Milgram S.

(obedience)
Behavioral Study of Obedience.
Background: General
• Stanley Milgram was a social psychologist at Yale University
in 1960.

• In 1945 WWII had come to an end. The horrors of the

holocaust were public knowledge.

• Milgram wanted to know how could anyone permit such

evil and be part of a regime that promotes such horrors.
Background: General
• Early psychological research into the Holocaust focused on
the idea that something distinctive about German culture
or personality leads to the high levels of conformity for the
genocide to take place. This is known as the dispositional
hypothesis.

• His research aim was to provide evidence for the “Germans

are different” hypothesis.
Background: Germans are different
• The hypothesis has been used by historians to explain the
systematic destruction of the Jews by the Third Reich.

• Milgram set out to test whether Germans have a basic

character flaw which is a readiness to obey authority
without question, no matter what outrageous acts the
authority commands.

• His plan was to test the hypothesis on the population of

New Haven on Americans and then go to Germany and
test the German population.
Background: Hypotheses
• Trait Theory / Dispositional hypothesis, is an approach to
study human personality and behaviour. It is the
measurement of steady patterns of habit in an individual's
behaviour, thoughts and emotions.

• Situational hypothesis (also known as External Factors) are

influences that do not occur from within the individual but
from elsewhere like the environment and others around
you.
Aim:

• Overall aim: To investigate how obedient people would be to orders

from a person in authority that would result in pain and harm to
another person.

• Specific aim: To see how large an electric shock participants would

give to a helpless man when ordered to.
Research method:
• The experiment was a Laboratory experiment. Milgram
recruited participants using a newspaper advert.

$4.00 in 1963 is equal to $33.81 in 2020

Sample:
• 40 males between the ages of 20 - 50 were drawn from the New
Haven district of Connecticut, USA.

37.5% were manual laborers, 40% were

white-collar workers and 22.5% were professionals.
Procedure:
• The participants arrived at The Yale Interaction Laboratory
and were met by the experimenter, Jack Williams, a man
dressed in a laboratory coat.

• They were given an introduction on the relationship between

punishment and learning.

• The participants meet another man, Mr. Wallace and made

to believe that he was another participant.
Procedure:
• The experimenter takes two pieces of paper and places them
in a hat. One piece of paper is supposed to say “Teacher”, the
other “Learner”.

• This was rigged so that Mr Wallace was always the victim.

• The learner sat in an ‘electric chair’ with straps to “prevent

excessive movement” during electric shocks that would be
given from a shock generator.
Procedure:
• An electrode was attached to the learner’s wrist and
electrode paste was applied to “avoid blisters and burns”.

• The learner was told that, “Although the shocks can be

extremely painful, they cause no tissue damage”.

• All these falsehoods basically made the experiment seem

much more real to the participant. The final deception was
to give the participant a sample shock of 45 volts (from an
external battery, since the shock-generator wasn’t actually
supposed to work).
Procedure:
• The participant was then seated in an adjacent room and
asked to read word pairs to the learner. The learner had to
memorize the pairs.

• The teacher then tested the learner by giving him one of the
words in a pair with four other words. The learner had to
choose the word that was previously paired with the first
word. If his answer was correct, the next word on the list was
read. If it was incorrect, the teacher had to state the correct
answer and administer an electric shock (starting from 15
volts).
Procedure:
• For every wrong answer, the shock level would increase by 15
volts (15, 30, 45, ...) The learner actually gave a
predetermined set of answers with about three wrong
answers for every right answer.

• At 300 volts, the learner would start hitting the wall and
shouting. He stopped answering questions.

• They were told to interpret no answer as a wrong answer,

meaning that the learner would have to be shocked again.
Procedure:
• After 315 volts, the learner went completely silent.

• If the participant asked for advice, he would be met with a

sequence of firm standardised ‘prods’.

(1) “Please continue” or “Please go on”

(2) “The experiment requires you to continue”
(3) “It is absolutely essential that you continue”
(4) “You have no choice, you must go on”
Procedure:
• If the participant asked about permanent physical injuries, a
different prod was used:
“Although the shocks may be painful, there is no
permanent tissue damage, so please go on.”

• If the participant said that the learner did not want to continue,
another prod was used:
“Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until
he has learned all the word pairs correctly, so please go on.”
Procedure:
• The experiment ended if the participant refused to continue after
the four official prods, or if 450 volts were administered.

• A participant who stopped before reaching 450 volts was classed

as a “defiant participant” while those who went up to 450 volts
were classed as an “obedient participant”.

• The experiment was filmed and observers watched through a

one-way mirror.
Procedure:
• Participants were then interviewed during which they rated how
painful they thought the last few shocks were on a scale from 0
to 14. Projective measures and attitude scales were employed
too.

• After the experiment, the participants were debriefed and an

open-ended questionnaire was given. Some psychometric tests
were taken to make sure there was no emotional harm.

• The teacher and learner were reunited in order to prove that

the learner was an actor who was not really in danger.
Results:
• Before Milgram embarked upon his study, fourteen Yale seniors,
all psychology majors, were provided with a detailed description
of the experimental situation.

• They were asked to reflect carefully on it, and to predict the

behavior of 100 hypothetical subjects.

• There was considerable agreement among the respondents on

the expected behavior of hypothetical subjects. All respondents
predicted that only an insignificant minority would go through to
the end of the shock series.
Results:
• The estimates ranged from 0 to 3%; i.e., the most "pessimistic"
member of the class predicted that of 100 persons, 3 would
continue through to the most potent shock available on the
shock generator—450 volts. The class mean was 1.2%.

• The question was also posed informally to Milgram’s colleagues,

and the most general feeling was that few if any subjects would
go beyond the designation Very Strong Shock.
Results:
• 26 participants were obedient and administered a complete
round of electric shocks, while only 14 were defiant.

• 65% obeyed
• 35% terminated the experiment before reaching 450 volts.

• When the experimenter was the one to end the experiment (at
450 volts), many of the participants sighed in relief or shook
their heads in what seemed like regret.
Results:
• Most of the participants were sweating, shaking, stuttering or
fidgeting during the study.

• 14 participants giggled nervously. The participants who had

nervous laughter fits were keen to point out that they weren’t
sadistic and that their laughter wasn’t a sign that they enjoyed
shocking the learner.

• 3 had seizures and the procedure was stopped for one of them.

• Average rating of how painful the shocks were was 13.42 out of
a maximum of 14.
Conclusions:
• People are much more obedient to destructive orders than we
think.

• They find this process highly stressful despite obeying them.

• Results supported the situational hypothesis rather than the

dispositional hypothesis.
Evaluation:

GRAVE
Evaluation:

GRAVE Generalisability

This study has reasonable generalisability as the sample size is 40.

The participants were between the range of 20 and 50 years old and
the participants come from a variety of occupations.
However, there were no women involved and the study was
ethnocentric.
Evaluation:

GRAVE Reliability

This study’s reliability is good as they used a standardised procedure for

testing the participants which can easily be reproduced.
A script for the audiotape and the prods are available for replication.
Evaluation:

GRAVE Application

Very useful in helping to understand destructive obedience.

Potential for reforming army, police, prisons etc…
Evaluation:

GRAVE Validity

Validity is reasonable in this study as it appears effective in terms of its

stated aims. (face validity)
Inferences can legitimately be made from the operationalizations in this
study to the theoretical constructs on which those operationalizations
were based. (construct validity)
But low in ecological validity, this is not a mundane task.
Evaluation:

GRAVE Ethics

Deception in terms of what the study was about and whether the shocks
were real.
Ethics are low as several participants suffered during the study with stress.
Protection of the participant’s state of mind and they would not exit the
study in the same mental state they entered in.
The right to withdraw might not have been there as prods were used.
Evaluation: Other considerations
Are Germans different?:
This study shows that Germans are no different to anyone else,
disproving Milgram's theory and instead providing evidence for the
situational disposition.

Milgram, never brought his experiment to Germany.

“I found so much obedience”, says Milgram softly, a little sadly, “I hardly
saw the need for taking the experiment to Germany” (Milgram, as
quoted in Meyer 97).
More information: Other experiments
Milgram conducted several variations of his experiment, When college
students and women were the participants, Milgram found the same
level of destructive obedience.

Others have replicated his study, here are some results:

Australia had a 68% obedience level

Jordan had a 63% obedience level
Germany had a 85% obedience level
 More resources for CIE A/S
Psychology (9990) can be found at:
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Research methods Biological
Issues and debates Cognitive
Approaches Learning
Statistics Social