Describe the Milgram study. When was obedience highest? When was it lowest? What does this tell us about group influences on obedience?

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Describe the Milgram study. When was obedience highest? When was it lowest? What does this tell us about group influences on obedience?



The Milgram experiment was very involved. It had to be in order to create the experimental realism necessary for the study to work. Participants were told that the study was designed to examine the effects of punishment on learning. A "learner" had to learn a list of word associations (such as blue -- boy). The experimenter told a person assigned to be the "teacher" that the "learner" was being shocked for incorrect responses, and theory suggested this would increase learning. Therefore in this study all incorrect responses were to be punished with a shock. The more errors the learner made, the worse the shock. The participants were randomly assigned to be either the "teacher" or "learner".

Importantly, the participants were always "randomly assigned" to be the teacher, and the learner was actually a confederate of the experimenter.

As you can see in the diagram below, the learner was placed in a separate room where they entered their responses on a keypad. The teacher and the experimenter were in the same room, to facilitate the experimenter giving commands to the teacher. Every time the learner gave an incorrect answer (which was frequent) the teacher administered a shock on a complicated shock generating machine.

As you can see from the video, people frequently wanted to stop. But Milgram's experimenter continued to give certain commands. To keep participants going, four verbal prods were used:
Please continue
The experiment requires that you continue
It is absolutely essential that you continue
You have no other choice; you must go on

In the basic condition of the study, depicted in the diagram above, the learner was in a separate room and began to protest at about 135V shocks. First the learner complains of pain, then flees to be let out, and as the shocks become increasingly intense and painful, the learner simply refuses to go on after screaming through the agony of a shock. In Milgram's first condition, 65% of the participants provided full compliance -- in other words they went up 450V, which was labeled as "XXX - Danger: severe shock" on the machine. . This is 10 steps beyond when the participants stopped responding altogether (and could presumably be dead in the next room).


These results are stunning. Milgram himself was shocked by the outcome (no pun intended). Even with the person begging and pleading to be released, a regular person (not a soldier, not a sadist) continued to shock past a level where they may have killed a person. It is quite remarkable. After his initial experiment, Milgram wanted to find out how far people will go in other conditions. Essentially he wanted to determine the limits of obedience.

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