hypothesis in milgram experiment

Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

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

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

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

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

On This Page:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milgram’s Experiment (1963)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milgram’s Agency Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Milgram (1974, p. 188):

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

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

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

Milgram Experiment Variations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Teacher Condition

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

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

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

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

Touch Proximity Condition

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

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

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

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

Social Support Condition

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

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

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

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

Absent Experimenter Condition 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical Evaluation

Inaccurate description of the prod methodology:.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milgram’s experiment lacked external validity:

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

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

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

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

Milgram’s sample was biased:

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

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

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

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

Selective reporting of experimental findings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethical Issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protection of participants 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right to Withdrawal 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Replications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milgram (1963) Audio Clips

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

Why was the Milgram experiment so controversial?

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

Would Milgram’s experiment be allowed today?

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

Did anyone refuse the Milgram experiment?

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

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

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

Were all participants in Milgram’s experiments male?

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

Why was the Milgram experiment unethical?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

Learning Check

Which is true regarding the Milgram obedience study?

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

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

Short Answer Questions

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

Group Activity

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

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

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

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

Essay Topic

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

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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.

Milgram S.  Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.  Harper & Row.

Russell N, Gregory R. The Milgram-Holocaust linkage: challenging the present consensus . State Crim J. 2015;4(2):128-153.

Russell NJC. Milgram's obedience to authority experiments: origins and early evolution . Br J Soc Psychol . 2011;50:140-162. doi:10.1348/014466610X492205

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

Milgram S. Liberating effects of group pressure . J Person Soc Psychol. 1965;1(2):127-234. doi:10.1037/h0021650

Haslam N, Loughnan S, Perry G. Meta-Milgram: an empirical synthesis of the obedience experiments .  PLoS One . 2014;9(4):e93927. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0093927

Perry G. Deception and illusion in Milgram's accounts of the obedience experiments . Theory Appl Ethics . 2013;2(2):79-92.

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

Burger J. Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? . Am Psychol . 2009;64(1):1-11. doi:10.1037/a0010932

Elms AC. Obedience lite . American Psychologist . 2009;64(1):32-36. doi:10.1037/a0014473

Miller AG. Reflections on “replicating Milgram” (Burger, 2009) . American Psychologist . 2009;64(1):20-27. doi:10.1037/a0014407

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

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

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

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

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

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Milgram experiment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What is the milgram experiment (a definition)​, video: milgram's obedience experiment​.

Why Is the Milgram Experiment Important?

Milgram Experiment Theory

The psychology of the milgram experiment, ethical issues in the milgram experiment​.

Milgram Experiment Results

Milgram experiment & obedience to authority, milgram experiment participants.

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Books Related to the Milgram Experiment​

• The Milgram Experiment: The History and Legacy of the Controversial Social Psychology Experiment
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• Understanding Willing Participants, Volume 1: Milgram’s Obedience Experiments and the Holocaust

Final Thoughts on the Milgram Experiment​

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• American Psychological Association. (1959). Ethical standards of psychologists. American Psychologist , 14 , 279–282.
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• Blass, T. (1999). The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority. Journal of Applied Social Psychology , 29 (5), 955–978.
• Brannigan, A. (2013). Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments: A report card 50 years later. Society , 50 (6), 623–628.
• Grzyb, T., & Dolinski, D. (2017). Beliefs about obedience levels in studies conducted within the Milgram paradigm: Better than average effect and comparisons of typical behaviors by residents of various nations. Frontiers in Psychology , 8 , 1632.
• Haslam, N., Loughnan, S., & Perry, G. (2014). Meta-Milgram: An empirical synthesis of the obedience experiments. PloS One , 9 (4), e93927.
• Hollander, M. M., & Maynard, D. W. (2016). Do unto others...? Methodological advance and self-versus other-attentive resistance in Milgram’s “obedience” experiments. Social Psychology Quarterly , 79 (4), 355–375.
• Laurens, S., & Ballot, M. (2021). “We must continue.” The strange appearance of “we” instead of “you” in the prods of the Milgram experiment. Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology , 5 (4), 556–563.
• Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67 (4), 371–378.
• Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view . Harper-Collins.
• Miller, A. G. (2009). Reflections on "Replicating Milgram" (Burger, 2009). American Psychologist , 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 (6), 737–761.
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Behavioral Study of Obedience: Insights from Milgram’s Groundbreaking Experiments

A haunting question emerges from the annals of psychological research: how far will ordinary people go in obeying orders, even when those orders conflict with their moral conscience? This unsettling inquiry has captivated psychologists, sociologists, and ethicists for decades, sparking intense debates about the nature of human behavior and the power of authority.

The study of obedience in psychology delves deep into the human psyche, exploring the complex interplay between individual morality and societal pressures. At its core, obedience refers to the act of complying with commands or instructions from an authority figure, even when those directives may conflict with personal beliefs or ethical standards. It’s a phenomenon that permeates every aspect of our lives, from childhood interactions with parents and teachers to adult relationships with bosses, government officials, and other authority figures.

Understanding obedience is crucial for unraveling the mysteries of human behavior. It helps us comprehend why seemingly good people can sometimes participate in harmful or unethical acts when instructed to do so by those in positions of power. This knowledge has far-reaching implications for fields as diverse as organizational psychology, military training, and even the study of historical atrocities.

The history of obedience research is rich and complex, with roots stretching back to the aftermath of World War II. As the world grappled with the horrors of the Holocaust, psychologists and social scientists sought to understand how ordinary citizens could have participated in such widespread acts of cruelty and genocide. This quest for answers led to a series of groundbreaking experiments that would forever change our understanding of human behavior.

Milgram’s Obedience Experiment: A Landmark Study

In the early 1960s, a young psychologist named Stanley Milgram embarked on a research project that would become one of the most famous and controversial studies in the history of psychology. Motivated by a desire to understand the mechanisms behind the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, Milgram designed an experiment to test the limits of obedience to authority.

The experimental design was deceptively simple, yet profoundly revealing. Participants were told they were taking part in a study on learning and memory. They were instructed to administer electric shocks to a “learner” (actually an actor) whenever the learner gave an incorrect answer to a series of questions. The voltage of the shocks increased with each wrong answer, eventually reaching levels that would be fatal if real.

What the participants didn’t know was that the true purpose of the experiment was to see how far they would go in following orders to harm another person. The results were shocking, to say the least. A staggering 65% of participants continued to administer shocks up to the maximum voltage, despite hearing the learner’s (fake) cries of pain and pleas to stop.

These findings sent shockwaves through the scientific community and beyond. They suggested that ordinary people could be compelled to commit acts of cruelty simply by following orders from an authority figure. The implications were profound and deeply unsettling.

However, Milgram’s study was not without its critics. Behavioral research design principles were called into question, with many arguing that the experiment was unethical and potentially harmful to participants. The psychological distress experienced by some subjects raised serious concerns about the balance between scientific inquiry and ethical considerations.

Despite these controversies, Milgram’s work remains a cornerstone of obedience research, sparking countless debates and inspiring numerous follow-up studies. Its impact on our understanding of human behavior cannot be overstated.

Factors Influencing Obedience

Milgram’s experiments and subsequent research have identified several key factors that influence obedience. One of the most significant is the presence of authority figures. We’re hardwired to respect and follow those in positions of power, whether they’re wearing a lab coat, a police uniform, or a business suit. This tendency can sometimes override our own moral judgments, leading us to comply with orders we might otherwise question.

Social pressure and conformity also play crucial roles in obedience. Conformity occurs when people change their behavior to fit in with the group, even if it means going against their personal beliefs. In Milgram’s experiments, the presence of other participants (actually confederates of the experimenter) who obeyed without question increased the likelihood that the real subject would also comply.

The proximity of the authority figure and the victim also influences obedience levels. Milgram found that when participants were physically closer to the learner or further from the experimenter, they were less likely to obey harmful commands. This suggests that distance can create a psychological buffer that makes it easier to follow orders that conflict with our moral standards.

Personal responsibility and its diffusion also play significant roles in obedience situations. When individuals feel that the responsibility for their actions is shared with others or rests primarily with the authority figure giving the orders, they’re more likely to comply with unethical demands. This diffusion of responsibility can lead to a dangerous abdication of moral agency.

Replications and Variations of Milgram’s Study

Since Milgram’s groundbreaking work, numerous researchers have attempted to replicate and expand upon his findings. Cross-cultural studies have shown that while there are some variations in obedience levels across different societies, the basic tendency to obey authority is a universal human trait.

Gender differences in obedience behavior have also been explored, with mixed results. Some studies suggest that women may be slightly more likely to disobey unethical orders than men, but these differences are generally small and context-dependent.

Modern adaptations of obedience experiments have sought to address ethical concerns while still probing the limits of human compliance. For example, some researchers have used role-playing scenarios or simulated environments to study obedience without putting participants in potentially distressing situations.

The advent of virtual reality technology has opened up new avenues for obedience research. Human behavior experiments in virtual environments allow researchers to create realistic scenarios that test obedience without the ethical concerns associated with traditional methods. These studies have largely confirmed Milgram’s findings, showing that even in simulated environments, people tend to obey authority figures to a surprising degree.

Implications of Obedience Studies

The insights gained from obedience research have far-reaching implications for various aspects of society. Understanding destructive obedience can help us develop strategies to prevent individuals from blindly following harmful orders. This knowledge is particularly relevant in contexts where authority figures might abuse their power, such as in totalitarian regimes or corrupt organizations.

In the realm of organizational psychology, obedience studies have informed management practices and leadership training. By recognizing the power of authority and the potential for its misuse, companies can create more ethical work environments and foster a culture of responsible decision-making.

The findings from obedience research also have significant implications for military and law enforcement training. These institutions must strike a delicate balance between instilling discipline and obedience while also encouraging ethical behavior and moral courage. Training programs now often include scenarios that challenge trainees to question unethical orders and make independent moral judgments.

Perhaps most poignantly, obedience studies help us understand historical atrocities like the Holocaust. While they don’t excuse the actions of those who participated in such events, they provide insight into the psychological mechanisms that can lead ordinary people to commit extraordinary acts of cruelty when ordered to do so by authority figures.

Critiques and Limitations of Obedience Research

Despite its profound impact, obedience research is not without its critics. One of the main concerns is ecological validity – the extent to which laboratory findings can be generalized to real-world situations. Critics argue that the artificial nature of experiments like Milgram’s may not accurately reflect how people would behave in genuine high-stakes situations.

Ethical constraints in modern obedience studies have limited researchers’ ability to fully replicate or extend Milgram’s work. While this is undoubtedly necessary to protect participants, it also means that our understanding of obedience in extreme situations remains somewhat limited.

Some researchers have proposed alternative explanations for obedience behavior observed in these experiments. For instance, some argue that participants may have been motivated more by a desire to please the experimenter or avoid confrontation than by blind obedience to authority.

The generalizability of findings to real-world situations is another area of debate. While obedience studies provide valuable insights, the complexity of real-life scenarios involving authority and moral decision-making may not be fully captured in experimental settings.

Behavioral theories limitations also come into play when considering obedience research. These theories often struggle to account for individual differences in personality, cultural background, and personal experiences that may influence obedience behavior.

The Ongoing Relevance of Obedience Research

Despite these limitations, the study of obedience remains highly relevant in contemporary society. In an era of increasing polarization and the rise of authoritarian tendencies in various parts of the world, understanding the mechanisms of obedience is more crucial than ever.

The basic principles that govern your behavior , including obedience to authority, continue to shape our social interactions and societal structures. By studying these principles, we can develop strategies to promote ethical behavior and resist harmful compliance.

Future directions for obedience studies in psychology are likely to focus on more nuanced aspects of compliance and resistance. Researchers may explore how individual differences in personality, moral reasoning, and critical thinking skills influence obedience behavior. The role of technology in shaping our responses to authority figures is another promising area of investigation.

Behavioral science projects focusing on obedience could yield valuable insights into how we can foster environments that encourage ethical decision-making and moral courage. For instance, studies might explore how education and training can enhance individuals’ ability to question authority and make independent moral judgments.

The Power of Critical Thinking and Moral Responsibility

As we reflect on the lessons learned from decades of obedience research, one thing becomes clear: the importance of critical thinking and moral responsibility in the face of authority cannot be overstated. While obedience can serve important social functions, blind compliance with unethical orders can lead to disastrous consequences.

Cultivating a society that values independent moral reasoning alongside respect for legitimate authority is a challenging but crucial task. It requires a delicate balance between maintaining social order and encouraging individuals to question and challenge unethical directives.

Education plays a vital role in this process. By teaching critical thinking skills and ethical reasoning from an early age, we can equip individuals with the tools they need to navigate complex moral situations. Behavioral experiments in educational settings can help students understand the dynamics of obedience and develop strategies for resisting harmful compliance.

Moreover, fostering a culture that values moral courage is essential. This means celebrating those who stand up against unethical orders and creating systems that protect whistleblowers and dissenters. By doing so, we can create a society that is more resilient to the dangers of destructive obedience.

Conclusion: The Ongoing Journey of Understanding Human Behavior

The study of obedience has come a long way since Milgram’s groundbreaking experiments, but many questions remain unanswered. As we continue to grapple with the complexities of human behavior, obedience research serves as a powerful reminder of our capacity for both compliance and resistance.

Human behavior and mind study is an ongoing journey, one that requires constant vigilance and self-reflection. By understanding the factors that influence our obedience to authority, we can work towards creating a world where ethical considerations trump blind compliance.

As we move forward, it’s crucial to remember that the power to resist harmful orders lies within each of us. By cultivating critical thinking skills, fostering moral courage, and remaining vigilant against the abuse of authority, we can harness the positive aspects of obedience while guarding against its dangers.

The haunting question that opened this exploration may never be fully answered, but our ongoing efforts to understand and address the complexities of obedience bring us closer to a society where moral conscience prevails over unquestioning compliance. In this pursuit, we not only advance our scientific understanding of human behavior but also contribute to the creation of a more just and ethical world.

References:

1. Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral Study of Obedience. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378.

2. Blass, T. (1999). The Milgram Paradigm After 35 Years: Some Things We Now Know About Obedience to Authority. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 29(5), 955-978.

3. Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today? American Psychologist, 64(1), 1-11.

4. Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2012). Contesting the “Nature” of Conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo’s Studies Really Show. PLoS Biology, 10(11), e1001426.

5. Zimbardo, P. G. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House.

6. Slater, M., Antley, A., Davison, A., Swapp, D., Guger, C., Barker, C., … & Sanchez-Vives, M. V. (2006). A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments. PloS one, 1(1), e39.

7. Passini, S., & Morselli, D. (2009). Authority Relationships Between Obedience and Disobedience. New Ideas in Psychology, 27(1), 96-106.

8. Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2009). The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. Free Press.

9. Cialdini, R. B. (2009). Influence: Science and Practice (5th ed.). Pearson Education.

10. Bandura, A. (1999). Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193-209.

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

Understand the infamous study and its conclusions about human nature

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

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

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

Key Takeaways: The Milgram Experiment

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

Detailed Milgram’s Experiment Summary

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

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

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

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

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

Critiques of the Milgram Experiment

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

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

Variations on the Milgram Experiment

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

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

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

Replicating the Milgram Experiment

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

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

The Legacy of the Milgram Experiment

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

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

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

From the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Psychology Program

Obedience and Authority: Stanley Milgram’s Shocking Experiment

In the early 1960’s, Stanley Milgram conducted a study of obedience to authority figures that would eventually impact Social Psychology forever. He was particularly interested in how and why Nazi workers were willing to kill thousands of innocent people.  This helped him create an experiment that looked at obedience to authority figures.

The Experiment

Milgram had 40 participants, all male, and ages that ranged from 20 to 50 years. The participants would be paired with another ‘participant’, who was actually a confederate that knew the purpose of the experiment. The confederate would always be the learner, and the participant would always be the teacher.

The learners job was to ‘memorize’ a list of word pairs. The learner was  placed in a room separate from the teacher, and was strapped to a chair with electrodes (see picture). The teacher was placed in front of a switch board apparatus, which would administer shocks at different levels to the learner. The board had increasing voltage from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 volts (danger-severe shock).

The teacher would list a word, and the learners objective was to answer with the words correct pairing. When the learner answered incorrectly, the teacher was ordered to give a shock, and increasing the amount of voltage each time. While the learner wasn’t actually feeling any shocks whatsoever, the teacher believed he was experiencing this pain. There was also an actor in the room with the teacher who was dressed as an experimenter in a lab coat, telling them that they must continue and that they have no choice but to continue.

The Results

Surprisingly, 2/3 of the participants continued to the highest shock, 450 volts. 100% of the participants continued to at least 300 volts.

These results suggest than when people are given orders, even when they believe it is causing someone else pain, they are likely to obey. This is true especially when the orders are coming from someone who they perceive as an authority figure.

Additional Resources

There were many different variations of this experiment conducted by Milgram. See below for some videos and helpful links/sources to learn more!

• Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience.  Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67, 371-378.
• http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html

The Stanley Milgram Experiment: Understanding Obedience

May 3, 2023

Discover the intriguing Stanley Milgram Experiment, exploring obedience to authority & human nature. Uncover shocking results & timeless insights.

Main, P (2023, May 03). The Stanley Milgram Experiment: Understanding Obedience. Retrieved from https://www.structural-learning.com/post/stanley-milgram-experiment

What was the Stanley Milgram experiment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who was Stanley Milgram?

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

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

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

Milgram's Independent Variables

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

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

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

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

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

Change of Location

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Touch Proximity Condition

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

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

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

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

Two Teacher Condition

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

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

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

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

Social Support Condition

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

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

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

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

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

Absent Experimenter Condition

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

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

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

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

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

Milgram's Legacy and Influence on Modern Psychology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milgram's Relationship with Other Prominent Psychologists

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

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

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

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

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

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

Criticisms of the Milgram Experiment

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

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

The Impact of Milgram's Research on Social Psychology

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

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

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

Real-Life Examples of Obedience Leading to Human Catastrophe

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

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

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

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

Key Takeaways

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

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

Further Reading on the Milgram Experiment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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• 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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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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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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Stanley Milgram

In 1954 Harvard’s Department of Social Relations took the unusual step of admitting a bright young student who had not taken a single psychology course.  Fortunately Stanley Milgram was soon up to speed in social psychology, and in the course of his doctoral work at Harvard he conducted an innovative cross-cultural comparison of conformity in Norway and France under the guidance of Gordon Allport. 

Obtaining his Ph.D. in 1960, Milgram was ready to expand his work on conformity with a series of experiments on obedience to authority that he conducted as an assistant professor at Yale from 1960 to 1963. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s report on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem, Milgram wondered whether her claims about “the banality of evil” – that evil acts can come from ordinary people following orders as they do their jobs – could be demonstrated in the lab. Milgram staged meticulously designed sham experiments in which subjects were ordered to administer dangerous shocks to fellow volunteers (in reality, the other volunteers were confederates and the shocks were fake). Contradicting the predictions of every expert he polled , Milgram found that more than seventy percent of the subjects administered what they thought might be fatal shocks to an innocent stranger. Collectively known as The Milgram Experiment, this groundbreaking work demonstrated the human tendency to obey commands issued by an authority figure, and more generally, the tendency for behavior to be controlled more by the demands of the situation than by idiosyncratic traits of the person.

The Milgram Experiment is one of the best-known social psychology studies of the 20th century. With this remarkable accomplishment under his belt, young Dr. Milgram returned to Harvard in 1963 to take a position as Assistant Professor of Social Psychology.

During this time at Harvard, Milgram undertook a new, equally innovative line of research, known as the Small World Experiment.  Milgram asked a sample of people to trace out a chain of personal connections to a designated stranger living thousands of miles away. His finding that most people could do this successfully with a chain of six or fewer links yielded the familiar expression “Six Degrees of Separation,” which later became the name of a play and a movie,  a source for the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” and a major theme of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 bestseller,  The Tipping Point . The internet has made it easier to study social networks, and several decades after its discovery, the phenomenon has become a subject of intense new research.

Stanley Milgram left Harvard in 1967 to return to his hometown, New York City, accepting a position as head of the social psychology program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  Tragically, he died of a heart attack at the age of 51. Milgram is listed as number 46 on the American Psychological Association’s list of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century.

Blass, T. (2002).  The man who shocked the world.  Psychology Today, Mar/Apr2002, 35(2), p. 68.

Eminent psychologists of the 20th century.  (July/August, 2002). Monitor on Psychology, 33(7), p.29.

Milgram, S. (1977).  The individual in a social world.  Reading, MA:  Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.

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Taking A Closer Look At Milgram's Shocking Obedience Study

In the early 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a controversial study in which participants were led to believe they were administering...

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."

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."

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."

Audio transcript

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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

Looking back: The making of an (in)famous experiment

Nestar Russell explores the early evolution of Stanley Milgram’s first official obedience to authority experiment.

26 September 2010

In the early 1960s Stanley Milgram (1963) showed that 65 per cent of a sample of ordinary Americans were willing to inflict potentially lethal shocks on an innocent other. Based on documents obtained from Milgram's personal archive at Yale University, I was able to retrace some of the important and unmentioned steps that led to this 'best-known result' (Miller, 1986, p.9).

We all build on the shoulders of those who came before us, and with respect to Solomon Asch, Milgram's obedience experiments were no exception. In his renowned 1951 experiment, Asch demonstrated that a third of all participants would conform to a group of confederates in their provision of obviously incorrect answers on a perceptual line judgement task.

When Milgram describes how his basic experimental procedure evolved, the influence of Asch is clear: I was working for Asch in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1959 and 1960. I was thinking about his group-pressure experiment. One of the criticisms…is that they lack a surface significance, because after all, an experiment with people making judgments of lines has a manifestly trivial content. So the question I asked myself is, How can this be made into a more humanly significant experiment? And it seemed to me that if, instead of having a group exerting pressure on judgments about lines, the group could somehow induce something more significant from the person, then that might be a step in giving a greater face significance to the behavior induced by the group. Could a group, I asked myself, induce a person to act with severity against another person? (Evans, 1980, p.188).

Milgram said he wanted to use group pressure to coerce participants into 'behaving aggressively toward another person' (Tavris, 1974, p.80). Later Milgram (1974, p.148) termed such coercive sources of pressure 'binding factors': powerful bonds that can entrap a person into doing something they might otherwise prefer not to do. He then imagined a situation like Asch's experiment, where a naive participant was placed among a group of actors: …instead of confronting the lines on a card, each one of them would have a shock generator. In other words, I transformed Asch's experiment into one in which the group would administer increasingly higher levels of shock to a person, and the question would be to what degree an individual would follow along with the group (Evans, 1980, pp.188–189). But there was a problem: 'to study the group effect you would also need an experimental control; you'd have to know how the subject performed without any group pressure' (Tavris, 1974, p.80). Asch resolved the problem of requiring an experimental control by running the line-judgement exercise on participants in the absence of the group. However, Milgram was this time unable to draw from Asch's legacy because 'it was not obvious what the inducement would be for a solitary individual to administer shocks in increasing intensities to another person' (Miller, 1986, p.18). According to Milgram, he started 'zeroing in on this experimental control [problem].

Just how far would a person go under the experimenter's orders? It was an incandescent moment… Within a few minutes, dozens of ideas on relevant variables emerged, and the only problem was to get them all down on paper (Tavris, 1974, p.80).

Milgram had his control experiment, but perhaps unwittingly adding 'orders' also introduced a new binding factor: a higher-status person trying to impose their will on someone below them in a hierarchical chain of command.

In support of Milgram's account is an undated archival document (circa 1960) titled 'Studies in Obedience' which describes a rudimentary idea to use a shock device with a 'dial that reads from …light-to-fatal'. He then discusses an initial goal and the main Asch-like coercive technique he intended to deploy to achieve it: 'In order to create the strongest obedience situation use findings of group dynamics' (see also Russell, in press). It seems Milgram was aware that to make his mark and capture the attention of academia, he had to develop an experiment that produced an eye-catching result in the first official publication (after which he could pursue numerous variations in an attempt to unravel why so many obeyed). But what was missing was a rationale as to why the group might agree to hurt an innocent person. Another document also titled 'Studies in Obedience' (circa 1960) with a sketch of a shock 'Panel' (see Figure 1 in PDF version) attempted to address this problem. That is, 'Because of certain possible hazards' the group were to undergo a 'pledge to obey'.

But there is much in this document that Milgram's post-hoc account has failed to mention: a 'War Situation' where one is to adhere to a 'pledge to obey' and all are given a Himmler-like 'Waver [sic] of responsibility', all 'For Germa[n]y'. That Milgram's concerns about the Holocaust – where ordinary Germans later frequently argued they were just following orders – provided the inspiration to invent the obedience experiments has been established (Miller, 1986, p.17). However, the above document illustrates that early in the formulation of his idea he was also attempting to 'cut and paste' into the controlled laboratory setting many of the Nazis' tried and tested techniques of coercion. But in order for Milgram to achieve his unofficial initial goal to 'create the strongest obedience situation', were participants likely to accept a transparently Nazi-sounding 'pledge to obey' orders to inflict severe shocks on an innocent person? The changes that followed would suggest not.

Milgram knew that deceiving participants into thinking they were inflicting shocks on another person was internally likely to generate what he termed strain: intense feelings of tension. He also understood such feelings might detract from his initial goal to create 'the strongest obedience situation'. Milgram countered such feelings by introducing what he would later term strain-resolving mechanisms: measures intended to reduce the tension normally associated with inflicting harm (Milgram, 1974, pp.153–164). For example, instead of a 'pledge to obey', Milgram revealed in his first research proposal (dated October 1960) a new idea: 'Obviously some acceptable rationale must be provided' for inflicting shocks and this was now to be 'achieved by setting the experiment in a context of "social learning".' By contributing to some greater good, Milgram had transformed the infliction of harm from 'something evil' (shocking an innocent person) into something 'good' (advancing human learning) – a strain-resolving conversion process Adams and Belfour (1998, p.xx) termed moral inversion. In this proposal Milgram presented a sketch of the proposed shock device (see Figure 2 in PDF version).

The proposal also mentioned that participants were to be run through the procedure as one of several members of a group or alone. He presumed the group variation 'will cause the critical subject to comply with the experimental commands to a far higher degree than in the "alone" situation' and that, although they might be interesting, the latter's primary purpose was to 'serve as necessary controls for the group experiments'. Building more on Asch's than his own legacy, Milgram's 'Obedience and Group Process' experiments constituted at this time 'the major concern of the present research'.

To assess the idea's viability, Milgram soon after had some of his students build a shock machine (Figure 3 in PDF version), hone the experimental procedure and run the first pilot studies.

The only 'group' pilot Milgram later discussed confirmed his earlier prediction that 'certain persons will follow the group' to the end of the shock board. However, the first test runs of the alone control left him 'astonished' (as cited in Blass, 2004, p.68). Something about the experimenter's commands seemed to render them a far stronger binding factor than he had anticipated.

Perhaps to advance his own legacy, rather than contributing to Asch's, from this point onwards the group force variations were relegated from dominating the research programme to consisting of a couple of minor variations. The 'alone' variations were now to be the main focus.

But there was 'something' about the student-run pilots that Milgram 'was never conviced [sic] of'. He suspected a general lack of professionalism might have tipped some participants off that it was all a ruse. It was of crucial importance that in the official series all participants were convinced the learner was being shocked.

However, one would expect that the more believable the experiments, the more resistant to obeying participants would become. This potential obstacle could defeat Milgram's initial goal to produce a strikingly high completion rate. His solution to this potential problem seems to have been to bombard participants with an array of binding factors and strain-resolving mechanisms that might increase their probability of completing (see Russell, in press).

For example, in a document dated December 1960, Milgram noted that some participants in the pilot mentioned it was the learner's prerogative to 'leave whenever he wants to', and this belief may have emboldened them to stop. Drawing upon his earlier Himmler-like 'Waver [sic] of responsibility', Milgram attempted to reduce the participants' tension regarding their continued participation by proposing: …the following change should be made; … Possible conversation: … EXPERIMENTER: I Have responsibility…go on with the experiment. On 25 January 1961 Milgram completed a second research proposal, which presented several potentially fruitful variations on the basic experimental procedure that, after observing the first pilot studies, Milgram suspected might shed light on why so many participants completed the basic procedure. The variation mentioned first was stimulated by an observation where some participants looked away from the learner, who they could see dimly through a window (Milgram, 1974, pp.33–34), yet continued inflicting shocks. It seemed: '…the salience of the victim may in some degree regulate their performance. This can be tested by varying the "immediacy" of the victim'.

After receiving funding in May 1961, Milgram prepared for a second series of pilot studies and soon after informed his research assistant that the new and improved '[shock] apparatus is almost done and looks thoroughly professional'.

In the second research proposal, while alluding to his initial goal, Milgram asked: 'if one is trying to maximize obedience, is it better to inform a person of the worst of what he may be asked to do at the outset, or is compliance best extracted piecemeal?' Going by the increasing number of switches in Milgram's successive envisioned and actual shock machines from 9 (Figure 1) to 10 (Figure 2) to 12 (Figure 3) to 30 (Figure 4), it would appear Milgram saw merit in the latter. It could be argued these changes represented the inclusion (and extension) of another binding factor that would later become known as the foot-in-the-door technique (Freedman & Fraser, 1966). This is where persons are more likely to agree to a significant request if it is preceded by a comparatively insignificant request.

In late July 1961 Milgram embarked on a second series of pilots that aimed to both eliminate participants' penetrating 'the cover story' and to trial his recent idea to vary the '"immediacy" of the victim'. The two variations piloted were the 'voice feedback' condition (learner could be heard shouting only) and the 'no feed back' condition (after being strapped into the electric chair, the learner could not be seen or heard at all). In the latter condition: 'virtually all subjects, once commanded, went blithely to the end of the board' (Milgram, 1965, p.61). 

Thus, by the final pilot Milgram had discovered how he could achieve his initial goal of maximising the completion rate. But near total obedience: deprived us of an adequate basis for scaling obedient tendencies. A force had to be introduced that would strengthen the subject's resistance to the experimenter's commands (Milgram, 1965, p. 61).  In the first official experiment Milgram decided participants were to experience a little perceptual feedback – auditory stimulation in the form of wall-banging at the 300- and 315-volt shocks. The intention of this procedural adaptation was to slightly increase the intensity of strain (instead of his usual approach of reducing tension).

On 7 August 1961 Milgram felt confident enough to run the first official 'remote' condition, generating his 'best-known' 65 per cent completion rate. In light of the subtle changes, he probably expected a slightly higher completion rate. Nonetheless, with most participants inflicting every shock, he had still achieved his initial goal of maximising the completion rate. And this result became the centrepiece of Milgram's (1963) (in)famous publication 'Behavioral study of obedience' and had its intended effect.

What can Milgram's study tell us about experimental psychology? Milgram was engaging in the ad hoc trial-and-error exploratory method of discovery, where 'a scientist has no very clear idea what will happen, and aims to find out. He [sic] has a feeling for the "direction" in which to go (increase the pressure and see what happens) but no clear expectations of what to expect' (Harré & Second, 1972, p.69). This is how many major discoveries occur in the pure sciences: often more by accident than design. Dynamite was very unlikely to have come about from hypothesis testing!  As Milgram (cited in Evans, 1980, p.191) said: 'Many of the most interesting things we find out in experimentation you don't learn until you carry it out.'

There was nothing underhanded about this approach; as Miller (1986, p.45) has pointed out: 'Given that there was virtually no previous systematic research on obedience, it was understandable that Milgram's focus was essentially in a context of discovery or exploration rather than confirming or disconfirming specific hypotheses'.

As the pictures in this article show, Milgram's indisputably creative idea emerged gradually. Initially it was weak but over time it became a more viable, engaging and truly fascinating project. When reading Milgram's publications one would be forgiven for thinking that he must have woken up one morning with the complete procedure in his head then ran the procedure later on that day. Milgram was clever, but not that clever!

His piloting studies were the seldom mentioned tool that clearly led Milgram to his most fascinating results. Finally, it is important to reiterate that although Milgram may have played an active role in maximising the completion rate in the Remote condition, the official series of experiments were still methodologically very tight. As mentioned, Milgram did not find the student-run pilots totally convincing and it was very important to him that the participants in the official research programme really believed the learner was being shocked. Methodologically, it would seem to me that the obedience research is a very robust series of experiments, and in part that is perhaps why their influence is still felt almost half a century later. - Nestar Russell is at Victoria University of Wellington [email protected]

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Home » Society & Community » Conformity & Obedience » Milgram’s Obedience Experiments » Milgram’s Obedience Experiments #3

Milgram’s Obedience Experiments #3

Replications of the classic study Post-1974 and the publication of Milgram’s book, replications of Milgram’s experiment became increasingly rare as the growth of ethical guidelines and increasingly-powerful ethics committees in academic establishments made it all but impossible to put participants at risk the way Milgram had. However, a number of replications were carried out in other countries and largely support Milgram’s findings as reliable . Among these replications, the percentages of participants going to 450v were:-

• 80% in Italy – Leonardo Ancona & Rosetta Pareyson , 1968
• 85% of a sample of German males – David Mantell , 1971
• 50% of a male British sample –  Peter Burley & John McGuinness , 1977
• 90% of  a sample of Spanish students – Bonny Miranda et al , 1981
• 85% of an Austrian sample recruited from the general public – Grete Schurz , 1985

Not all the replications were as faithful to Milgram as they could have been. One of the more concerning was that of  Mitri Shanab & Khawla  Yahya  (1977). Working with 6-16 year-olds, they found 73% of the children gave what they believed were real electric shocks to other same gender peers. A further potential confounding variable was that the researcher was female.

One of the more interesting replications with regard to gender differences was that of Wesley Kilham & Leon Mann in Australia in 1974. They found 40% of males would go to 450v but only 16% of females. However, potential confounding variables were that participants were all first-year Psychology students and the females’ victim was female student. The lower obedience rates overall may be attributed to the notion that in Australian culture there is more of a tradition of questioning authority.

Possibly the most important neo-replication in terms of supporting Milgram’s Agentic Shift Theory is that of Don Mixon (1972). Participants were recruited through prior general consent – to avoid outright deception – with the result they knew vaguely the area of research they were being involved in but not the specific hypothesis . They were then asked to role play naive participants in a set-up similar to Milgram’s. Those that were told the researcher was responsible for any distress to the learner behaved much like Milgram’s participants – ie: as agents. Those that thought they were personally responsible were significantly less obedient – showing much autonomy .

The 21st Century so far has seen 2 worthy attempts to replicate Milgram.

In 2009 Jerry Burger  became the first experimenter in over 30 years to get permission to carry out a Milgram replication. However, Burger had to make major concessions to get the go-ahead. All the volunteers were pre-screened by clinical psychologists, with those with any signs of emotional or psychological disorder being screened out. The researcher was also (secretly) a clinical psychologist briefed to stop the procedure if a teacher showed signs of excessive stress. Also all trials of those continuing to obey the experimenter were stopped at 150v. It was reasoned that, if the participant would give someone 150v, the likelihood was that they would give them 450v. 22 women and 18 men took part in the replication. Participants were told 3 times that they could withdraw from the study. Only a 15v shock was administered to the teacher, as opposed to the the 45v in Milgram’s studies.

65% of the males and  73% females were willing to go beyond 150v.

A further 30 participants were tested with a confederate acting as an additional teacher. The additional teacher expressed unhappiness about administering shocks to the learner and eventually refused to go on. This was a slight variation on one of Milgram’s own variations but the results were quite different. Whereas this significantly reduced obedience in the original, 63% of Burger’s participants carried on after the confederate refused.

Burger’s participants were ethnically diverse with 54.3% (white), 18.6% (Asian), 12.9% (Latin/Hispanic), 8.6% (Indian- Asian) and 4.3% (African -American). Overall the level of education was higher than in Milgram’s classic study group, with 22.9% having tried college at some point, 40% having bachelor’s degrees and 20% having master’s degrees. Participants were paid $50 and told that the money was their’s to keep, even if they quit the experiment early.

One of the most interesting replications in terms of gender differences was carried out by Charles Sheridan & Richard King (1972). They theorised that perhaps Milgram’s participants had merely played along with the experiment because they realized the victim was faking his cries of pain. Accordingly, they decided to use real electric shocks. Obviously they couldn’t use a human for this purpose, so they used the next best thing: a cute, fluffy puppy.

Students, acting as the ‘trainer’, were required to train the puppy on a discrimination task by punishment with increasingly severe and real shocks. The participants could see the dog suffering and hear its yelps and howls. The researcher did not assure the participants that the puppy would suffer no harm. Many participants tried to gently coax the puppy to escape the shock, to no avail; others shifted nervously from foot to foot, as if sympathising with the animal whose paws were trapped on the electric grid. Some hyperventilated, gasping for air, or even began to cry. As in Milgram’s experiments, however, those who protested were sternly reminded that they had no choice and must continue with the regimen of punishment. Having been informed at the outset that this was an ‘important’ scientific investigation into the “critical fusion frequency” in canine vision, almost all suppressed their own better instincts and ultimately surrendered to authority.  Eventually the puppy received an odourless anaesthetic gas to put it to sleep, leading participants to think they’d killed it. 54% of the male participants went to the maximum voltage – but, interestingly, all of the female went to the max! Some carried on obeying orders to zap the dog after it had ‘died’.

Not a scientific piece of research but relevant nonetheless is  Le Jeu de la Mort   (The Game of Death)  is a  F rench/Swiss television documentary broadcast by the French public television channel France 2. It was presented as a social commentary on the effects of obeying orders and humiliation in reality television, and its broadcast was followed by a studio discussion on the programme.  The documentary focused on a modern version of the Milgram experiment, with the additional factor of reality television’s popularity and influence on the general public. The experiment was performed in the guise of a game show known as  La Zone Xtrême . Volunteers were given €40 to take part as contestants in a “pilot” for the fictitious show, where they had to administer increasingly stronger electric shocks to trained actors posing as players as punishment for incorrect answers, as encouraged to do so by the host and audience.  Only 16 of 80 contestants chose to end the game before delivering the highest voltage punishment.

Milgram’s Pessimism Milgram’s 1974 publication contains quite a pessimistic tone, writing of “the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority” . He went on:  ‘The capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into the large institutional structures…is the fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which, in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival.”  He stated the urgent need  “ to invent political systems that give conscience a better chance over errant authority.”

Although by this time  Abraham Maslow had been published several times with regard to the Hierarchy of Needs and Clare W Graves had published his model, Milgram clearly didn’t take into account different complexities in thinking influencing when and how someone might be obedient – and to what degree. Indeed so trapped does he appear to have been into his 2-dimensional situationalist view  that, it was only with great reluctance he accepted Elms’ findings that ‘personality’  can exert a dispositionalist influence on obedience.

Nonetheless, for all the flaws in Milgram’s work, his obedience experiments are not only brilliant in concept but they do reveal a distinctly concerning tendency to obey, especially under situational pressures.

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• After the end of the study, Milgram debriefed his participants (this is now standard procedure but Milgram was one of the first researchers to do this); he explained the truth to them, introduced them to Mr Wallace (alive and well) and checked that they were in a comfortable mental state.
• 40 participants were interviewed by a psychiatrist a year later and only 2 expressed lasting distress about their part in the study, but they were willing to do it again.
• A questionnaire was sent out to all the participants in all the Variations (see below) and only 1% expressed criticism of the way they had been treated by 84% said they were “glad” or “very glad” to have participated.
• Milgram  pointed out that before the study he had approached his own students, colleagues and professional psychiatrists and no one had suspected that obedience would be as high as it turned out

Relatively few subjects experienced greater tension than a nail-biting patron at a good Hitchcock thriller - Stanley Milgram

I would say, on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiments ... that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town - Stanley Milgram (1979 interview)

How Would People Behave in Milgram’s Experiment Today?

Photo from the Milgram Experiment.

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

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

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

The Original Experiment

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

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

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

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

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

Putting Milgram’s Work in Context

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

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

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

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

Understanding Milgram’s Work Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Meta-Milgram: An Empirical Synthesis of the Obedience Experiments

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

• Nick Haslam, 
• Steve Loughnan, 

• Published: April 4, 2014
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0093927
• Reader Comments

Milgram's famous experiment contained 23 small-sample conditions that elicited striking variations in obedient responding. A synthesis of these diverse conditions could clarify the factors that influence obedience in the Milgram paradigm. We assembled data from the 21 conditions ( N  = 740) in which obedience involved progression to maximum voltage (overall rate 43.6%) and coded these conditions on 14 properties pertaining to the learner, the teacher, the experimenter, the learner-teacher relation, the experimenter-teacher relation, and the experimental setting. Logistic regression analysis indicated that eight factors influenced the likelihood that teachers continued to the 450 volt shock: the experimenter's directiveness, legitimacy, and consistency; group pressure on the teacher to disobey; the indirectness, proximity, and intimacy of the relation between teacher and learner; and the distance between the teacher and the experimenter. Implications are discussed.

Citation: Haslam N, Loughnan S, Perry G (2014) Meta-Milgram: An Empirical Synthesis of the Obedience Experiments. PLoS ONE 9(4): e93927. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0093927

Editor: Martin Voracek, University of Vienna, Austria

Received: January 2, 2014; Accepted: March 10, 2014; Published: April 4, 2014

Copyright: © 2014 Haslam et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The authors have no support or funding to report.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The Milgram study is arguably the most iconic experiment in the history of psychology. In the fifty years since it was conducted, debate about its implications has spread far beyond the academic literature of social psychology and into the culture at large. Scholars continue to discuss whether Milgram demonstrated the capacity for evil in everyday people, the roots of the Holocaust, or the ethical limitations of psychological research. Arguments continue on the nature of authority and the meaning of obedience within Milgram's paradigm [1] and how the study's findings should be theorized [2] . Attempts have been made to replicate it with mixed results [3] , [4] and the original data have been re-examined [5] . Meanwhile, archival scholarship continues to examine the origins of Milgram's work [6] and to unearth troubling discrepancies between its public representation and how its methodology was executed in practice [7] .

The most famous of Milgram's findings is associated with the best-known version of his experiment. A substantial majority of study participants, recruited from the general public as “teachers” in a study of paired associates learning, continued to shock an unresponsive and possibly dying “learner” up to the maximum 450 volts at the behest of the “experimenter.” (Although it remains unclear and somewhat controversial how this behavior should be conceptualized, and even whether it is best described as ‘obedience’ [7] , we use that term as shorthand to describe the progression of experimental subjects to 450 volts.) This rate (62.5%) exceeded by a factor of 500 the figure estimated by psychiatrists who read the study protocol [8] . It is the shock value of this finding – the fact that a majority of ordinary people were apparently capable of destructive obedience – that has triggered the enduring interest in Milgram's work, and the desire to make sense of it.

Less well-known is the fact that this finding represents just one of 23 diverse experimental conditions that Milgram conducted, which varied enormously in levels of obedient responding. Only 18 of these were reported in the monograph that reported the study [8] . The full set of 23 conditions, numbered in the order they were carried out from August 1961 to May 1962 and in accordance with Milgram's notes from the Yale University archive, are sketched in Table 1 . Although several conditions are familiar to many psychologists, others are obscure and rarely discussed. For example, a survey of ten social psychology textbooks [9] , [10] , [11] , [12] , [13] , [14] , [15] , [16] , [17] , [18] shows that although the average text refers to 7.6 conditions, nine conditions go completely unmentioned (see Figure 1 , which lists conditions according to Milgram's numbering: see Table 1 ).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0093927.g001

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0093927.t001

An analysis of the data from the 23 study conditions could establish which of the situational properties that vary across conditions covary with participants' rates of progression to maximum voltage. However, this task is made difficult by the ad hoc nature of the conditions [6] , which compose a patchwork of methodological elements rather than a systematic investigation of well-articulated experimental factors. Milgram often designed new conditions to explore specific situational factors that might influence obedience, such as the well-known Bridgeport replication, which repeated the original Yale study in an industrial setting. These specific variations are commonly reported as pairwise comparisons of study conditions, each of which had a small sample size (usually 40, but sometimes only 20). Thus the 47.5% obedience rate in Bridgeport is usually contrasted with the 62.5% rate for the comparable condition at Yale, and interpreted as evidence that the status, legitimacy, or prestige of the setting influences obedience. As a result, it is difficult to offer any definitive conclusions about Milgram's findings based on anything more than piecemeal analysis of small sample variations within the larger experimental program.

A better way to examine the experimental factors that influence obedience in Milgram's research would be to synthesize its findings by amalgamating his conditions in a manner akin to meta-analysis and assessing moderators of obedience in the combined sample. The combined sample of the 23 conditions is a substantial 780 participants. No analysis that synthesizes conditions from Milgram's study to examine determinants of obedience has previously been conducted. Packer [5] carried out a meta-analysis of eight conditions but focused on the critical voltage levels at which disobedient participants refused to continue rather than on differences in levels of obedience across conditions. Reicher, Haslam, and Smith [19] correlated levels of obedience in 15 of the 23 conditions with ratings by social psychologists and students of the teacher's probable level of identification with experimenter and learner, but did not examine characteristics internal to the Milgram study as predictors of obedience levels.

Deciding how to systematically characterize the variations among Milgram's conditions in a way that might illuminate differences in obedience rates is no easy task. Milgram himself did not provide a systematic classification of his conditions beyond simply clustering them into those exploring the “immediacy of the victim”, “presence of an authority figure”, and “group experiments”. Other writers have identified numerous differentiating characteristics, often labeled in multiple ways. Sometimes these characteristics have been integrated into two broad components: those that connect the teacher to the experimenter and those that link the teacher to the learner. Gilovich et al. [12] refer to these sets of features as “tuning out [or in] the experimenter” and “tuning in [or out] the learner”. Other writers offer alternative distinctions. For example, Aronson et al. [9] distinguish informational and normative influences. Myers [15] proposes that the primary factors are the victim's distance, the authority's closeness and legitimacy, institutional authority, and the liberating effect of disobedient peers. Sutton and Douglas [17] sort the relevant factors into proximity of experimenter to teacher, proximity of learner to teacher, authority of the situation, authority or status of the experimenter, and group pressure.

Rather than begin with a particular classification of factors that might influence obedience levels across the study conditions, we began with an abstract schema of Milgram's experiment and attempted to fit his experimental variations into this schema. By this means we attempted to determine inductively which of a large set of experimental features are independently associated with variations in obedience. Our schema (see Figure 2 ) started from the recognition that the Milgram experiment involves three hierarchically organized roles (Experimenter, Teacher, Learner) and two relationships between them (Experimenter-Teacher and Teacher-Learner), there being no unmediated relationship between Experimenter and Learner. By “relationship” we mean any intrinsically relational aspect of their connection, such as distance or intimacy. With one exception the factors that Milgram varied across his conditions can be located within one of the three roles or the two relationships. The exception is the setting in which the experiment was conducted (i.e., Yale versus Bridgeport). The schema therefore identifies six classes of factors that Milgram manipulated across his study conditions.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0093927.g002

Having developed a reasonably comprehensive set of study properties to capture the variations among Milgram's conditions, we conducted a statistical analysis to determine which of these factors were independently associated with obedience levels. Treating Milgram's conditions as a single study with a large sample, rather than as a variegated collection of studies with small samples, allows a powerful test of the situational influences on obedience within his paradigm. The aim of our study was to determine which of the many potential influences were statistically reliable, rather than to test a particular theory of obedience or interpretation of the Milgram study. Nevertheless, any such theory or interpretation must be consistent with the determinants that are found to be efficacious.

Materials and Methods

Ethics statement.

This report presents a re-analysis of publically available, previously published data originally collected by Milgram and his colleagues in 1961 and 1962, prior to the advent of institutional review boards. No informed consent was required at that time by Yale University. Participants provided uninformed verbal consent and signed a waiver absolving Yale University of legal responsibility.

Selection of conditions

Milgram's study included 23 conditions in which participants completed a variation of the obedience protocol. Another variation, sometimes referred to as condition 21, assessed levels of obedience predicted by laypeople and psychiatrists rather than actual behavior, and is therefore not an experiment. Two conditions – numbers 10 (“conflicting instructions”) and 12 (“role reversal”) – differ from the others in that proceeding to the 450 V shock involves dis obeying the experimenter, and because of this fundamental difference in the meaning of the dependent measure these conditions were excluded from the analysis. The analysis therefore included 21 of the 23 conditions, and 740 of the 780 (94.9%) total participants.

Four conditions with complex, two-part designs allow two alternative ways of counting the number of obedient participants. Obedience levels from part B of condition 15 (“good experimenter, bad experimenter”) were selected because part A ended at 150 V and therefore did not allow all participants the opportunity to defy the experimenter. Parts A of conditions 17 (“teacher in charge”), 18 (“no experimenter”), and 22 (“peer authority”) were selected because they all allowed participants to proceed all the way to 450 V before part B was initiated.

To determine which variations among study conditions were independently associated with differences in obedience rates, we developed a set of codes to distinguish the conditions. Development of the codes was guided by two considerations: codes should identify distinctions recognized by Milgram or other scholars, and they should be reasonably exhaustive, ideally yielding a unique configuration of codes for each condition. The latter goal was successfully met with two exceptions. Conditions 5 and 6 (“coronary trouble” and “different actors”) were coded identically because they differed only in the actors playing the learner and experimenter roles. Conditions 18 and 19 (“no experimenter” and “authority for afar”) were coded identically because in both conditions the experimenter departs after explaining the study and leaves a phone number on which he can be contacted, with no other significant procedural differences.

A total of 14 codes were developed and organized into our six-part schema (see Figure 2 ). Some codes pertained to variations in properties of the three roles in the study: the learner, the teacher, and the experimenter. Others pertained to the relations between pairs of protagonists or roles: the teacher-learner relation and the experimenter-teacher relation. Finally, one code related to the overall setting or context of the study. With one exception, all codes were dichotomous with “0” representing the more common default position and “1” representing the deviant condition, which guided the naming of the coded properties. The codes are described according to the six-part schema below, and are summarized in Tables 2 and 3 , along with their associated obedience rates.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0093927.t002

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0093927.t003

Learner properties.

Two codes referred to properties of the learner. “ Vulnerability ” refers to three conditions (5 [“coronary trouble”], 6 [“different actors”] & 23 [“Bridgeport”]) in which the learner mentions heart trouble at the beginning of the experiment, augmenting the heart-related concerns that are part of the standard script in the other conditions. Thus conditions 5, 6, and 23 were coded “1” and all other conditions coded “0”. “ Rights expression ” refers specifically to condition 8 (“learner's proviso”), where at the outset the learner says he will only participate if he is able to leave when he wants. Condition 8 was therefore coded “1” and all others “0”.

Teacher properties.

Three codes referred to properties of the teacher role. “ Female gender ” pertains to the single condition (20 [“women”]) that employed female participants, so this condition was coded “1” and all others “0”. “ Group pressure to obey ” refers to the distinction between two conditions (9 [“group pressure to obey”] & 11 [“group choice”]) in which multiple teachers (actually confederates) exert pressure on the participant teacher to escalate the shocks (coded “1”) and all other conditions (coded “0”), where no such pressure was exerted. “ Group pressure to disobey ” contrasted one condition (7 [“group pressure to disobey”]) involving pressure within the teacher group against obeying (coded “1”) and all other conditions (coded “0”). These group pressure variants are discussed in terms of “normative influence,” “social consensus”, or “social support” by some writers on the Milgram study.

Experimenter properties.

Four experimenter properties were coded. “ Number ” distinguishes two conditions (15 [“good experimenter, bad experimenter”] & 16 [“experimenter becomes learner”]) employing two experimenters, both coded “1”, from all others, coded “0”. (Condition 18, entitled “no experimenter,” actually has an experimenter who meets the participant before being called away.) “ Illegitimacy ” – referred to as low experimenter “status” or “authority” by some writers – distinguishes two conditions (17 [“teacher in charge”] & 22 [“peer authority”], both coded “1”) in which an apparent participant (actually a confederate) takes over the experimenter role, from all other conditions, coded “0”, where the experimenter is identified as a scientist or researcher. “ Non-directiveness ” distinguishes three conditions (11 [“group choice”], 14 [“carte blanche”] & 22 [“peer authority”], all coded “1”) in which no explicit direction is given to increase the shocks (shock level is instead left to the discretion of the participants) from all other conditions, where such a direction is always given (coded “0”). Finally, “ Inconsistency ” separates one condition (15 [“good experimenter, bad experimenter”]) in which the experimenter role is internally conflicted (coded “1”) from all other conditions (coded “0”), where the role is consistent, most often because there is a single, unwavering experimenter.

Teacher-learner relation properties.

Three properties of the relationship between teacher and learner were coded. “ Intimacy ” distinguishes the little-known condition 24 (“intimate relationships”), in which the learner was a friend or relative of the teacher (coded “1”), from all other conditions (coded “0”), where the two were strangers. “ Proximity ” – sometimes referred to as “immediacy” – captures degrees of distance between teacher and learner. Least proximal is condition 1 (“no feedback”, coded “0”), where the learner is in an adjoining room and does not cry out, followed by the baseline condition 2 (“voice feedback”, coded “1”) in which the learner is in an adjoining room but screams. Condition 3 (“proximity”, coded “2”) has the learner seated close behind the teacher in the same room, and condition 4 (“touch”, coded “3”) has the teacher holding the learner's hand to the shock-plate. All other conditions, which followed the baseline condition in this regard, were coded “1”. Finally, the “ Indirectness ” code distinguished condition 13 (“non-trigger position”, coded “1”), where the participant is a teacher who reads the word pairs while another administers the shocks, from all other conditions (coded “0”), where the teacher's role in shocking the learner was unmediated.

Experimenter-teacher relation properties.

One code, “ Distance ”, captured variation among conditions in the relation between experimenter and teacher. Four conditions in which the experimenter absents himself during the study (17 [“teacher in charge”], 18 [“no experimenter”], 19 [“authority from afar”] and 22 [“peer authority”]) (coded “1”), are distinguished from all other conditions (coded “0”), where the experimenter is physically present in the experimental situation throughout.

Setting property.

A final code pertained to the setting or context of the experiment, distinguishing condition 23 (“Bridgeport”), conducted in an industrial neighborhood (coded “1”), from all other conditions (coded “0”), which were carried out on Yale University's ivied campus. The code was called “ Low status ”, but other writers have referred to it as low “prestige”, “legitimacy”, “institutional authority”, or “authority of the situation.”

All coding was based on published descriptions of the conditions and on Milgram's original notes, accessed by the third author at the Yale University archives. The original, hand-written data summary sheets were also used to confirm obedience rates for each condition. Data file construction .

A data file ( N  = 740) was reconstructed using the known sample sizes for each condition ( n  = 40 for 16 conditions, n  = 20 for 5 conditions) and the number of participants in each condition who proceeded to deliver the 450 V shock. Obedience was coded dichotomously as delivering this highest shock, consistent with standard practice and in recognition of the marked irregularity of the distribution of highest voltages delivered, which renders continuously scored voltage level statistically problematic as a dependent measure.

Across the 21 conditions the proportion of obedient participants was 323/740 (43.6%). Table 4 presents rates of obedience as a function of each dichotomous code. Eight codes were associated with differential rates of obedience. Obedience rates were higher for more vulnerable learners ( p  = .011), for female teachers ( p  = .005), and for more indirect teacher-learner relations ( p <.001). Rates were lower when there was more group pressure for experimenters to disobey ( p <.001), when the teacher-learner relation was more intimate ( p  = .009), when the experimenter was non-directive ( p <.001) and inconsistent ( p  = .031), and when the experimenter-teacher relation was more distant ( p  = .007). A comparable test of the bivariate relationship between obedience and the one non-dichotomous code, “Proximity”, showed that greater proximity between teacher and learner was associated with lesser obedience (Spearman r  = −.37, p <.001).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0093927.t004

In view of the redundancy among the predictor codes, a logistic regression analysis was conducted to determine which condition properties were independently associated with obedience levels. “Proximity,” was coded in increasing order of closeness from 0 to 3. Although linear, quadratic, and cubic effects for this variable were estimated within the model, only the linear effect was of interest. The model accounted for substantial variation in obedience (Nagelkerke R 2  = 0.30, p <.01) and eight of the 14 coded variables independently predicted this outcome. Findings of the analysis are summarized in Table 5 , where positive values of B signify that conditions higher in the property named by the code tend to have higher rates of obedience, and negative values signify the reverse.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0093927.t005

Table 5 indicates that three of the four Experimenter variables were associated with obedience. Higher obedience resulted when experimenters gave authoritative directions rather than leaving shock levels to teachers ( p <.001), and lower obedience occurred when their directions were inconsistent (i.e., differing between experimenters: p  = .006). Surprisingly, obedience rates were somewhat higher when the authority was illegitimate (i.e., a peer rather than a researcher: p  = .004), an effect that might reflect collinearity among predictors given the lack of bivariate association between illegitimacy and obedience shown in Table 4 . The presence of multiple experimenters did not influence obedience levels ( p  = .56).

Similarly mixed findings were obtained for the three Teacher variables, only one of which had a significant effect. Pressure to disobey from a group of teachers substantially decreased obedience ( p <.001). However, pressure to obey from a group of teachers only marginally increased it ( p  = .052) and teacher gender had no effect ( p  = .467), the higher rate of obedience obtained for female teachers in the bivariate analysis disappearing when other variables were statistically controlled. Neither of the two Learner variables – vulnerability ( p  = .987) or rights expression ( p  = .109) – had significant effects on obedience, the bivariate vulnerability association also disappearing when other variables were held constant.

Turning to the relationship and setting variables, distance between the Experimenter and Teacher had an effect ( p  = .003), such that greater distance between them was associated with lesser obedience. All three Teacher-Learner relation variables had significant effects: conditions in which the teacher and learner were more proximal ( p  = .001), more intimate ( p  = .003), and more directly related ( p  = .001) had lower rates of obedient responding. Finally, the Setting variable, “low status”, was unrelated to obedience ( p  = .301).

Although the six code groupings – learner, teacher, experimenter, teacher-learner relation, experimenter-teacher relation, and setting properties – contain different numbers of codes, the relative magnitude of their effects offers some insight into the importance of these property types within the set of conditions that Milgram employed. Table 6 presents Nagelkerke R 2 values for each set of codes, which suggest that three property types - Experimenter, Teacher-Learner relation, and Teacher - are pre-eminent determinants of obedience rates across Milgram's 21 study conditions.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0093927.t006

Our analysis indicates that many properties of Milgram's study conditions were associated with rates of obedient responding. These eight properties are diverse, pertaining to aspects of two of the three roles in the study – Teacher and Experimenter – as well as to both of the relationships between roles: Teacher-Experimenter and Teacher-Learner. Although our study brackets off the issue of how obedience within the Milgram study should be understood and takes no theoretical position on that issue, the number and diversity of these properties present a challenge for any encompassing account of obedience in the Milgram paradigm.

The significant predictors of obedience in our analysis are clearly disparate. The most powerful effects, in decreasing order, are the Experimenter's non-directiveness, the Teachers' group pressure to disobey, the Teacher-Learner relation's proximity and indirectness, the Teacher-Experimenter relation's distance, the Teacher-Learner relation's intimacy, and the Experimenter's illegitimacy and inconsistency. Several of these effects are well-established within the literature on the Milgram study, such as proximity, group pressure to disobey, and distance between Experimenter and Teacher. Others have been largely overlooked.

For example, few of the textbooks whose coverage was sampled in Figure 1 recognized the importance of the Experimenter's directiveness vs. non-directiveness, failing to note the very low levels of obedience in the “Carte blanche” and “Group choice” conditions. Proceeding to the 450 V shock rarely occurs if the authority figure does not give explicit commands to escalate the shocks, even if pressure to escalate is coming from fellow teachers (i.e., in the “Group choice” condition). Few textbooks noted the role of inconsistency among Experimenters in reducing obedience, neglecting to cite the “Good experimenter/bad experimenter” condition, where a benign experimenter almost completely overrode the power of the standard “bad” experimenter to induce compliance. No textbooks in our sample recognized the role of the indirectness of the relation between Teacher and Learner, failing to mention the “Non-trigger position” condition and its very high rates of obedience. Similarly, no textbooks acknowledged how the intimacy of the relationship between Teacher and Learner reduces obedience. Participants shocked learners with whom they had an existing social bond at less than one quarter the rate as when the learners were strangers. These four factors deserve greater attention in commentaries on Milgram's work.

Just as some factors that significantly predict obedience have been overlooked, other well-publicized factors were not significant predictors in our analysis or had unexpected effects. In particular, the analysis of textbook coverage shows that Milgram's replication of his study in Bridgeport, and his examination of the role of experimenter legitimacy through the “Peer authority” condition, attract substantial attention. However, the status of the setting was not associated with obedience in our systematic analysis of the 21 conditions, with levels similar regardless of the prestige of the experimental situation. Moreover, the illegitimacy of the authority was associated with higher obedience levels. Although this finding may be unreliable, it clearly contradicts the expectation that more legitimate authorities generate greater obedience in the Milgram paradigm. Although obedience was low (20%) in the “Peer authority” condition, our analysis suggests that this was probably due to the non-directive instruction in that condition rather than to the illegitimacy of the person proposing the shock levels (i.e., a peer rather than an identified researcher). In “Teacher in charge”, another condition where a peer was drafted into the authority role, obedience rates were a relatively high 55%, challenging the standard interpretation that peers, as illegitimate authorities, are not obeyed. In short, the importance of the prestige of the situation and the legitimacy of the authority may have been over-estimated in past interpretations of Milgram's work.

Such interpretations have often distinguished two components of the experimental situation. On the one hand, the Experimenter exerts a more or less authoritative influence on the Teacher, and on the other, the Learner generates more or less compassion or moral concern in that Teacher. The relative strength of these two influences is taken to determine rates of obedience, whether it is understood in terms of the Teacher's relative identification with Experimenter and Learner [19] or “tuning them in (or out)” [15] . Milgram's conditions cannot definitively answer which of these two components is the more important determinant of obedience in any general sense, as it may not comprehensively manipulate the range of properties that might capture the components or manipulate them in equally powerful ways.

Nevertheless, our analysis indicates that within the confines of 21 of Milgram's conditions, the two components are fairly similar in strength. As Table 4 shows, properties on the Experimenter side of the Teacher (i.e., Experimenter and Teacher-Experimenter relations) have similar overall predictive power as those on the Learner side (i.e., Learner and Teacher-Learner relations), with a small advantage to the Experimenter side. This general finding implies that any interpretation of the Milgram study that neglects one component or the other – that sees the study exclusively through the lens of the Experimenter's influence on the Teacher or the Teacher's disengagement from the Learner, for example – must be incomplete.

One limitation of our analysis is that by focusing on objective properties of the experimental situation it neglects the participant's interpretation of that situation and their understanding of the significance of their behavior. The ambiguity of the situation and apparent skepticism about the experimental set up among many participants [7] all raise questions about how ‘obedience’ – and variations in it across conditions – should be understood within the Milgram paradigm. For example, Milgram's own notes suggest that some conditions were difficult for participants to take seriously. Their degree of belief or disbelief, unmeasured in our analysis, may well have altered the meaning and extent of their ‘obedient’ responding. A second, unavoidable limitation of our analysis is that it could not capture some objective properties of the experimental situation. As Gibson [20] and Perry [7] have shown, the experimenter frequently did not adhere to the published details of the study protocol. Tape recordings show, for example, that he often went beyond the standard ‘four prods’ in ways that are likely to have influenced the delivery of shocks by participants.

Although it is over five decades old the Milgram study is of more than historical significance. Although its meanings remain elusive and continue to generate disagreement, stimulated by new theoretical perspectives and by revelations of methodological weaknesses, attempts to clarify what the study teaches us continue to be important. Whether or not it illuminates the influences on obedience in any general sense, we believe that our analysis helps to extract and systematize some of the patterns within Milgram's complex set of findings. These patterns may help to guide and constrain future interpretations of his study.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: NH SL GP. Performed the experiments: NH SL. Analyzed the data: NH SL. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: GP. Wrote the paper: NH SL GP.

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