Cortney Winfield

Kaplan University

PS 499

May 29, 2017

 The Milgram Experiment was done in by Stanley Milgram who was a psychologist at Yale

University and conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and

personal conscience(McLeod,2007). The way Milgram set up the experiment was with 3 people. Only

two people in the experiment knew what the experiment was about. They study took place in 1963.

That was the same year that there were trials held for people who had committed war crimes during the

second World War. While the trials were being held, the defense of the people accused of committing

the actual crimes would use the defense that they were just following orders. That is how this

experiment came about.

Procedure: The way the experiment was to be done was with a teacher, learner and a lab

assistant. Volunteers were recruited for a lab experiment investigating memory patterns. There were

40 men between the ages of 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional, from the

New Haven area. They were paid $4.50 for participating in the experiment.

At the beginning of the experiment they were introduced to another participant, who was actually apart

of the experimenter(McLeod,2007). Both drew straws to determine their roles although this was fixed

and the lab assistant was always the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a white lab

coat, played by an actor(McLeod,2007).Two rooms were used to carry out the plans. One room was for

the learner who was with an electric chair and another for the teacher and experimenter with an electric

shock generator who would be asking the questions. (McLeod,2007).

The Experiment: The instructions would be read off to the participants and they would then go

to the designated rooms. The learner, who is not actually hooked up to any electrodes would make

certain noises as if they were in pain at certain times. Once the volts would become higher, the learner

would make a statement about having heart issues, but the teacher would still be told to continue. The

job of the “teacher” was to ask the series of questions and then he would manually flip a switch when
the learner got the answer wrong. Milgram wanted to see if the teacher would stop once they knew that

the other person In the next room, whom they could not see but could hear, was in

distress(Milgram,1974).

Results: Out of all the times that this experiment was done, 65% of the teachers went to the

highest level on the voltage box which was 400volts. This finding actually shocked Milgram because

there was such a high percentages of people who did not want to “hurt” anyone, but at the same time

they did not speak up to the authority figure and did not listen to their own conscience when they knew

it was wrong and did not feel comfortable with performing the act (Milgram,1974) .

As soon as the experiments were over, Participants were debriefed after and showed much relief

at finding they had not harmed the student. One cried from emotion when he saw the student alive, and

explained that he thought he had killed him. But what was different about those who obeyed and those

who rebelled? Milgram divided participants into three categories: Obeyed but justified themselves,

Obeyed but blamed themselves, and Rebelled (Milgram,1974).

In 2007, this very experiment was done again and this time it was recorded by “Dateline News”

on ABC network. They tried to keep the fidelity of the experiment as close as they could. There were

many differences but they managed to be able to do the experiment in a way that was true to the

original. If you remember the reason that the experiment was done in the first place, it was because

during World War II war crimes trial, many of the defendants used the defense that they were instructed

to do it although they knew that it was wrong, they did not stop because their superior officers said they

must do it. If you think back to 2005, the photos of young American soldiers smiling while torturing

Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib horrified the world and raised the question of who was to blame.

Some of the soldiers defended themselves by claiming they were just doing what their superiors had

instructed. But the smiling faces in the photos seemed to imply that they followed the orders without

protest (Borge, 2007). The argument sounded all too familiar so with the permission of the APA and
Santa Clara University, this marked the first time in decades that the famous study has been re-created

under similar circumstances. The results seemed to still be the same, but with a higher percentage of

people going higher on the voltage scale. Here are the actual results:

In ABC News' version of the Milgram experiment, we tested 18 men, and found that 65 percent of

them agreed to administer increasingly painful electric shocks when ordered by an authority

figure(Borge, 2007) . 22 women signed up for our experiment. Even though most people said that

women would be less likely to inflict pain on the learner, a surprising 73 percent yielded to the orders

of the experimenter. Out of the 30 people we tested with an additional accomplice acting as a moral

guide, 63 percent still inflicted electric shocks, even though the accomplice refused to go on . Our

subjects had an unusually high level of education. 22.9 percent had some college, (Borge, 2007). 40

percent had bachelor's degrees and 20 percent had master's degrees. The group was also ethnically

diverse with 54.3 percent (white), 18.6 percent (Asian), 12.9 percent (Latin/Hispanic), 8.6 percent

(Indian-Asian) and 4.3 percent (African -American)(Borge, 2007) .

The reason that I chose this experiment to write about is because it is my favorite. I actually use

a quote from Stanley Milgram as a signature on my email. The quote that I like is : "The

disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to

authority."-Stanley Milgram. This experiment holds people accountable for their own actions. It keeps

people responsible for doing actions that they know are either unethical or wrong. In the case of the

soldiers of Abu Ghraib, those soldiers were found to be guilty and had to be held accountable for their

personal actions. No longer could the excuse be, I was told to do it or my Commander told me to do it.

It holds a person to a higher standard and makes that person choose between the person in authority or

their own conscience.

The 2 main ethics violations that I could guess that this experiment did not follow were 8.02 of the

Ethics code for the APA which was Informed Consent to Research. The people who were labeled as

the “teacher” were not given all of the information until the very end.  The second rule that was not

done correctly was 8.06 Offering Inducements for Research Participation. The people in this study,

both times were offered monetary rewards for participating and doing what was asked of them by the

man in white coat. How do we know that some of those people would have done the same actions if

there was no money involved.

If it were my job to write my experiment based on the correct ethics code under the

APA, I do not see how I could do this experiment at all. The experiment starts out with me lying to my

participants about what the experiment is an I am putting them under an amount of stress and since I do

not know who these people are, I don't know if they suffer from anxiety or stress related illnesses and

watching them struggle to press that next switch based on getting money takes the ethics right out of it.

An example that comes to mind is we ask one of the women to be the “teacher”. She has no money

and has to pay a bill that day. She will be more focused on getting the money to pay a bill, than which

switch she decides to flip or if she decides to stop because she is beginning to feel bad for the learner

for all of those “shocks” she has made him endure. This is why these rules are so important because

we also have to “Do no harm” and protect our clients at all cost.
 References

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper and Row. An
excellent presentation of Milgram's work is also found in Brown, R. (1986). Social Forces in
Obedience and Rebellion.Social Psychology: The Second Edition. New York: The Free Press.

American Psychological Association. (2002). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct.
Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx?item=1

Mental Floss. (2012). 10 famous psychological experiments that could never happen today. Retrieved
from http://mentalfloss.com/article/52787/10-famous-psychological-experiments-could-never-
happen-today

McLeod, S. A. (2007). The Milgram Experiment. Retrieved from

www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html

BORGE, CAROLINE Jan. 3, 2007 Basic Instincts: The Science of

Evilhttp://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2765416&page=1