Milgram Experiment

Goals Milgram Experiment

The Milgram Experiment, conducted in 1961 by Stanley Milgram, a psychology professor at Yale University, is a famous study on obedience to authority. Milgram believed that the reason people submit to destructive authority lies more in the situation than in their personality. He argued that when faced with a highly convincing situation, even rational people could ignore ethical and moral rules and commit cruel acts if ordered to do so.

 

Goals and Procedure

The true purpose of this experiment was to study "obedience to authority," not the "effect of punishment on learning." Milgram advertised the experiment as a study on the effects of punishment on learning and recruited 40 male participants aged 20 to 50 years old, offering $4.50 as compensation. The participants were randomly assigned to the roles of "teacher" and "learner." However, in reality, the learner was an actor, and the electric shock machine was fake.

 

During the experiment, the teacher was instructed to present problems to the learner, who had to memorize a list of words. If the learner answered incorrectly, the teacher was told to administer an electric shock starting at 15 volts and increasing in 15-volt increments up to 450 volts. The learner, who was actually an actor, pretended to be shocked, but no real shocks were given . The real focus of the experiment was to observe how far the teachers would go in increasing the voltage, even when they knew the shocks could be harmful.

 

Milgram observed the teachers' reactions as they were instructed to increase the voltage. The teachers were encouraged to continue by an experimenter dressed in a white lab coat, who assured them that he would take full responsibility for the consequences.

 

Each time the teacher hesitated to increase the voltage, the experimenter would say one of four pre-determined prompts:

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

 

Results of the Experiment

Before starting the experiment, Milgram did not think that participants would increase the voltage all the way to 450 volts for just $4.50. He estimated that only about 0.1% of the participants would go up to 450 volts. However, the actual results were shocking: 65% of the participants increased the voltage to the maximum 450 volts. This experiment was later expanded by Philip Zimbardo into the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971.

 

Milgram's experiment received a lot of ethical criticism because it did not inform participants in advance that it could cause them psychological distress. As a result of this and other ethical concerns, Milgram was eventually dismissed from the university. Despite this, similar experiments have been conducted since. In 2006, Dr. Jerry M. Burger conducted a modified version of Milgram's experiment, adhering to strict ethical guidelines. The results were consistent with Milgram's initial findings, showing that about 70% of participants still followed orders to apply shocks at significant levels.

 

These results highlight the powerful impact of social influence and pressure, demonstrating that many people can be persuaded to perform actions they might otherwise find morally objectionable, even under ethical constraints.