Stanley Milgram's Shocking Experiment

          In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram of Yale University performed his famous Milgram Experiment. It was during the Nuremberg War Criminal trials that Milgram wanted to study whether the accused’s defense of obedience or just following orders was justified. Therefore, in 1961, Milgram began his experiment to test how easily ordinary people would go to follow an instruction, even it caused harm to another person.

The Experiment

            Participants in this study were told they were going to find out the effect of punishment on memory and learning. In each experiment there were three people involved, the experimenter, who was an actor dressed in a lab coat, the teacher, and the learner, who was also an actor posing as a participant. First, the two participants drew straws or slips of paper to determine who would be the learner and who would be the teacher, but this was a fixed draw and the actor was always the learner. They were then taken into another room where the teacher watches the learner get strapped into an electric chair so “he can’t escape.” The teacher then receives a sample shock to show what the learner could feel.

            The teacher is moved into a nearby area where they couldn’t see each other, but they could hear each other. They then were to test the learners with word-pairs, and if the learner answered incorrectly the teacher would have to administer an electric shock starting at 15 volts and increasing up to a dangerous 450 volts with each incorrect answer. The learner purposely gave wrong answers. It is important to note that they didn’t actually get shocked. The learner played prerecorded sounds of the shock, and at certain levels, they yelled and began to bang on the wall loudly. At the highest voltage, they fell silent. If at any point the teacher showed doubt or wanted to end the experiment, they were given four specific verbal prods.

They were:

1.     Please continue.

2.     The experiment requires you to continue.

3.     It is absolutely essential that you continue.

4.     You have no other choice but to continue.

(Milgram 1963)

The experiment was over if the participant absolutely refused to continue or the 450-volt shock was given three times in a row.

www.simplypsychology.org, 2007.

The Results

            Milgram found, out of the diverse group of male participants, that two-thirds or 65% of participants went all the way to 450 volts and that ALL participants went to 300 volts. After this, Milgram performed 18 different variations on the experiment, for example changing what the authority figure says, the environment, or in the presence of others. They yielded similar results, although some caused a major increase or decline in obedience levels. These results are, pun-intended, shocking. Milgram and the students, colleagues, and psychiatrists he polled expected that the teachers would not inflict the highest voltage or something similar unless they were a sociopath, so their expectations were blown out of the water by the experiment. This shows just how powerful the effects of an authority figure can have on a normal human and how this applies to other situations like World War II.