expectations, along with punishments for violations.

While obedience is often a virtue, it can also be manipulated. Unscrupulous groups and leaders use blind obedience to serve unethical and diabolical purposes. We may refer to following the dictates of these leaders as destructive obedience.

Background and Methodology

Stanley Milgram designed the experiment in response to the widely debated question of whether the atrocities of the Holocaust could be attributed to a distinct characteristic of the German national character. The study first of several experiments in this series was conducted at Yale University and involved participants who were led to believe that they were taking part in a memory and learning experiment. Milgram conducted 24 variations of this experiment in total.

The unsuspecting participants were assigned the role of “teacher” and instructed to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to a “learner” whenever they made a mistake in a word-pairing task. Unbeknownst to the “teacher,” the “learner” was an actor who did not actually receive any electric shocks. This setup was intended to investigate the “teacher’s” willingness to obey the instructions of the experimenter, despite the apparent distress exhibited by the “learner.”

Commands from Authority Figure

When a teacher was hesitant to administer stronger shocks to the learner the experimenter prodded the teacher with specific orders.

The prods were, in this order:

• Please continue or Please go on.
• The experiment requires that you continue.
• It is absolutely essential that you continue.
• You have no other choice; you must go on ( Milgram, 1963 )

The Level Progressive Level of Shocks

The seven levels of shocks progressively administered were:

• Slight Shock
• Moderate Shock
• Strong Shock
• Very Strong Shock
• Intense Shock
• Extreme Intensity Shock
• Danger: Severe Shock ( Milgram, 1963 )

Milgram predicted that most US citizens would break off early from the experiment, refusing to administer stronger shocks. However, the results proved different. “In the repeated trial of the baseline experiment, about 65% of people obeyed all the way to the punitively fatal end” ( Badhwar, 2009 ).

Results and Implications

The results of the Milgram Experiment were startling, as a significant majority of participants were willing to administer the highest level of electric shocks to the “learner” when instructed to do so by the authority figure. Many participants displayed extreme discomfort and distress during the experiment, yet they continued to follow the orders given to them.

Based on his research, Milgram stated that “if a system of death camps were set up in the US of the sorts we had seen in Nazi Germany one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town” ( Sapolski, 2018. Kindle location: 7,343 ). We proudly defend that this could never happen her. Yet, with supporting provocation from an unscrupulous leader, a group of violent protesters marched on our nation’s capital ready to kill.

Robyn Dawes wrote, “the implication of Milgram’s experiments and others that followed is that ‘authoritarianism’ is not such an unusual phenomenon. Perfectly normal people have a tendency to accept authority—even to the point of inflicting pain and possible harm on others, or at least believing they are. In fact, so strong is this tendency that we do not make compelling demands on authorities to prove that they are indeed authorities” ( Dawes, 1996. p. 202 ).

Inner Tension

Erich Fromm wrote that social scientists discovered two findings from Milgram’s experiments. “The first finding concerns the sheer strength of obedient tendencies manifested in this situation.” He explains that “subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will. Yet, 26 students abandon this tenet in following the instructions of an authority who has no special powers to enforce his commands.”

Fromm continues, “the second unanticipated effect was the extraordinary tension generated by the procedures. One might suppose that a subject would simply break off or continue as his conscience dictated. Yet, this is very far from what happened” ( Fromm, 2013. Kindle location: 1,128) . Obedience to authority when that obedience conflicts with inner tenants of behavior creates tension that we must resolve.

These findings raised profound ethical concerns and sparked important discussions about the power of authority. Also of importance, the experiments bring attention to the influence of situational factors on behavior. Accordingly, we see the potential for ordinary individuals to commit acts that violate their moral principles when ordered to do so by an authority figure.

Moral Justification

As Milgram proclaimed, “the person who, with inner conviction, loathes stealing, killing, and assault may find himself performing these acts with relative ease when commanded by authority.” And thus, ordinary citizens act in extraordinary and violent ways, self-righteously violating self proclaimed values and ordinary human ethics to gladly march in obedience to an authority figure.

According to Albert Bandura we internalize laws that regulate our behavior through self sanctions. However, when our behaviors violate these self sanctions, shunning the internalized ethical laws, we justify .

According to moral disengagement theory , moral justification refers to the process of framing harmful actions or behaviors in a way that makes them seem morally acceptable or justified. In many instances, it appears that obedience to authority supersedes internalized ethics. However, we then must address the cognitive dissonance of conflicting morals and behaviors. We do this through a number of defensive strategies .

Legacy and Ethical Considerations

Peter K. Lunt wrote, “Milgram is perhaps the best-known social psychologist outside the discipline and he and his experiments are a fantastic ambassador, bringing the issues and concerns of the relation between the individual and the social world to a wide audience” ( Lunt, 2009, p. 111 ).

Despite its immense impact on the field of psychology and popular understanding, the Milgram Experiment has also faced criticism regarding its ethical implications and the potential stress imposed on the participants. Milgram dismissed the stress the experiment caused on the subjects, justifying it brought helpful personal insights about their willingness to obey authorities. Diana Baumrind described this process of gaining self-knowledge as ‘inflicted insight'” ( Herrera, 2001 ).

Nevertheless, it has significantly contributed to our understanding of obedience, conformity, and the complex interactions between individuals and authority figures. The readers of Milgram’s experiments benefit without the harm. However, how do we measure harm to some that benefits others. Can we sacrifice the good of the few for the benefit of the many when the few had no choice in the matter other than willingness to participate in a social experiment at a laboratory at Yale?

A Few Words by Psychology Fanatic

In conclusion, the Milgram Experiment serves as a powerful reminder of the intricacies of human behavior and the critical importance of ethical considerations in psychological research. It continues to stimulate ongoing debates on the nature of obedience, moral decision-making, and the ethical boundaries of scientific inquiry.

Milgram’s experiments, like most experiments, has been subject to harsh criticism. Critics contend he manipulated numbers and tainted the experiments with his own bias. Perhaps, some of their criticism is justified. Personally, I’m not certain that any experiment in the a laboratory can be completely pristine, untainted by the environment. Accordingly, we must view the results with some skepticism. However, this does not dismiss all his findings. We still can learn much from these social experiments, consider our own tendencies to destructively obey, and make some mindful changes.

Last Update: February 23, 2024

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References:

Badhwar, Neera ( 2009 ). The Milgram Experiments, Learned Helplessness, and Character Traits. The Journal of Ethics, 13(3), 257-289. DOI: 10.1007/s10892-009-9052-4

Dawes, Robyn ( 1996 ). House of Cards. Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth. Free Press; 1st edition.

Fromm, Erich ( 2013 ). The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Open Road Media; 1st edition.

Herrera, C. ( 2001 ). Ethics, Deception, and ‘Those Milgram Experiments’. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 18(3). DOI: 10.1111/1468-5930.00192

Kumar Das, Krishanu ( 2020 ). Milgram’s Experiment: Obedience or Emotional Adaptation on Empathy Emotional Scale?. Social Sciences. DOI: 10.11648/j.ss.20200901.12

Lunt, Peter Kenneth ( 2009 ). Stanley Milgram: Understanding Obedience and its Implications. ‎Bloomsbury Academic; 1st edition.

Milgram, Stanley ( 1963 ). Behavioral Study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 67(4), 371-378. DOI: 10.1037/h0040525

Milgram, Stanley ( 2009 /1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. ‎ Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition.

Sapolski, Robert ( 2018 ). Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Penguin Books; Illustrated edition.

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Author Interviews

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

Behind the Shock Machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview Highlights

On turning from an admirer of Milgram to a critic

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

Watch A Video Of One Of The Milgram Obedience Experiments

On the many variations of the experiment

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

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

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

On the ethics of working with human subjects

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

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

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

On conversations with the subjects, decades after the experiment

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

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

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

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

• 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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Article contents

Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority.

• Stephen Gibson Stephen Gibson Heriot-Watt University, School of Social Sciences
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.511
• Published online: 30 June 2020

Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority are among the most influential and controversial social scientific studies ever conducted. They remain staples of introductory psychology courses and textbooks, yet their influence reaches far beyond psychology, with myriad other disciplines finding lessons in them. Indeed, the experiments have long since broken free of the confines of academia, occupying a place in popular culture that is unrivaled among psychological experiments. The present article begins with an overview of Milgram’s account of his experimental procedure and findings, before focussing on recent scholarship that has used materials from Milgram’s archive to challenge many of the long-held assumptions about the experiments. Three areas in which our understanding of the obedience experiments has undergone a radical shift in recent years are the subject of particular focus. First, work that has identified new ethical problems with Milgram’s studies is summarized. Second, hitherto unknown methodological variations in Milgram’s experimental procedures are considered. Third, the interactions that took place in the experimental sessions themselves are explored. This work has contributed to a shift in how we see the obedience experiments. Rather than viewing the experiments as demonstrations of people’s propensity to follow orders, it is now clear that people did not follow orders in Milgram’s experiments. The experimenter did a lot more than simply issue orders, and when he did, participants found it relatively straightforward to defy them. These arguments are discussed in relation to the definition of obedience that has typically been adopted in psychology, the need for further historical work on Milgram’s experiments, and the possibilities afforded by the development of a broader project of secondary qualitative analysis of laboratory interaction in psychology experiments.

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• interaction
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What percentage of participants agreed to administer 300-volt shocks?

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Milgram's study was an example of a ______ experiment.

The fact that Milgram conducted his experiment in a laboratory setting and controlled for several variables adds to the ______ validity of his study.

Almost all nurses agreed to administer an unknown drug to the patient when told to do so by an unknown doctor over the phone, in the study conducted by Hofling et al. (1966) .

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Children are known to be more vulnerable to being coerced into obeying than adults. But what other factors determine whether a human will or won’t display a specific behaviour in response to a command? Is it just part of some people’s nature, or do the circumstances determine whether people obey? Finding the answers to these questions is a major topic in social psychology .

• What was Milgram's obedience experiment based on?
• How was Milgram's obedience experiment set up?
• What was Milgram's hypothesis?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of Milgram's experiment?
• What are the ethical issues with Milgram's experiment?

Milgram’s Original Obedience Experiment

A year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking officer in Nazi Germany, Stanley Milgram (1963) carried out a series of experiments to investigate why and to what extent people obey authority. Eichmann’s legal defence, and that of many other Nazis prosecuted after the holocaust, was: ‘ We were just following orders .

Were these Germans particularly obedient people, or was it just part of human nature to follow orders from someone in authority? This is what Milgram wanted to find out in his psychology experiment.

Aim of Milgram's Experiment

Milgram’s first obedience test investigated destructive obedience . He continued investigating many specific variations in his later experiments in 1965 and mostly focused on situational influences on obedience, such as location, uniforms, and proximity.

After his first study, Milgram went on to develop his agency theory which offers some explanations as to why people obey.

Forty male participants from different professional backgrounds from the local area around Yale in Connecticut, between 20-50 years of age, were recruited through a newspaper advertisement and paid $4.50 per day to participate in a study on memory .

Milgram's Obedience to Authority Experiment Setup

When participants arrived at Milgram’s lab at Yale University in Connecticut, they were told that they were participating in an experiment about punishment in learning. An individual participant and a confederate (‘Mr. Wallace’) would draw numbers out of a hat to see which one would take on the role of ‘learner’ or ‘teacher’. The draw was rigged, so the participant would always end up as the ‘teacher’. A third person was also involved; an ‘experimenter’ wearing a grey lab coat, who represented the authority figure.

The participant would witness the ‘learner’ being strapped into an ‘electric chair’ in the neighbouring room, and he and the ‘experimenter’ would sit on the other side of a wall. The participant was instructed to run through a set of learning tasks with the ‘learner’. Each time the ‘learner’ got an answer wrong, the ‘experimenter’ was to turn up the voltage by one unit and deliver a shock until the ‘learner’ had achieved the task without error.

The study was designed so that no real shocks were administered and the ‘learner’ was never going to succeed in his memory task. The experiment was designed to be open-ended so that the participant’s conscience alone would determine the outcome of the experiment.

The levels of voltage that the participant was administering were clearly labelled and ranged from 15 volts (slight shock) to 300 volts (Danger: severe shock) and 450 volts (XXX). They were informed that the shocks would be painful but cause no permanent tissue damage and given a sample shock of 45 volts (fairly low) to prove that the shocks actually hurt.

While carrying out the procedure, the ‘learner’ would provide standardised reactions. When the voltages got beyond 300 volts, the ‘learner’ would start pleading for the ‘teacher’ to stop, saying he wanted to leave, shout, pound the wall, and at 315 volts, there would be no responses given from the ‘learner’ anymore at all.

Usually, around the 300 volts mark, the participant would ask the ‘experimenter’ for guidance. Each time the ‘teacher’ tried to protest or asked to leave, the ‘experimenter’ would reinforce the instructions using a script of four stock answers in sequence, called prods.

Prod 1: ‘Please continue', or ‘Please go on.’

Prod 2: ‘The experiment requires that you continue.’

Prod 3: ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue.’

Prod 4: ‘You have no other choice, you must go on.’

There were also similar standardised responses the ‘experimenter’ gave when asked whether the subject was going to be harmed by the shocks. If the subject asked if the learner was liable to suffer permanent physical injury, the experimenter said:

Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on.’

If the subject said that the learner did not want to go on, the experimenter replied:

Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on.’

The Hypothesis of Milgram's Experiment

Milgram’s hypothesis was based on his World War II observations. He hypothesized that the Nazi soldiers were following orders in extreme situations. He said that the pressure that these people were under was so great that they obeyed demands they would not normally have done.

Results of Milgram's Obedience Experiment

During the trials, all of the participants went up to at least 300 volts. Five of the participants (12.5%) stopped at 300 volts when the first signs of distress by the learner appeared. Thirty-five (65%) went up to the highest level of 450 volts, a result that neither Milgram nor his students anticipated.

Participants also showed intense signs of tension and distress including nervous laughing fits, groaning, ‘digging fingernails into their flesh’ and convulsions. For one participant the experiment had to be cut short because they had started having a seizure.

Milgram’s experiment indicates that it is normal to obey legitimate authority figures , even if the order goes against our conscience.

After the study, all the participants were told of the hoax and debriefed, including meeting the ‘learner’ again.

Conclusion of Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Experiment

All of the study participants obeyed the authority figure when asked to go against their better judgement rather than refuse to proceed. Although they were met with resistance, all study participants had been informed at the start that they could stop the experiment at any point. Milgram argued that it’s normal for humans to give in to destructive obedience when pressured.

What was surprising about Milgram’s experiment was how easy it was to get people to be destructive - participants obeyed even in the absence of force or threat. Milgram’s results speak against the idea that particular groups of people are more prone to obedience than others.

For your exam, you might be asked how Milgram measured the level of obedience of his participants, as well as how variables were controlled in the laboratory.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Milgram’s Experiment

First, let us explore the contributions and positive aspects overall of Milgram’s experiment.

Some of its strengths include:

Operationalisation of Human Behaviour

Let's first review what operationalisation means.

In psychology, operationalisation means being able to measure invisible human behaviour in numbers.

It’s a major part of making psychology a legitimate science that can produce objective results. This allows for comparison of people with each other and statistical analysis as well as comparison with other similar experiments that happen in other places in the world and even in the future. By creating a fake shocking apparatus, Milgram was able to measure in numbers to which extent humans would obey authority.

The control of variables through set prods, a unified setting, and procedure means that it’s more likely that the results of Milgram’s experiment produced internally valid results. This is a strength of laboratory experiments in general; because of the controlled environment, it is more likely that the researcher can measure what they set out to measure.

Reliability

With the shock experiment, Milgram was able to reproduce a similar result with forty different participants. After his first experiment, he also went on to test many different variables that could influence obedience.

There were numerous criticisms and debates surrounding Milgram’s obedience experiment. Let’s explore a couple of examples.

External validity

There is some debate about whether Milgram’s obedience study has external validity. Even though conditions were strictly controlled, the laboratory experiment is an artificial situation and this might factor into how the participants behaved. Orne and Holland (1968) thought that the participants might have guessed that they were not really harming anyone. This casts doubt on whether the same behaviour would be seen in real life - what is known as ecological validity .

However, some factors speak for the external validity of Milgram’s study, one example being a similar experiment having been conducted in a different setting. Hofling et al. (1966) conducted a similar study to Milgram, but in a hospital setting. Nurses were instructed to administer an unknown drug to a patient over the phone by a doctor they didn’t know. In the study, 21 out of 22 nurses (95%) were heading to give the drug to the patient before being intercepted by the researchers. On the other hand, when this experiment was replicated by Rank and Jacobson (1977) using a known doctor and known drug (Valium), only two out of 18 nurses (10%) carried out the order.

The Debate about Internal Validity

The internal validity was questioned after Perry (2012) examined the tapes of the experiment and noted that many participants expressed doubts that the shocks were real to the ‘experimenter’. This might indicate that what was displayed in the experiment was not genuine behaviour but rather the effect of unconscious or conscious influence by the researchers.

Biased sample

The sample was made up exclusively of American men, so it’s not clear whether the same results would be obtained using other gender groups or cultures. To investigate this, Burger (2009) partially replicated the original experiment using a mixed male and female American sample with diverse ethnic backgrounds and a broader age range. The results were similar to Milgram’s, showing that gender , ethnic background, and age might not be contributing factors to obedience.

There have been many replications of Milgram’s experiment in other Western countries and most have delivered similar results; however, Shanab’s (1987) replication in Jordan showed remarkable differences in that Jordanian students were significantly more likely to obey across the board. This raises the question of whether there is a difference in levels of obedience in different cultures.

Ethical Issues with Milgram’s Experiment

Although the participants were debriefed and 83.7% of them went away from the experiment satisfied, the experiment itself was ethically problematic. Using deception in a study means that the participants can’t give their full consent as they don’t know what they’re agreeing to.

Also, keeping participants in an experiment against their will is a violation of their autonomy, but Milgram’s four stock answers (prods) meant that the participants were denied their right to leave. It is the researcher’s responsibility to ensure that no harm comes to the participants, but in this study, the signs of mental distress became so extreme that the study subjects went into convulsions.

After the conclusion of the experiment, the participants were informed of what was actually being measured. However, do you think the participants had long-lasting mental harm from the experiment and what they did?

At the time that Milgram carried out his experiment into obedience, there were no official research ethics standards. It was studies like that of Milgram and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment that forced psychologists to put ethics rules and regulations in place. However, ethics rules aren’t as strict outside of the scientific context, so replications of the experiment can still be carried out for entertainment purposes on TV shows.

Milgram Experiment - Key takeaways

• Milgram investigated obedience to legitimate authority in his 1963 study. He based his study on Germans obeying to Nazi order during the Holocaust and World War II.
• Milgram found that when pressured by an authority figure, 65% of people would shock another person with dangerous levels of electricity. This indicates that it is normal behaviour for humans to obey authority figures.
• The strengths of Milgram’s obedience experiment were that the laboratory setting allowed for a controlling of many variables, internal validity was good as well as reliability.
• Criticisms of Milgram’s obedience experiment include that the results might not be applicable in the real world and across cultures.
• Participants weren’t told the truth about what they were being tested on, so it’s considered an unethical experiment by today’s standards.

Flashcards in Milgram Experiment 10

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Frequently Asked Questions about Milgram Experiment

What did Milgram's experiment conclude?

The Milgram obedience experiment showed that when pressured, most people will obey orders that could be harmful to other people.

What were the criticisms of Milgram’s research?

The criticisms of Milgram’s research were that the laboratory experiment can’t be applied to situations in the real world, so his conclusions can’t be taken as indicators of true human nature. Also, the experiment was unethical. As the sample used for Milgram’s obedience experiment were mainly American men, there is also the question of whether his conclusions apply to other genders as well as across cultures.

Was Milgram's experiment ethical?

The Milgram obedience experiment was unethical because the study participants were misled about the real aim of the experiment, meaning they couldn’t consent, and it caused extreme distress to some of the participants.

Is the Milgram experiment reliable?

The Milgram obedience experiment is considered reliable because variables were mainly controlled and the results are reproducible.

What did Milgram's experiment test?

Milgram’s first obedience test investigated destructive obedience. He continued to investigate many specific variations in his later experiments in 1965 and mostly focused on situational influences on obedience such as location, uniforms, and proximity.

Test your knowledge with multiple choice flashcards

Milgram's research focus on _______ factors influencing obedience.

In Milgram's experiment, the participants were either assigned the role of a teacher or a learner.

Who was the authority figure in Milgram's experiment?

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Group 1: Social Sciences

The milgram shock experiment.

by Saul McLeod [1] used with permission

One of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology was carried out by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University. 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).

View a video on The Milgram Shock Experiment on the Simply Psychology page, whose author gave permission to use this article.

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).

Milgram’s Experiment

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 lab 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, who was 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 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.

Sixty-five percent (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:

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.

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.

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 precent in the original study). In total 636 participants have been tested in 18 different variation studies.

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

Change of Location

The experiment was moved to a set of run down offices rather than the impressive Yale University. Obedience dropped to 47.5 percent. This suggests that status of location effects obedience.

Two Teacher Condition

When participants could instruct an assistant (confederate) to press the switches, 92.5 percent shocked to the maximum 450 volts. 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 they refuse to participate after 150 volts. Obedience fell to 30 percent.

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

Social Support Condition

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

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

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 percent.

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

Critical Evaluation

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 & 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.

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 & 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.

Ethical Issues

• Deception – 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 percent said that they were “glad to be in the experiment,” and 1.3 percent 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.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.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. Milgram also interviewed the participants one year after the event and concluded that most were happy that they had taken part.
• 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 6/7 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 that there were no signs of any long-term psychological harm. In fact, the majority of the participants (83.7%) said that they were pleased that they had participated.
• 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). Did Milgram give participants an opportunity to withdraw? The experimenter gave four verbal prods which mostly discouraged withdrawal from the experiment:

1. Please continue. 2. The experiment requires that you continue. 3. It is absolutely essential that you continue. 4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

Milgram argued that they are 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 percent of participants had chosen to withdraw.  (end of article; references below refer to the article)

Additional Information

This is a video that draws some conclusions about the Milgram experiment, from Khan Academy.

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

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 . New York: Harper Collins.

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

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). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

Note that you may download a copy of this article as a .pdf from the website listed in the attributions below.

[1] McLeod, S. A. (2017, Febuary 05).  The milgram shock experiment . Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html

• article The Milgram Experiment. Authored by : Saul McLeod. Provided by : SimplyPsychology. Located at : https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html . License : CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives . License Terms : used with permission
• video What we can learn from the Milgram experiment. Authored by : Khan Academy. Provided by : YouTube. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTZKp8nOhVU . License : Other . License Terms : YouTube video

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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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• Feb 24, 2020

The Power of Authority: Milgram’s Shock Experiments

By: Adam Tseng

Would you ever shock a random stranger on the street? Sounds like an obvious “no,” doesn’t it? But what if you were ordered to do it by someone important? Would you still say no?

This is the question Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram set out to answer in his famous Shock Experiments.📷

After the Second World War, the horrors of the Holocaust were exposed to the world. Americans balked at the thought that the Nazis killed millions of Jewish innocents without batting an eye. Their crimes seemed inexplicable. But when the murderers were put on trial, their answers were all the same: “I was only following orders.” It’s easy to label all of those concentration camp guards, SS soldiers, and party officers as half-crazed demons possessed by a devilish, fanatical desire to exterminate the Jewish race. However, Milgram was skeptical of that notion and decided to put it to the test.

For his experiments, Milgram created three roles: a researcher, teacher and student. The study subjects drew straws to determine whether they would be a teacher or student, but the draw was intentionally botched so that all of the subjects ended up being the teacher . The student and the researcher were both secretly working for Milgram. Each new teacher would be escorted in by the researcher and told that they would be asking the student questions and administering a shock through a special machine upon an incorrect response, increasing the voltage with each wrong answer. Though the machine and shocks were not real, they certainly looked like they were. Deliberately, the student would provide numerous wrong answers, prompting the teacher to increase the voltage dramatically. Over the course of the experiment, the student would feign excruciating pain, pleading to be released, and let out disturbing screams, but the researcher would prompt the teacher to continue asking questions and delivering shocks. 📷

The results were chilling. Sixty-five percent of all the subjects reached the maximum voltage (400 volts) in shock delivery. All of them surpassed 300 volts. Though the subjects became visibly distressed by what they were doing to the student and had every right to simply walk out, they all felt compelled to continue because of the researcher’s instructions.

Milgram demonstrated the enormous power of conformity and social influence - two factors that captivated and puzzled social psychologists - and how they affected people’s behavior with others. Though a person, left to himself, may be kind and virtuous, his personality often changes within a group. He realized that, due to the influence of the researcher, the subjects felt safer and more justified in delivering the cruel shocks. This was because the researcher was perceived to be a knowledgeable authority figure who would take responsibility for his actions. After all, they assumed that the researcher “knew what he was doing.” This desire to stay with the norm in order to fit in with a group is called normative social influence .

The Shock Experiments showed that the Nazis, who murdered millions of innocent Jews, weren’t devils or sadists. They were ordinary people driven to commit horrific acts by higher-ups in the German chain of command. While this did not vindicate the crimes committed by the Nazis in any way, it did reveal a far more sinister conclusion. In using regular citizens, workers, professionals, and commoners as his test subjects, Milgram proved this fearsome scenario could happen anywhere and to anyone.

Every story has a bright side, and even this unnerving one is no exception. Throughout the study, the subjects had been cognizant of the massive pain they were inflicting on the student, and simply felt hard pressed by the researchers to continue. This cognizance became clear when Milgram informed the subjects that the student was in fact unharmed after the experiments ended. They displayed extreme relief, even to the point of tears. In a variation of his experiments, Milgram added two other teachers. All three of them were given the same instructions to ask questions and deliver increasingly powerful shocks (which were actually fake, just like in the original experiment), but only one of the teachers was a subject. Under Milgram’s secret directions, the other two, who were not subjects, intentionally stopped and refused to continue at 150 and 210 volts, walking out the door. This change in experimental protocol resulted in a 90% decrease in obedience from the original study, showing that people were capable of rising up and resisting authority, so long as they had fellow peers to look up to. It only takes a few courageous people to light the spark to ignite the fire of rebellion that can overcome the power of authority. As Stanley Milgram himself put it:

“It may be that we are puppets… controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.”

Works Cited

Cherry, Kendra. “Why Was the Milgram Experiment so Controversial?” Verywell Mind , Verywell Mind, 16 Sept. 2019, www.verywellmind.com/the-milgram-obedience-experiment-2795243.

“The History Project.” History Posts, on This Day, Videos, Amazing Photographs , thehistoryproject.co.uk/posts.php?id=121.

Mcleod, Saul. “The Milgram Experiment.” Milgram Experiment | Simply Psychology , Simply Psychology, 5 Feb. 2017, www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html.

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• Published: 18 February 2016

Modern Milgram experiment sheds light on power of authority

• Alison Abbott  

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

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• Neuroscience

People obeying commands feel less responsibility for their actions.

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

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

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

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

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

Ordered to shock

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

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

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

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

Sense of agency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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November 1, 2012

What Milgram’s Shock Experiments Really Mean

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

By Michael Shermer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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What is the milgram experiment in behavioral science, what is the milgram experiment.

The Milgram Experiment was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. The primary goal of the experiments was to investigate the willingness of ordinary individuals to obey authority figures, even when the instructions given by the authority figure led to the infliction of harm on another person. The experiments were inspired by the Holocaust and aimed to better understand the factors that contributed to the compliance of people during the Nazi regime.

What are findings of Milgram Experiment?

Obedience to authority.

A majority of the participants were willing to obey the authority figure and administer increasingly severe electric shocks to a “learner,” even when the shocks appeared to cause the learner significant pain and distress. This finding demonstrated the powerful influence of authority on human behavior and the capacity of ordinary individuals to commit harmful acts when instructed by an authority figure.

Gradual Escalation

Participants were more likely to continue administering shocks if the intensity of the shocks was increased gradually, rather than abruptly. This gradual escalation made it easier for the participants to rationalize their actions and avoid taking responsibility for the harm they were inflicting on the learner.

Factors Affecting Obedience

Various factors could influence the level of obedience displayed by participants. For example, obedience rates were higher when the experimenter was physically present, when the learner was in another room, and when the participant did not have to directly administer the shock. These factors highlight the complex interplay between situational and psychological factors that contribute to obedience.

Examples of Milgram Experiment

The Milgram Experiment itself is the primary example of this type of study. In the experiment, participants were instructed by an authority figure (the experimenter) to administer electric shocks of increasing intensity to a “learner” (a confederate) each time the learner made an error in a memory task. The participants were led to believe that the shocks were real and that they were causing the learner pain, although no actual shocks were administered.

Shortcomings and Criticisms of Milgram Experiment

Ethical concerns.

The Milgram Experiment has been widely criticized for its ethical shortcomings, as it exposed participants to significant psychological distress and deception, potentially leading to long-term harm.

Lack of Scientific Rigor

Critics have also questioned the scientific rigor of the Milgram Experiment, citing concerns about demand characteristics, the small sample size, and the potential influence of experimenter bias on the outcomes.

Limited Generalizability

Some researchers argue that the findings of the Milgram Experiment may be limited in their generalizability, as the study was conducted primarily with American participants during a specific historical context.

Alternative Explanations

Some critics have suggested that factors other than obedience to authority, such as the desire to conform to social norms or a belief in the importance of the experiment, may have contributed to the participants’ willingness to administer shocks.

Importance and Impact

Despite these criticisms, the Milgram Experiment remains a foundational study in the field of behavioral science, offering valuable insights into the power of authority and the factors that influence obedience. The ethical concerns raised by the experiment have also led to the development of more stringent ethical guidelines for conducting psychological research, helping to protect the well-being of participants.

Related Behavioral Science Terms

Belief perseverance, crystallized intelligence, extraneous variable, representative sample, factor analysis, egocentrism, stimulus generalization, reciprocal determinism, divergent thinking, convergent thinking, social environment, decision making, related articles.

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How The Milgram Experiment Showed That Anyone Could Be A Monster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Was The Milgram Experiment?

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

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

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

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

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

What Happened When The “Test-Takers” Failed Their Tests?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Results Of The Milgram Experiment

Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Participants in the Milgram experiment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some other findings from the Milgram experiment:

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

The Legacy Of The Milgram Experiment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The latest news and views on education from oxford university press., think you know all about milgram’s obedience experiments.

Milgram’s obedience studies are amongst the most famous in all of psychology and taught to all psychology students. But if you think you know all about them, chances are that a new film from shortcuts tv, Beyond Milgram , will get you thinking again.

When Professors Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher asked samples of psychology students what Milgram’s experiments showed, over 90% replied that ‘people will obey instructions from someone in authority, even if it means harming others’. This is hardly surprising as the conventional view of Milgram’s shock machine experiments, taught to generations of psychology students over more than five decades, is that they demonstrated that quite ordinary, decent  people are capable of inflicting what they believed was serious harm to another person just because they are told to by an authority figure. Some of Milgram’s results were indeed literally shocking. In the famous baseline condition – the one everyone sees with unhappy volunteer ‘teachers’ being told by a white coated experimenter ‘please continue’ giving electric shocks to a complaining ‘learner’ – an incredible 65% of participants continued increasing voltage right through to the maximum 450 volts.

Haslam and Reicher don’t question the validity of Milgram’s findings, nor do they try to explain them away as many have done. On the contrary, they see them as very significant, but argue that the famous baseline condition only tells part of a bigger story. If  you look at the many much less familiar variants Milgram used, involving in all almost a thousand participants, you find as much disobedience as obedience and, ironically, when experimenters actually issued the command, ‘You have no other choice, you must go on’, all participants refused to continue.

‘Whatever else these studies are about, and whatever else they show,’ says Reicher, ‘they don’t show that people automatically obey orders.’

Reicher argues that Milgram’s explanation, that people go into a passive ‘agentic state’ where they simply obey orders, just doesn’t fit his own findings!  If you listen carefully to the experiments (shown in the film with illustrative clips of the original black and white footage) you see that participants are not passively listening to one voice. Rather they’re actively listening to two voices, the experimenter telling them to continue and the ‘learner’ pleading with them to stop. So the key question here is, why did participants sometimes obey the voice telling them to continue and sometimes refuse?

For Haslam and Reicher, the answer to this question is found in social identity.  The famous baseline condition with its incredible rate of compliance was structured to encourage the participants’ identification with the project.  It was conducted at the prestigious Yale University, the white coated experimenter was authoritative and also took time to explain to each participant just how important this scientific experiment was for helping to improve learning.  However, when Milgram switched the location of the experiments to seedy downtown Bridgeport, compliance fell below 50%.  When the experimenters were indifferent, offhand, or simply phoned in commands, compliance fell to just above 20%, and when there were two experimenters who argued with each other and issued contradictory orders it fell to zero.

‘The crucial variable here is identification, says Haslam. ‘People will only obey orders to harm others when they identify with those orders and believe the good outweighs the harm. In Milgram’s experiments, participants obeyed when they believed the good of the scientific cause outweighs the harm being done.’ And when participants were debriefed and told the real purpose of the experiments, most were glad they participated and very few had any regrets about their involvement in spite of the deception involved.

So, according to Haslam and Reicher, Milgram’s experiments are actually telling us a very different story from the one that has been told generations of psychology students and which appears to lend credibility to Hannah Arendt’s notion of the ‘banality of evil’.  People obey orders to harm others not because they go into an agentic state that blinds them to the consequences of their actions, but rather because they believe in and identify with what they are doing.  This interpretation has massive social implications.

From the point of view of social identity theory, those who organised the mass destruction of populations, planted bombs in city centres, tortured suspected terrorists or gave electric shocks in a Yale laboratory more than half a century ago all shared one thing in common. They identified with what they were doing, in spite of the harm caused to others. They didn’t lapse into a passive agentic state. Rather, they believed that what they were doing was right. And that’s the really frightening thing about Milgram’s experiments.

Steve Taylor has degrees in sociology, psychology and law. He works at the University of London and is a scriptwriter for shortcuts tv . 

The full  Milgram: Obedience and Identity film is available from shortcuts tv .

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AQA ALEVEL PSYCHOLOGY - Social Influence: Milgram (1963) Obedience to Authority Experiment

Subject: Psychology

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Unit of work

Last updated

4 September 2024

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This is a complete set of notes for Milgram’s obedience research in AQA Alevel Psychology in the subtopic of social influence. This includes his aim, procedure, findings, conclusion and evaluation points. I hope this helps you with your revision. If you have any questions please message me or leave a reviews. Thank you

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