Obedience Test 1 - Milgram's Shocker

Humans have been shown to be obedient in the presence of perceived legitimate authority figures, as shown by the Milgram experiment in the 1963, which was carried out by Stanley Milgram to find out how the Nazi's managed to get ordinary people to take part in the mass murders of the Holocaust. 

Stanley Milgram

The experiment showed that obedience to authority was the norm, not the exception. Regarding obedience, Milgram said that;

"Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to; Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others."

ABOUT THE EXPERIMENTS

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the popular question at that particular time: 

• "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? 
• Could we call them all accomplices?"

Dr Diana Baumrind

The experiments have been repeated many times in the following years with consistent results within differing societies, although not with the same percentages across the globe.The experiments were also controversial, and considered by some scientists to be unethical and physically or psychologically abusive. Psychologist Diana Baumrind considered the experiment "harmful because it may cause permanent psychological damage and cause people to be less trusting in the future"

How was the experiment being conducted?

An advertisement was placed in a local paper. Participants are paid $4.00 per hour for taking part.Three individuals were involved;

• The one running the experiment (an authoritative role)
• The subject of the experiment (a volunteer) - "the teacher"
• A confederate pretending to be a volunteer - "the teacher but claim to be the student"

The "teacher" and "learner" were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. The teacher sits in an adjoining room with the experimenter. Participant is shown the equipment, and procedure is explained. The arrangement for the experiments was shown as below;

The confederate will be asked a series of questions. An incorrect answer will result in an electric shock, delivered by the teacher. The teacher is given a 45V shock to show that the equipment is real. Control panel has switches (15V to 450V) and each incorrect answer gets a shock 15V higher than the last. The experimenter encourages the teacher with various instructions.

As the experiment proceeds, the confederate was heard to make various noises:

• 75V, 90V and 105V --- a little grunt
• 120V --- complains about the pain
• 150V --- ‘get me out of here....’
• 180V --- ‘I can’t stand the pain...’
• 270V --- an agonised scream
• 300V --- he shouts that he will answer no more questions.
• 315V --- violent scream
• 330V --- silence
• 345V onwards --- there's only silence

Remember:  No shocks were ever received!!!

The summary of the experiment can be seen on this video from youtube below;

What is the findings of Milgram's Experiments?

Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors to predict the behaviour of 100 hypothetical teachers. All of the poll respondents believed that only a very small fraction of teachers (the range was from zero to 3 out of 100, with an average of 1.2) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock. Milgram also polled forty psychiatrists from a medical school and they believed that by the tenth shock, when the victim demands to be free, most subjects would stop the experiment. They predicted that by the 300 volt shock, when the victim refuses to answer, only 3.73 percent of the subjects would still continue and they believed that "only a little over one-tenth of one percent of the subjects would administer the highest shock on the board."

In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment's final massive 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment; some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. Throughout the experiment, subjects displayed varying degrees of tension and stress. Subjects were sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, groaning, digging their fingernails into their skin, and some were even having nervous laughing fits or seizures.

The findings can be summarise as below;

Although 65% of the participants choose to obey order, the remaining of Milgram’s participants refused to obey.  Possible reasons for this:

• Responsibility.  One of Milgram’s participants refused because she’d lived in Nazi Germany and had seen enough pain inflicted in her lifetime. Milgram believed past memories had ‘woken’ her from her agentic state
• Education. Gamson et al (1982) were conducting a research study when one of the participants became suspicious of the procedure and persuaded others to withdraw.  The participant had read about Milgram's research and questioned the legitimacy of the experimenters.  The person made use of their education.
• Morality.  Kohlberg outlined a number of stages of moral reasoning that we progress through.  He found that people who have reached the higher levels are more likely to disobey unreasonable demands and question authority when it appears unjust.
• Disobedient model.  Watching others disobey reminds us that we are able to do the same.
• Knowledge of authority.  For example, one nurse out of 22 in Hofling’s study that knew the rules and refused to obey instructions to administer the drug.

Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, 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.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.