research paper on milgram experiment

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Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiments: origins and early evolution

Affiliation.

1 Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. [email protected]
PMID: 21366616
DOI: 10.1348/014466610X492205

Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiments remain one of the most inspired contributions in the field of social psychology. Although Milgram undertook more than 20 experimental variations, his most (in)famous result was the first official trial run - the remote condition and its 65% completion rate. Drawing on many unpublished documents from Milgram's personal archive at Yale University, this article traces the historical origins and early evolution of the obedience experiments. Part 1 presents the previous experiences that led to Milgram's conception of his rudimentary research idea and then details the role of his intuition in its refinement. Part 2 traces the conversion of Milgram's evolving idea into a reality, paying particular attention to his application of the exploratory method of discovery during several pilot studies. Both parts illuminate Milgram's ad hoc introduction of various manipulative techniques and subtle tension-resolving refinements. The procedural adjustments continued until Milgram was confident that the first official experiment would produce a high completion rate, a result contrary to expectations of people's behaviour. Showing how Milgram conceived of, then arrived at, this first official result is important because the insights gained may help others to determine theoretically why so many participants completed this experiment.

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After shock? Towards a social identity explanation of the Milgram 'obedience' studies. Reicher S, Haslam SA. Reicher S, et al. Br J Soc Psychol. 2011 Mar;50(Pt 1):163-9. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8309.2010.02015.x. Br J Soc Psychol. 2011. PMID: 21366617

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A novel experimental approach to study disobedience to authority

Emilie a. caspar.

1 Moral and Social Brain Lab, Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan, 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

2 Center for Research in Cognition and Neuroscience, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

Associated Data

Data are made available on OSF (DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/2BKJC ).

Fifty years after the experiments of Stanley Milgram, the main objective of the present paper is to offer a paradigm that complies with up-to-date ethical standards and that can be adapted to various scientific disciplines, ranging from sociology and (social) psychology to neuroscience. Inspired by subsequent versions of Milgram-like paradigms and by combining the strengths of each, this paper presents a novel experimental approach to the study of (dis)obedience to authority. Volunteers are recruited in pairs and take turns to be ‘agents’ or ‘victims’, making the procedure fully reciprocal. For each trial, the agents receive an order from the experimenter to send a real, mildly painful electric shock to the ‘victim’, thus placing participants in an ecological set-up and avoiding the use of cover stories. Depending on the experimental condition, ‘agents’ receive, or do not receive, a monetary gain and are given, or are not given, an aim to obey the experimenter’s orders. Disobedience here refers to the number of times ‘agents’ refused to deliver the real shock to the ‘victim’. As the paradigm is designed to fit with brain imaging methods, I hope to bring new insights and perspectives in this area of research.

Introduction

The experiment of Stanley Milgram is one of the most (in)famous in psychology 1 , within and beyond academia. Several variables account for this notoriety, such as the method used, the ethical issues associated, the enthralling results or the societal impact of the research topic. Milgram’s classical studies famously suggested a widespread willingness to obey authority, to the point of inflicting irreversible harm to another person just met a few minutes before. Beyond the studies of Milgram, the history of nations is also plagued by horrendous acts of obedience that have caused wars and the loss of countless lives 2 . History has fortunately shown that some individuals do resist the social constraint of receiving orders when their own morality is of greater importance than the social costs associated with defying orders (e.g., 3 , 4 ). To understand the factors that prevent an individual from complying with immoral orders, research on disobedience should focus on two main axes: (1) what social and situational factors support disobedience and (2) what individual differences support disobedience.

The first axe has already been largely investigated in past studies. From Milgram’s studies, important situational factors supporting disobedience have already been established 5 . For instance, disobedience increases if the experimenter is not physically present in the room or if two experimenters provide opposing views regarding the morality of the experiment. Subsequent versions and interpretations of Milgram’s studies 6 – 8 as well as historical research 4 , 9 also suggested the importance of several social (e.g. presence of a supporting group) and situational factors (e.g. family history, proximity with the ‘victim’, intensity of the pain; money) supporting resistance to immoral orders. However, the second axe regarding individual differences has been less systematically approached. A few studies 10 , 11 previously explored personality traits that may influence disobedience (e.g. empathic concern, risk-taking) but most of these studies, however, have used relatively weak and potentially biased methods, such as self-reported questionnaires and methods based on cover stories. These studies are not sufficient to explain why, in a given situation, some people will refuse immoral orders and rescue threatened human beings while others will comply with such orders. With the current literature on disobedience, we have no idea about which neuro-cognitive processes drive inter-individual differences regarding the degree of disobedience. This aim could be achieved by offering a novel experimental approach that would make it possible to use novel techniques that give us a more direct access to the functioning of the brain and cognition, such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), electroencephalography or Magnetic Resonance Imagery (MRI). Regrettably, the original paradigm and those bearing close similarity are not adapted to reliably answer those questions as they were not designed to fit with neuroimaging measurements. By combining the strengths of previous work on disobedience into a single experimental paradigm and adapting it to fit with cognitive and brain imaging measurements, this novel experimental approach could help to better understand, together with individual, social, and cultural factors, which mechanisms make it possible for an individual to refuse to comply with immoral orders.

There were several challenges to consider in order to develop such a paradigm, both ethical and methodological. Studying obedience and resistance to immoral orders involves putting volunteers in a situation where they have to make a decision on whether or not to commit ‘immoral acts’ under orders. A balance has to be found between what is acceptable from an ethical perspective and what is necessary for the research question. Milgram’s studies on obedience raised undeniable ethical issues 12 – 14 , mostly associated with high stress and the use a cover story, which involves deception. Some variants of Milgram’s studies were realized with immersive virtual reality to prevent the ethical issues associated with Milgram’s paradigm 15 , but the transparency of the fake scenario presented to participants does not capture decision-making in an ecological set-up. Other Milgram-based variants, such as the 150-V method, appear to replicate Milgram’s results 16 with respect to the actual ethical standards, but methodological concerns are still present 17 as cover stories are still used, which lead to interpretation issues. Beyond ethical considerations, the use of deception also indeed involves a doubt about whether or not volunteers truly believed the cover story. As a consequence, a reasonable doubt remains on how to interpret the results and this is one of the main critics associated with Milgram’s studies and following versions. Recent work on the reports of Milgram’s volunteers suggested that there are no strong and reliable evidence that participants believed in the cover story 8 , 14 , 18 . Others suggested that since the stress of participants was visible on video recordings during the experiment (e.g. hand shaking, nervousness), this suggests that participants actually believed that they were torturing another human being 19 . However, this interpretation has been challenged by another study showing that participants can have physiological reactions to stress even in an obviously-fake experimental set-up 15 . These contrasting interpretations of Milgram’s studies actually reinforce the idea that results can hardly be interpreted when cover stories are used 20 . To answer those criticisms, a real scenario had thus to be created, where participants made decisions that have real consequences on another human being.

An additional challenge is that methods relying on the original paradigm of Milgram, such as the virtual reality version 15 or the 150-V method 16 are not adapted to neuroimaging measurements. More specifically, with such Milgram-like experimental approaches, only a single trial would be recorded for the entire experimental session, that is, when the volunteer stops the experiment (if this happens). For cognitive and neuroimaging data collection, a single trial per participant is not a reliable result, which requires the averaging of several trials to obtain a good signal-to-noise ratio.

Another challenge at the methodological and conceptual levels it that several experimenters 1 , 5 , 21 , 22 including myself 21 – 27 , noted that volunteers are extremely obedient when coming to an experiment. Personally, I have tested about 800 volunteers to investigate the mechanisms by which coercive instructions influence individual cognition and moral behaviors. For instance, by using behavioral, electrophysiological and neuroimaging methods, we have observed that when people obey orders to send real shocks to someone else, their sense of agency 23 , their feeling of responsibility 28 , empathy for the pain of the victim and interpersonal guilt 26 are attenuated compared to a situation where they are free to decide which action to execute. Out of 800 volunteers tested, only 27 disobeyed my orders (i.e. 3.3%): 21 for prosocial reasons (i.e. they refused to administer an electric shock to another individual), 3 by contradiction (i.e. by systematically pressing the other button, not matter the content of the order), and 3 for antisocial reasons (i.e. by administering shocks despite my order not to do so). Although convenient to study how obedience affects cognition, this rate is indubitably an issue when studying disobedience. If participants almost never disobey, we can’t study the mechanisms through which resistance to immoral orders may develop in a given situation. Several reasons for not disobeying the experimenter’s orders have been suggested. Some consider that being obedient is part of the human nature as massive and destructive obedience has been observed through countless historical events 2 . Another current view on the experiments of Milgram is that volunteers were actually happy to participate and to contribute to the acquisition of scientific data 17 , thus explaining the high obedience rate observed. This effect has been referred to as ‘engaged followership’ 29 . If that interpretation is correct, the volunteer’s willingness to come and help the experimenter acquiring scientific data creates an extra difficulty to obtain disobedience in an experimental setup. However, this interpretation is challenged by several studies reported by Milgram, which displayed a higher disobedience rate than his original study. For instance disobedience increases when the shocks’ receiver sits in the same room as the participant or when the authoritative experimenter is not physically present in the room 5 . If participants were indeed only guided by their willingness to help to acquire scientific data, this should be the case in any experimental set-up. As some studies involve a higher disobedience rate compared to the initial version of Milgram’s study 1 , they could thus, at a first glance, be used for studying disobedience. However, even if some versions of the initial study of Milgram offer a highly disobedience rate, thus making it possible to study the mechanisms through which resistance to immoral orders may develop in a given situation, these experimental set-ups are still not adapted for cognitive and neuroimaging measurements and still rely on the use of a cover story.

Taking all the presented challenges into account (i.e. not using cover stories to avoid interpretation issues; obtaining a fair rate of disobedience; using an experimental approach that also fits with cognitive and neuroimaging measurements; respecting ethical standards), the present paper presents a set of experiments that combine the strengths of past experimental work on (dis)obedience. Volunteers were openly involved and active (= real social situation) rather than having to act in fictitious scenarios (= imagined social situation, e.g. Slater et al., 2006). They were confronted with moral decisions to follow or not the orders from an experimenter to inflict a real painful shock to a ‘victim’ in exchange (or not) for a small monetary gain, thus avoiding the use of cover stories. Since the aim here is to develop a paradigm that could be used both in behavioral and neuroimaging studies, some basic characteristics had to be considered. For instance, to fit with a Magnetic Resonance Imagery (MRI) scanning environment, neither the ‘victim’, nor the experimenter were in the same room as the agent. A real-time video was thus used to display a video of the victim’s hand receiving shocks on the agent’s screen and headphones were used so the participant could hear the experimenter’s orders.

Another method to study disobedience would be to select participants who are more likely to disobey than others. Each volunteer was thus also asked to complete a series of personality questionnaires to evaluate if a specific profile is associated with a greater prosocial disobedience rate. Systematic post-experimental interviews were conducted at the end of each experiment in order to understand the decisions of volunteers to follow or not the orders of the experimenter and to ask them how they felt during the experiment.

Participants

A hundred eighty naive volunteers (94 females) were recruited in same gender dyads (= 90 dyads). During the recruitment procedure, I ensured that the participants in each dyad were neither close friends (by mixing people studying different academic courses), nor relatives. To estimate the sample size a priori, I calculated the total sample size based on an effect size f of (0.3). To achieve a power of 0.85 for this effect size, the estimated sample size was 168 for 6 groups 30 . I increased the sample size slightly to 180 in order to prevent loss of data in case of withdrawals. Volunteers were randomly assigned to one of the 6 variants of the task (N = 30/variant). One volunteer was not taken into account because they only played the role of the ‘victim’ to replace a participant who did not show up. No volunteers withdrew from the experiment. For the remaining 179 volunteers, the mean age was 22.63 years old (SD = 2.77, range:18–35). A Univariate ANOVA with Age as the dependent variable and Variant as the fixed factor confirmed that age of the volunteers did not differ between the different variant of the tasks ( p > 0.1, BF 10 = 0.167). Volunteers received between €10 and €19.60 for their participation. All volunteers provided written informed consent prior to the experiment. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Erasme Hospital (reference number: P2019/484). All methods were performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations.

Method and Material

Six experimental set-ups were created in a between-subject design. In all six set-ups, volunteers were invited by pairs. One person was assigned to start as agent and the other one to start as ‘victim’. Their roles were switched mid-way, ensuring reciprocity. Compared to the experimental design of Milgram, both volunteers were real participants, not confederates. The reciprocity also avoided volunteers to be stuck in the role of the person providing pain to the other, thus attenuating the potential psychological distress of being in a perpetrator role only. Volunteers were given the possibility to choose the role they wanted to start with. In the case none of them had a preference, role assignment was decided by a coin flip, but volunteers were reminded that they could still decide themselves. This procedure allows to ensure that participants do not think that this procedure is a trick.

Volunteers were first given the instructions of the task. Then, they signed the consent forms in front of each other, so both were aware of the other’s consent. The experimenter was never present in the same room, but rather gave the instructions through headphones. This was for two reasons. First, Milgram’s studies show that disobedience increases if the experimenter is not physically present in the room. Second, in the case of MRI scanning, the experimenter would not be able to give direct verbal instructions to the volunteers in the MRI room due to the high noise of the scanner. Here, agents were isolated in a room and were provided headphones to hear the experimenter’s instructions (see Fig. 1 ). They were told that this was done to avoid attentional interferences through the experimenter’s physical presence in the room. In this series of studies, instructions were pre-recorded but a real setup with a microphone connected to the headphones could also work. Pre-recordings allow perfect timing of the events, important for neuroimaging or electroencephalography recordings. The instructions were “ give a shock ” or “ don’t give a shock ”. To increase the authenticity of the procedure, each sentence was recorded 6 times with small variations in the voice and displayed randomly. In addition, the audio recordings included a background sound similar to interphone communications.

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Experimental setup. Schematic representation of the experimental setup. Volunteers were in different rooms. The experimenter was located in a third, separated room. The agent heard on a trial basis the orders of the experiment through headphones and had to decide to press the ‘SHOCK’ or ‘NO SHOCK’ button. A real-time camera feedback displayed the hand of the victim of the agent’s screen so to allow to keep track on the consequences of their actions.

Shocks were delivered using a constant current stimulator (Digitimer DS7A) connected to two electrodes placed on the back of victims’ left hand, visible to the agent through the camera display. Individual pain thresholds were determined for the two volunteers before starting the experiment. This threshold was determined by increasing stimulation in steps of 1 mA (Caspar et al., 2016). I approximated an appropriate threshold by asking a series of questions about their pain perception during the calibration (1. « Is it uncomfortable? »—2. « Is it painful? »—3. « Could you cope with a maximum of 100 of these shocks? »—4. « Could I increase the threshold? »). When roles were reversed, I briefly re-calibrated the pain threshold of the new victim by increasing the stimulation again from 0 in steps of 3 mA up to the previously determined threshold, to confirm that the initial estimate was still appropriate, and to allow re-familiarisation. The mean stimulation level selected by this procedure was 36.3 mA (SD = 17.5, V = 300, pulse duration: 200 µs). I chose this instead of other types of pain (e.g. financial) because it produces a clear muscle twitch on the victim’s hand each time a shock is sent. This allows volunteers to have a clear and visible feedback of the consequences of their actions and to be fully aware that shocks were real.

There was a total of 96 trials per experimental condition. In the coerced condition, the experimenter asked to give a shock in 64 trials and asked not to give a shock 32 trials. This ratio was chosen on the assumption that the volunteer’s willingness to refuse immoral orders would increase with the number of times they were instructed to inflict pain to the “victim”.

On each trial, a picture of two rectangles, a red one labelled ‘SHOCK’ and a green one labelled ‘NO SHOCK’, was displayed in the bottom left and right of the screen. The key-outcome mapping varied randomly on a trial-wise basis, but the outcome was always fully congruent with the mapping seen by the participant. Agents could then press one of the two buttons. Pressing the SHOCK key delivered a shock to the victim while pressing the NO SHOCK key did not deliver any shocks. This procedure of randomized button mapping allows to have a better control over motor preparation, an aspect that can be important for neuroimaging data.

In half of the variants of the task (i.e., 3/6), the “Aim” variants, participants were given a reason for obeying the orders of the experimenter, while this was not the case in the other half, the “No aim” variants. In the “No Aim” variants, I did not provide any reasons for obeying to the participants and I simply explained the task. If participants asked about the aim, I simply told them that they would know at the end of the experiment, without providing further justifications. In the “Aim” variants, volunteers were told that researchers observed a specific brain activity in the motor cortex in another study when participants were given instructions. We explained that the present study was a control study to measure different aspects linked to motor activity when they press buttons, in order to see if the button pressing was related to brain activity measured over the motor cortex. To increase the veracity of the aim, electrodes were also placed on their fingers and connected to a real electromyography (EMG) apparatus to supposedly record their muscle activity. Volunteers were instructed to press the two buttons only with their right and left index fingers, as naturally as possible, and to avoid producing too ample movements to create clean EMG data. In the case volunteers asked if they really had to follow orders, I told them that for ethical reasons I could not force them to do anything, but that it would be better for the sake of the experiment. Telling them explicitly that they could disobey the orders would not be beneficial in the quest of studying ‘real’ disobedience.

In 4 out of 6 variants of the task, the “Free-choice” variants, a second experimental condition was used, the free-choice condition. In this condition, volunteers were told that they could freely decide in each trial to shock the ‘victim’ or not. In this condition, they did not receive instructions. In 4 out of 6 variants of the task, the “Monetary reward” variants, agents received a monetary reward of + €0.05 for each shock delivered. In the other 2 variants, volunteers were not rewarded for each shock delivered (i.e. “No monetary reward” variants). To resume, the 6 variants of the same task were the following: (1) No Aim + Monetary reward + Free-choice condition; (2) No Aim + No monetary reward + Free-choice condition; (3) Aim + Monetary reward + Free-choice condition; (4) Aim + No monetary reward + Free-choice condition; (5) No Aim + Monetary reward + No free-choice condition; (6) Aim + Monetary reward + No free-choice condition (see Table Table1 1 ).

Schematic representation of each variant of the experimental task.

Variants of the task	Aim for obedience	Monetary reward	Free-choice condition
Variant 1	✗	✓	✓
Variant 2	✗	✗	✓
Variant 3	✓	✓	✓
Variant 4	✓	✗	✓
Variant 5	✗	✓	✗
Variant 6	✓	✓	✗

Before the experimental session, volunteers filled in six questionnaires. Those questionnaires included (1) the Money Attitude Scale (e.g. “ I put money aside on a regular basis for the future ”) 31 , (2) the Moral Foundation Questionnaire (e.g. “ Whether or not someone showed a lack of respect for authority ”) 32 , (3) the Aggression-Submission-Conventionalism scale (e.g., “ We should believe what our leaders tell us ”) 33 , (4) the short dark triad scale (e.g., “ Most people can be manipulated ”) 34 , the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (e.g. “ When I see someone get hurt, I tend to remain calm ”) 35 . At the end of the experimental session, they were asked to fill in two more questionnaires: (1) A debriefing assessing what they felt during the experiment and the reasons for choosing to obey or disobey the orders of the experimenter (Supplementary Information S1) and (2) a questionnaire on social identification with the experimenter (e.g., “ I feel strong ties with this experimenter ”) 36 . At the end of the experiment a debriefing was conducted for each volunteer, separately. Volunteers were then paid, again separately.

General data analyses

Each result was analyzed with both frequentist and Bayesian statistics 37 . Bayesian statistics assess the likelihood of the data under both the null and the alternative hypothesis. BF 10 corresponds to the p (data| H 1 )/ p (data| H 0 ). Generally, a BF between 1/3 and 3 indicates that the data is similarly likely under the H 1 and H 0 , and that the data does not adjudicate which is more likely. A BF 10 below 1/3 or above 3 is interpreted as supporting H 0 and H 1 , respectively. For instance, BF 10 = 20 would mean that the data are 20 times more likely under H 1 than H 0 providing very strong support for H 1 , while BF 10 = 0.05 would mean that the data are 20 times more likely under H 0 than H 1 providing very strong support for H 0 38 . BF and p values were calculated using JASP 39 and the default priors implemented in JASP. All analyses were two-tailed.

Number of shocks given in the free-choice condition

In the free-choice condition, volunteers were told that they were entirely free to decide to deliver a shock or not to the ‘victim’ on each of the 96 free-choice trials. On average, agents administered shocks to the victim on 31.86% of the trials (SD = 34.98, minimum: 0%, maximum: 100%) in the free-choice condition, corresponding to 30.59/96 shocks. A paired-sample t-test indicated that agents delivered less frequently a shock in the free-choice condition than in the coerced condition (68.03%, SD = 41.11, t (119) = -9.919, p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = − 0.906, BF 10 = 1.987e + 14). This result supports the fact that individuals can inflict more harm to others when they obey orders than when they act freely.

Prosocial disobedience across variants

In the present study, I was interested in prosocial disobedience, that is, when agents refuse the orders of the experimenter to send a painful shock to the ‘victim’. Table Table2 2 displays the number of volunteers who reported that they voluntarily disobeyed in each variant of the task.

Number of volunteers who reported that they voluntarily disobeyed the orders of the experimenter.

	Variant 1	Variant 2	Variant 3	Variant 4	Variant 5	Variant 6
Voluntary disobedience (‘Yes’)	23/30	24/30	8/30	16/30	24/30	13/30

In this experiment, the main variable of interest was not to consider how many participants disobeyed in each variant only, but also how frequently they disobeyed. A percentage of prosocial disobedience was calculated for each volunteer, corresponding to the number of trials in which participants chose to disobey (i.e., sending no shocks while ordered by the experimenter to do so) divided by the total number of trials corresponding to the order to send a shock, multiplied by 100. I compared the prosocial disobedience rate across variants of the task, gender of participants and order of the role. I conducted a univariate ANOVA with prosocial disobedience as the dependent variable and Aim (aim given, no aim given), Monetary reward (+ €0.05 or not), Free-choice (presence or absence of a free-choice condition), Gender and Order of the Role (agent first, victim first) as fixed factors (see Fig. 2 ). Both frequentist and Bayesian statistics strongly supported a main effect of Aim (F (1,155) = 14.248, p < 0.001, η 2 partial = 0.084, BF incl = 158.806). Prosocial disobedience was lower when an aim for obedience was given to volunteers (20.4%, CI 95 = 12.8–28.1) than when no aim was given (43.3%, CI 95 = 35.6–51). Both frequentist and Bayesian statistics also supported a main effect of Monetary reward (F (1,155) = 12.335, p = 0.001, η 2 partial = 0.074, BF incl = 28.930). Prosocial disobedience was lower when a monetary reward was given for each shock (25.1%, CI 95 = 18.5–31.7) than when no monetary reward was given (45.4%, CI 95 = 35.9–54.8). The frequentist approach showed a main effect of Gender (F (1,155) = 5.128, p = 0.025, η 2 partial = 0.032), with a lower prosocial disobedience rate for female volunteers (25.7%, CI 95 = 18.2–33.2) then for male volunteers (38%, CI 95 = 30–46). However, the Bayesian version of the same analysis revealed a lack of sensitivity (BF incl = 0.871). All other main effects or interactions supported H 0 or a lack of sensitivity (all p s > 0.1 & BFs incl ≥ 0.4.291E-7 & ≤ 1.178).

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Graphical representation of the percentages of prosocial disobedience in each variant of the task.

The following results report two-tailed Pearson correlations between prosocial disobedience and several other variables, including (1) the reasons given for disobeying, (2) the feeling of responsibility, badness and how sorry they experienced during the experiment, (3) the identification with the experimenter, (4) the perceived level of pain of the victim, (5) identification with the ‘victim’, and (6) individual differences measured through self-report questionnaires. I applied a False Discovery Rate (FDR) approach with the Benjamini and Hochberg method 40 to each p-value for each of those correlations but for the sake of clarity these variables are reported in different sub-sections.

Reasons for prosocial disobedience

All participants who reported that they voluntarily disobeyed the orders of the experimenter (N = 108) were presented a list of 10 reasons that they had to rate from “Not at all” to “Extremely” (see Supplementary Information S1). The reason ‘ I wanted to make more money ’ was only considered for the data of volunteers who had a variant with a monetary reward for each shock (N = 68). Both frequentist and Bayesian statistics showed that the percentage of prosocial disobedience positively correlated with moral reasons (r = 0.550, p FDR < 0.001, BF 10 = 1.700e + 7), positively correlated with disobedience by contradiction (r = 0.329, p FDR < 0.001, BF 10 = 47.53) and negatively correlated with the willingness to make more money (r = − 0.485, p FDR < 0.001, BF 10 = 822.16). Other correlations were in favor of H 0 or were inconclusive (all p s FDR > 0.076, all BFs 10 ≥ 0.120 & ≤ 1.446).

Feeling responsible, bad and sorry

Both frequentist and Bayesian statistics showed strong positive correlations between prosocial disobedience and how responsible (r = 0.299, p FDR < 0.001, BF 10 = 343.98) and how bad (r = 0.301, p FDR < 0.001, BF 10 = 384.65) they felt during the task (see Figs. 3 A and B). The more responsible and worse they felt during the task, the more they refused the order to send a shock to the ‘victim’. How sorry they felt was inconclusive ( p FDR > 0.08, BF 10 = 0.929).

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Graphical representation of Pearson correlations between prosocial disobedience and ( A ) feeling of responsibility, ( B ) how bad agents felt during the task when they administered shocks to the ‘victim’, and ( C ) how painful they estimated the shock delivered to the ‘victim’ was. All tests were two-tailed.

Identification with the experimenter

Both frequentist and Bayesian statistics strongly supported H 0 regarding the relationship between prosocial disobedience and personal identification ( p FDR > 0.5, BF 10 = 0.121) and bonding with the experimenter ( p FDR > 0.5, BF 10 = 0.117). The relationship between the charisma of the experimenter and prosocial disobedience was also slightly in favor of H 0 ( p FDR > 0.1, BF 10 = 0.530).

Estimated pain of the ‘victim’

The frequentist approach showed a positive correlation between the perceived pain of the ‘victim’ and prosocial disobedience (r = 0.189, p FDR = 0.048). The higher they considered the ‘victim’ to be in pain, the more frequently they refused to deliver the shock. The Bayesian version of the same analysis slightly supported this relationship (BF 10 = 2.236), see Fig. 3 C.

Identification with the ‘victim’

In the post-session questionnaire, volunteers had to identify to what extent they considered that the other participant could be part of their group and to what extent they identified with the other participant. Both frequentist and Bayesian statistics strongly supported H 0 regarding the relationship between prosocial disobedience and the perception that the other participant could be part of one’s own group ( p FDR > 0.8, BF 10 = 0.096). The relationship between prosocial disobedience and the identification with the other participant also slightly supported H 0 ( p FDR > 0.1, BF 10 = 0.511).

Correlations between the behavior of pairs of participants

As we used a role reversal procedure, the behavior of those who were agents first could influence the behavior of those who turned agents afterwards. A Pearson correlation between prosocial disobedience of agents first and prosocial disobedience of victims who turned agents afterwards. The correlation was positive (r = 0.514, p < 0.001, BF 10 = 60,068.704), suggesting participants who were agents second tend to act similarly as those who were agents first.

Individual differences associated with prosocial disobedience

Another approach to ensure a reliable prosocial disobedience rate when recruiting volunteers would be to target individuals with a profile that is most frequently associated with disobedient behaviors. Both frequentist and Bayesian statistics for exploratory correlations were two-tailed. Cronbach’s α for each subscale is presented in Supplementary Information S2. Both frequentist and Bayesian statistics showed a negative correlation between scores on the Authority subscale (r = -0.259, p FDR < 0.001, BF 10 = 41.372) and the Purity subscale (r = -0.303, p FDR < 0.001, BF 10 = 424.97) from the MFQ questionnaire. The lower volunteers scored on authority and purity, the higher was their prosocial disobedience rate. Other correlations were in favor of H 0 or were inconclusive (all p s FDR ≥ 0.048, all BFs 10 ≥ 0.100 & ≤ 2.314).

Reasons for obedience

If participants reported that they did not voluntarily disobey the orders of the experimenter, they were asked in an open question to explain their decision to comply with those orders. After reading all the answers, three categories were extracted from the reasons provided: (1) ‘For science’ reasons; participants reported that they obeyed to allow reliable data acquisition (e.g., Participant 91: “ Pour ne pas fausser l’étude ”—English translation: “ To avoid biasing the stud y”); (2) ‘For respect of authority’ reasons; participants reported that they had to follow the orders of the authoritative figure (e.g., Participant 13: “ Pour moi c’est normal de suivre un ordre ”—English translation: “ In my opinion, it’s normal to follow an order ”), and (3) ‘For lack of side-effects’ reasons; participants reported that since the shocks delivered were calibrated on one’s own pain threshold, obeying orders to shock was not problematic (e.g., Participant 115: “ Douleur supportable pour l'autre, je n'ai accepté de faire subir que ce que j'aurais été prêt à subir moi-même ”—English translation: “ The pain was tolerable for the other participant, I have accepted to inflict the intensity of the pain that I would have been ready to undergo myself ”). An independent, naive judge classified the response of participants in one or several of those three established categories. Analyses of the frequencies revealed that the reason “For Science” was mentioned 31/70 times, the reason “For lack of side-effects” was mentioned 17/70 times and the reason “For respect of authority” was mentioned 31/70 times.

The aim of the present paper was to present a novel experimental approach to study (dis)obedience to immoral orders, by combining the strength of past experimental work and by adapting it to cognitive and neuroimaging measurements. Although other versions were proposed since Milgram’s studies, like a study in an immersive virtual environment 15 or the 150-V method 16 , some methodological concerns remained as those methods still involved cover stories or fake experimental set-ups. Here, the experimental approach was significantly different as it was based on an entirely transparent method that involved the administration of real electric shocks to another individual. This approach has the advantage to solve some of the main ethical and methodological concerns associated with the use of cover stories. It also has the advantage that it be can used both to study how social and situational factors influence disobedience as well as individual factors. For social and situational factors, the proposed paradigm can be adapted to evaluate for instance the influence of a supporting group, the use of high or low monetary rewards or how priming disobedience with a documentary influence disobedience. For individual factors, the paradigm allows to investigate how personality traits influence disobedience or to study the neuro-cognitive processes underlying disobedience.

Some novel theories combining a multi-method approach based on social psychology, neuroeconomics and neuroscience could thus emerge to understand better the mechanisms supporting disobedience. For instance, one could evaluate how empathy for the pain of the victim predicts disobedience and how the presence of a supporting group influences our capacity to feel empathy 41 and/or compassion for the ‘victim’ 42 . It could also be argued that the presence of a supporting group diffuses responsibility between individuals and increases obedience, by influencing how our brain processes agency and responsibility over our actions 28 , 43 – 45 . As the results obtained in the present study also indicated that feeling bad for the shocks delivered was statistically associated with prosocial disobedience, one could evaluate how the neural correlates of guilt 46 predicts prosocial disobedience and what historical, cultural and individual factors influence the feeling of guilt.

Six variants of the same task were tested in the present study, some inducing a higher prosocial disobedience rate than others. Statistical results showed that providing a reason—or aim—to justify obedience strongly decreased disobedience. Providing a monetary reward, even one as small as €0.05, also strongly decreased disobedience. Variant 2, in which volunteers were not given an aim or monetary reward, showed the highest disobedience rates. However, to study disobedience in ecological way, the paradigm should capture disobedience of participants even if they know that they are losing something (i.e., monetary rewards or the ‘trust’ of the experimenter asking them help for the study). Defying the orders of an authority generally involves social and/or monetary costs in real-life situations. I would thus not recommend using an experimental paradigm in which volunteers have no costs associated with defying the orders of the experimenter, as it would reduce the ecology of the disobedience act. Variants 3 and 6 involve two types of costs for resisting the orders of the experimenter: a monetary loss and deceiving the experimenter. In Variant 3, descriptive statistics showed that prosocial disobedience was lower compared to Variant 6. The main difference between these two variants was the presence of a free-choice condition. In my former studies 23 , 27 , volunteers frequently justified obedience in the coerced condition because they were given freedom in the free-choice condition (e.g. Participant 89 – English Translation: “ (…) In addition, I knew I could chose freely in the other condition not to send shocks—what I did ). In the present debriefings, some volunteers also reported that the presence of a free-choice condition was giving them enough freedom to accept to follow the orders in the coerced condition. In the supplementary analyses, results showed that when the monetary reward and the aim for obeying are identical, being given a free-choice condition reduces disobedience in the coerced condition. Therefore, Variant 6 appears to provide a good balance between reaching a reliable disobedience rate and finding volunteers who would refuse to produce physical harm on another human beings despite the monetary or social costs associated with defying orders.

Another approach would be to pre-select people who are predicted to be more disobedient. Personality questionnaires indicated that scoring low on the authority and on the purity subscale of the MFQ was strongly associated with a higher prosocial disobedience rate. The link between one’s own relationship to authority and prosocial disobedience observed here replicates another study conducted on the first generation of Rwandese after the 1994 genocide 47 . One’s own relationship to authority thus appears to be a reliable predictor variable in order to pre-select a sample that is more likely to disobey immoral orders.

In the present paper, administering a real mildly painful shock in exchange or not for a small monetary gain was described as an ‘immoral’ act. The notion of what is moral or not can highly differ between individuals 48 , for both academics and volunteers participating in an experiment. Humans are indeed sensitive to different competing issues of morality, a key reason for rescuing persecuted people 49 . In accordance with this observation, the present results indicated that moral reasons were a critical factor associated with the prosocial disobedience rate: the more shocking partners was considered as immoral, the more volunteers disobeyed. However, considering an action as against one’s own moral values does not necessarily translate to a refusal—especially when this order is in line with the Law. An extreme example is soldiers who have perpetrated acts that transgressed their moral beliefs but were issued by their superior in combat 50 . A core question for future research remains: Why are some people capable of putting their own moral standards above the social costs associated with defying orders?

Results indicate that the more volunteers felt responsible during the task, and the worse they felt for sending shocks to the ‘victim’, the higher was their prosocial disobedience. In another study, we observed that obeying orders reduced the feeling of responsibility, how bad and how sorry volunteers felt compared to being free to decide 26 . One hypothesis is that individuals who have preserved a feeling of responsibility and feeling bad—even under command—could more easily defy immoral orders. However, future studies are necessary to better understand the neuro-cognitive processes that prevent an individual from complying with immoral orders. As this paradigm is adapted to neuroimaging measurements, a whole range of studies could now be conducted.

It has been previously suggested that a strong identification with the experimenter giving orders is associated with higher obedience 36 . However, in the present paper, correlations between prosocial disobedience and identification with the experimenter were in favor of H0 with both the frequentist and the Bayesian approaches. In a former study, we also observed that identification to the experimenter was not a critical aspect for explain (dis)obedience. We observed that the generation of Rwandese born after the genocide and tested in Rwanda reported a higher identification to the experimenter than the same generation of Rwandese but tested in Belgium 47 . However, the latter group had a higher prosocial disobedience rate than the former group. Future studies must thus be conducted to understand how the identification with the person giving orders could influence obedience and its weight compared to other social, cultural and individual variables.

Although some volunteers reported that they felt a bit stressed and anxious during the task when they were in the role of the agent, the overwhelming majority did not report any negative psychological feelings. None of the participants withdrew from the experiment and none reported long-term negative psychological effects.

Nowadays, it has become difficult to find volunteers who do not know Milgram’s studies given the high media coverage, including movies, radio soaps, books, podcast and documentaries. One could expect that knowing Milgram would prevent people to obey. However, for the large majority of volunteers, it appears that this is not the case. In previous studies that I conducted with a relatively similar paradigm, the disobedience rate was drastically low (i.e. 3.3%) even if participants were university students knowing Milgram’s studies. In the present study, almost all the volunteers who participated in the present study knew Milgram and explicitly mentioned him during the oral debriefings or before starting the experiment. Yet for those who disobeyed, almost none reported that the reason for disobedience was that they thought it was the aim of the experiment. Further, there was no statistical relationship between prosocial disobedience and believing that it was the aim of the study. It does not mean that knowing Milgram would not influence at all disobedience. It rather suggests that knowing Milgram is not the main factor influencing one’s decision to obey or not an experimenter. It is also possible that since in this experiment shocks were real and not fake such as in Milgram’s studies, participants considered that this was indeed not a study aiming to replicate Milgram.

As far as I have observed, the main problem associated with knowing Milgram’s studies is that volunteers believe that I also have hidden aims and procedures when they enter the experimental room. Several volunteers reported that they only realized that my explanations for the task were true when they were explicitly offered the choice to decide which role to play first and/or when they started receiving the shocks. This is a general concern in psychological studies: The high use of cover stories can also impact other research, as volunteers start to develop a mistrust in what researchers tell them.

Results indicated that who were agents second tend to act similarly as those who were agents first, by sending a relatively similar amount of shocks. Of note, this is an effect that we also observed in past studies on the effect of obeying orders on cognition 23 , 26 , 43 . Nonetheless, in none of those studies we observed that the order of the role had a statistical influence on the neuro-cognitive processes targeted. However, the influence on role reversal on disobedience and related neuro-cognitive processes has still to be investigated in future studies.

The present paradigm is ecological in the sense that volunteers are facing decisions that have a real, physical impact on another human being. However, at the moment I only have little evidences that this paradigm has ecological validity to reflect obedience in real life situations, especially regarding “destructive disobedience” 17 . Caution is indicated when making inference from laboratory studies to complex social behaviours, such as those observed during genocides 16 . My main evidence at the moment is that the very low rate of prosocial disobedience observed in the first generation of post-genocide Rwandans tested in Rwanda using this paradigm 47 is consistent with the fact that deference to authority had already been emphasized by academics as an important factor in the 1994 genocide 4 , 51 . Individual scores on deference to authority in Caspar et al. 47 was the best predictive factor for prosocial disobedience in that former paradigm, thus suggesting some ecological validity. A promising approach would be to recruit “Righteous Among the Nations”, individuals who really saved lives during genocides. Testing this population with the present paradigm would put the ecological validity of this paradigm to the test.

People’s ability to question and resist immoral orders is a fundamental aspect of individual autonomy and of successful societies. As Howard Zinn famously wrote: “ Historically, the most terrible things—war, genocide, and slavery—have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience ”. Understanding how individuals differ in the extent to which they comply with orders has undeniably several societal implications. They range from understanding how evolving in highly hierarchical environments — such as the military or prisons—influences moral behaviours, to developing interventions that would help to prevent blind obedience and help to resist calls to violence in vulnerable societies. However, since Milgram’s studies, the topic of disobedience has been mostly studied by social psychologists using adapted versions of the initial paradigm developed by Milgram. I hope that with this novel approach, (dis)obedience research will be given a new boost and will be considered by other scientific disciplines seeking to understand better human behaviours.

Supplementary Information

Acknowledgements.

Emilie A. Caspar was funded by the F.R.S-FNRS.

Author contributions

E.A.C. developed the study concept and the method. Testing, data collection and data analysis were performed by E.A.C. E.A.C. wrote the manuscript.

Data availability

Competing interests.

The author declares no competing interests.

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Published: 18 February 2016

Modern Milgram experiment sheds light on power of authority

Alison Abbott

Nature volume 530 , pages 394–395 ( 2016 ) Cite this article

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People obeying commands feel less responsibility for their actions.

More than 50 years after a controversial psychologist shocked the world with studies that revealed people’s willingness to harm others on order, a team of cognitive scientists has carried out an updated version of the iconic ‘Milgram experiments’.

Their findings may offer some explanation for Stanley Milgram's uncomfortable revelations: when following commands, they say, people genuinely feel less responsibility for their actions — whether they are told to do something evil or benign.

“If others can replicate this, then it is giving us a big message,” says neuroethicist Walter Sinnot-Armstrong of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the work. “It may be the beginning of an insight into why people can harm others if coerced: they don’t see it as their own action.”

The study may feed into a long-running legal debate about the balance of personal responsibility between someone acting under instruction and their instructor, says Patrick Haggard, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, who led the work, published on 18 February in Current Biology 1 .

Milgram’s original experiments were motivated by the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who famously argued that he was ‘just following orders’ when he sent Jews to their deaths. The new findings don’t legitimize harmful actions, Haggard emphasizes, but they do suggest that the ‘only obeying orders’ excuse betrays a deeper truth about how a person feels when acting under command.

Ordered to shock

In a series of experiments at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1960s, Milgram told his participants that a man was being trained to learn word pairs in a neighbouring room. The participants had to press a button to deliver an electric shock of escalating strength to the learner when he made an error; when they did so, they heard his cries of pain. In reality, the learner was an actor, and no shock was ever delivered. Milgram’s aim was to see how far people would go when they were ordered to step up the voltage.

Routinely, an alarming two-thirds of participants continued to step up shocks, even after the learner was apparently rendered unconscious. But Milgram did not assess his participants’ subjective feelings as they were coerced into doing something unpleasant. And his experiments have been criticized for the deception that they involved — not just because participants may have been traumatized, but also because some may have guessed that the pain wasn’t real.

Modern teams have conducted partial and less ethically complicated replications of Milgram’s work. But Haggard and his colleagues wanted to find out what participants were feeling. They designed a study in which volunteers knowingly inflicted real pain on each other, and were completely aware of the experiment’s aims.

Because Milgram’s experiments were so controversial, Haggard says that he took “quite a deep breath before deciding to do the study”. But he says that the question of who bears personal responsibility is so important to the rule of law that he thought it was “worth trying to do some good experiments to get to the heart of the matter.”

Sense of agency

In his experiments, the volunteers (all were female, as were the experimenters, to avoid gender effects) were given £20 (US$29). In pairs, they sat facing each other across a table, with a keyboard between them. A participant designated the ‘agent’ could press one of two keys; one did nothing. But for some pairs, the other key would transfer 5p to the agent from the other participant, designated the ‘victim’; for others, the key would also deliver a painful but bearable electric shock to the victim’s arm. (Because people have different tolerances to pain, the level of the electric shock was determined for each individual before the experiment began.) In one experiment, an experimenter stood next to the agent and told her which key to press. In another, the experimenter looked away and gave the agent a free choice about which key to press.

To examine the participants’ ‘sense of agency’ — the unconscious feeling that they were in control of their own actions — Haggard and his colleagues designed the experiment so that pressing either key caused a tone to sound after a few hundred milliseconds, and both volunteers were asked to judge the length of this interval. Psychologists have established that people perceive the interval between an action and its outcome as shorter when they carry out an intentional action of their own free will, such as moving their arm, than when the action is passive, such as having their arm moved by someone else.

When they were ordered to press a key, the participants seemed to judge their action as more passive than when they had free choice — they perceived the time to the tone as longer.

In a separate experiment, volunteers followed similar protocols while electrodes on their heads recorded their neural activity through EEG (electroencephalography). When ordered to press a key, their EEG recordings were quieter — suggesting, says Haggard, that their brains were not processing the outcome of their action. Some participants later reported feeling reduced responsibility for their action.

Unexpectedly, giving the order to press the key was enough to cause the effects, even when the keystroke led to no physical or financial harm. “It seems like your sense of responsibility is reduced whenever someone orders you to do something — whatever it is they are telling you to do,” says Haggard.

The study might inform legal debate, but it also has wider relevance to other domains of society, says Sinnot-Armstrong. For example, companies that want to create — or avoid — a feeling of personal responsibility among their employees could take its lessons on board.

Caspar, E. A., Christensen, J. F., Cleeremans, A. & Haggard, P. Curr. Biol. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.12.067 (2016).

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The Milgram experiment: Its impact and interpretation

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Short history of research ethics with selected cases, diplomarbeit / diploma thesis, 14 references, good ethics can sometimes mean better science: research ethics and the milgram experiments, some thoughts on ethics of research: after reading milgram's "behavioral study of obedience.", ethics, deception, and 'those milgram experiments'..

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BEHAVIORAL STUDY OF OBEDIENCE.

Milgram's obedience experiments: a rhetorical analysis., the man who shocked the world: the life and legacy of stanley milgram, from new haven to santa clara: a historical perspective on the milgram obedience experiments., the declaration of helsinki and public health., spinning an organizational “web of obligation” moral choice in stanley milgram’s “obedience” experiments, contemporary social psychology in historical perspective., related papers.

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Neurobiology of the Milgram Obedience Experiment

This manuscript presents a comprehensive review of the neurobiology underlying the Milgram Obedience Experiment, a cornerstone in understanding human behavior under authority. Beginning with an examination of traumatic historical events, particularly the Holocaust, the manuscript delves into the psychological underpinnings of obedience. It discusses how individuals, like Adolf Eichmann, rationalized their actions as mere adherence to orders, a phenomenon later empirically studied by Stanley Milgram. Milgram's experiments, conducted at Yale University, demonstrated a startling willingness among ordinary people to inflict harm when instructed by an authority figure, with a significant proportion of participants administering what they believed were lethal electric shocks to others. The review further explores the neurobiological aspects of obedience, emphasizing the role of mirror neurons and empathetic responses. It highlights how obedience to authority can diminish empathetic responses and alter the neural processing of actions and consequences. This diminished sense of agency and responsibility when following orders is contrasted with situations where individuals act on their own volition, shedding light on the complex interplay between authority, morality, and neurobiology. In conclusion, this review not only provides a deep insight into Milgram's obedience experiments but also extends the understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms that drive human behavior in contexts of authority and obedience. It underscores the intricate balance between individual autonomy and susceptibility to external influences, a balance that is crucial in understanding both historical events and contemporary societal dynamics.

Author Biography

Sultan tarlacı, uskudar university, department of neuroscience and neurology, i̇stanbul, türkiye.

He was awarded a Research Encouragement Award by the Society of Brain Research (2000), a Research Encouragement Award by TUBITAK Society of Brain Research (2001), the Sedat Simavi Health Sciences Award by the Society of Turkish Journalists (2003), NeoCortex Prize (2014). He is the author of a neurology textbook titled "Neurologic Emergency Disease: Current Diagnosis and Treatment" (2019) and popular books titled Quantum Brain: New Scientific Approach to the Consciousness-Brain Problem (2010), Consciousness: From Antiquity to the Rediscovery of Consciousness (2012), Crime and Brain (2017), From Cave to Mars (2017), Death’Dict (2016), Why Schrödinger's cat became schizophrenic? (2016) and NeuroQuantology: Quantum Physics in the Brain. Reducing the Secret of the Rainbow to the Colours of a Prism (New York, Nova Publs., 2014), 197 Days: In Search of a Killer (Novel, 2015), Master and Apprentice Conversations: Parapsychology, Mysticism, Afterlife and Dreams (2018), Omar Khayyam: the Whell of Destiny (2023). His main research interest is the application of quantum physics to the nervous system, neuropsychology, neurophilosophy and clinical electrophysiology.

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Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment

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On This Page:

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, carried out one of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology.

He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.

Milgram (1963) examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on obedience – that they were just following orders from their superiors.

The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question:

Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974).

Milgram (1963) wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures, as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.

Milgram selected participants for his experiment by newspaper advertising for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University.

The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher.’ The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s confederates (pretending to be a real participant).

The learner (a confederate called Mr. Wallace) was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arms, and the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX).

The shocks in Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments were not real. The “learners” were actors who were part of the experiment and did not actually receive any shocks.

However, the “teachers” (the real participants of the study) believed the shocks were real, which was crucial for the experiment to measure obedience to authority figures even when it involved causing harm to others.

Milgram’s Experiment (1963)

Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person.

Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities, for example, Germans in WWII.

Volunteers were recruited for a controlled experiment investigating “learning” (re: ethics: deception).

Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional, from the New Haven area. They were paid $4.50 for just turning up.

At the beginning of the experiment, they were introduced to another participant, a confederate of the experimenter (Milgram).

They drew straws to determine their roles – learner or teacher – although this was fixed, and the confederate was always the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a gray lab coat, played by an actor (not Milgram).

Two rooms in the Yale Interaction Laboratory were used – one for the learner (with an electric chair) and another for the teacher and experimenter with an electric shock generator.

The “learner” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped to a chair with electrodes.

After he has learned a list of word pairs given to him to learn, the “teacher” tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.

The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).

The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose), and for each of these, the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock, the experimenter was to give a series of orders/prods to ensure they continued.

There were four prods, and if one was not obeyed, then the experimenter (Mr. Williams) read out the next prod, and so on.

Prod 1 : Please continue. Prod 2: The experiment requires you to continue. Prod 3 : It is absolutely essential that you continue. Prod 4 : You have no other choice but to continue.

These prods were to be used in order, and begun afresh for each new attempt at defiance (Milgram, 1974, p. 21). The experimenter also had two special prods available. These could be used as required by the situation:

Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on’ (ibid.)
‘Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on’ (ibid., p. 22).

65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.

Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations of his study. All he did was alter the situation (IV) to see how this affected obedience (DV).

Conclusion

The individual explanation for the behavior of the participants would be that it was something about them as people that caused them to obey, but a more realistic explanation is that the situation they were in influenced them and caused them to behave in the way that they did.

Some aspects of the situation that may have influenced their behavior include the formality of the location, the behavior of the experimenter, and the fact that it was an experiment for which they had volunteered and been paid.

Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.

People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in the family, school, and workplace.

Milgram summed up in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), writing:

“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”

Milgram’s Agency Theory

Milgram (1974) explained the behavior of his participants by suggesting that people have two states of behavior when they are in a social situation:

The autonomous state – people direct their own actions, and they take responsibility for the results of those actions.
The agentic state – people allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving the orders. In other words, they act as agents for another person’s will.

Milgram suggested that two things must be in place for a person to enter the agentic state:

The person giving the orders is perceived as being qualified to direct other people’s behavior. That is, they are seen as legitimate.
The person being ordered about is able to believe that the authority will accept responsibility for what happens.

According to Milgram, when in this agentic state, the participant in the obedience studies “defines himself in a social situation in a manner that renders him open to regulation by a person of higher status. In this condition the individual no longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others” (Milgram, 1974, p. 134).

Agency theory says that people will obey an authority when they believe that the authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This is supported by some aspects of Milgram’s evidence.

For example, when participants were reminded that they had responsibility for their own actions, almost none of them were prepared to obey.

In contrast, many participants who were refusing to go on did so if the experimenter said that he would take responsibility.

According to Milgram (1974, p. 188):

“The behavior revealed in the experiments reported here is normal human behavior but revealed under conditions that show with particular clarity the danger to human survival inherent in our make-up.

And what is it we have seen? Not aggression, for there is no anger, vindictiveness, or hatred in those who shocked the victim….

Something far more dangerous is revealed: the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.”

Milgram Experiment Variations

The Milgram experiment was carried out many times whereby Milgram (1965) varied the basic procedure (changed the IV). By doing this Milgram could identify which factors affected obedience (the DV).

Obedience was measured by how many participants shocked to the maximum 450 volts (65% in the original study). Stanley Milgram conducted a total of 23 variations (also called conditions or experiments) of his original obedience study:

In total, 636 participants were tested in 18 variation studies conducted between 1961 and 1962 at Yale University.

In the original baseline study – the experimenter wore a gray lab coat to symbolize his authority (a kind of uniform).

The lab coat worn by the experimenter in the original study served as a crucial symbol of scientific authority that increased obedience. The lab coat conveyed expertise and legitimacy, making participants see the experimenter as more credible and trustworthy.

Milgram carried out a variation in which the experimenter was called away because of a phone call right at the start of the procedure.

The role of the experimenter was then taken over by an ‘ordinary member of the public’ ( a confederate) in everyday clothes rather than a lab coat. The obedience level dropped to 20%.

Change of Location: The Mountain View Facility Study (1963, unpublished)

Milgram conducted this variation in a set of offices in a rundown building, claiming it was associated with “Research Associates of Bridgeport” rather than Yale.

The lab’s ordinary appearance was designed to test if Yale’s prestige encouraged obedience. Participants were led to believe that a private research firm experimented.

In this non-university setting, obedience rates dropped to 47.5% compared to 65% in the original Yale experiments. This suggests that the status of location affects obedience.

Private research firms are viewed as less prestigious than certain universities, which affects behavior. It is easier under these conditions to abandon the belief in the experimenter’s essential decency.

The impressive university setting reinforced the experimenter’s authority and conveyed an implicit approval of the research.

Milgram filmed this variation for his documentary Obedience , but did not publish the results in his academic papers. The study only came to wider light when archival materials, including his notes, films, and data, were studied by later researchers like Perry (2013) in the decades after Milgram’s death.

Two Teacher Condition

When participants could instruct an assistant (confederate) to press the switches, 92.5% shocked to the maximum of 450 volts.

Allowing the participant to instruct an assistant to press the shock switches diffused personal responsibility and likely reduced perceptions of causing direct harm.

By attributing the actions to the assistant rather than themselves, participants could more easily justify shocking to the maximum 450 volts, reflected in the 92.5% obedience rate.

When there is less personal responsibility, obedience increases. This relates to Milgram’s Agency Theory.

Touch Proximity Condition

The teacher had to force the learner’s hand down onto a shock plate when the learner refused to participate after 150 volts. Obedience fell to 30%.

Forcing the learner’s hand onto the shock plate after 150 volts physically connected the teacher to the consequences of their actions. This direct tactile feedback increased the teacher’s personal responsibility.

No longer shielded from the learner’s reactions, the proximity enabled participants to more clearly perceive the harm they were causing, reducing obedience to 30%. Physical distance and indirect actions in the original setup made it easier to rationalize obeying the experimenter.

The participant is no longer buffered/protected from seeing the consequences of their actions.

Social Support Condition

When the two confederates set an example of defiance by refusing to continue the shocks, especially early on at 150 volts, it permitted the real participant also to resist authority.

Two other participants (confederates) were also teachers but refused to obey. Confederate 1 stopped at 150 volts, and Confederate 2 stopped at 210 volts.

Their disobedience provided social proof that it was acceptable to disobey. This modeling of defiance lowered obedience to only 10% compared to 65% without such social support. It demonstrated that social modeling can validate challenging authority.

The presence of others who are seen to disobey the authority figure reduces the level of obedience to 10%.

Absent Experimenter Condition

It is easier to resist the orders from an authority figure if they are not close by. When the experimenter instructed and prompted the teacher by telephone from another room, obedience fell to 20.5%.

Many participants cheated and missed out on shocks or gave less voltage than ordered by the experimenter. The proximity of authority figures affects obedience.

The physical absence of the authority figure enabled participants to act more freely on their own moral inclinations rather than the experimenter’s commands. This highlighted the role of an authority’s direct presence in influencing behavior.

A key reason the obedience studies fascinate people is Milgram presented them as a scientific experiment, contrasting himself as an “empirically grounded scientist” compared to philosophers. He claimed he systematically varied factors to alter obedience rates.

However, recent scholarship using archival records shows Milgram’s account of standardizing the procedure was misleading. For example, he published a list of standardized prods the experimenter used when participants questioned continuing. Milgram said these were delivered uniformly in a firm but polite tone.

Analyzing audiotapes, Gibson (2013) found considerable variation from the published protocol – the prods differed across trials. The point is not that Milgram did poor science, but that the archival materials reveal the limitations of the textbook account of his “standardized” procedure.

The qualitative data like participant feedback, Milgram’s notes, and researchers’ actions provide a fuller, messier picture than the obedience studies’ “official” story. For psychology students, this shows how scientific reporting can polish findings in a way that strays from the less tidy reality.

Critical Evaluation

Inaccurate description of the prod methodology:.

A key reason the obedience studies fascinate people is Milgram (1974) presented them as a scientific experiment, contrasting himself as an “empirically grounded scientist” compared to philosophers. He claimed he systematically varied factors to alter obedience rates.

Perry’s (2013) archival research revealed another discrepancy between Milgram’s published account and the actual events. Milgram claimed standardized prods were used when participants resisted, but Perry’s audiotape analysis showed the experimenter often improvised more coercive prods beyond the supposed script.

This off-script prodding varied between experiments and participants, and was especially prevalent with female participants where no gender obedience difference was found – suggesting the improvisation influenced results. Gibson (2013) and Russell (2009) corroborated the experimenter’s departures from the supposed fixed prods.

Prods were often combined or modified rather than used verbatim as published.

Russell speculated the improvisation aimed to achieve outcomes the experimenter believed Milgram wanted. Milgram seemed to tacitly approve of the deviations by not correcting them when observing.

This raises significant issues around experimenter bias influencing results, lack of standardization compromising validity, and ethical problems with Milgram misrepresenting procedures.

Milgram’s experiment lacked external validity:

The Milgram studies were conducted in laboratory-type conditions, and we must ask if this tells us much about real-life situations.

We obey in a variety of real-life situations that are far more subtle than instructions to give people electric shocks, and it would be interesting to see what factors operate in everyday obedience. The sort of situation Milgram investigated would be more suited to a military context.

Orne and Holland (1968) accused Milgram’s study of lacking ‘experimental realism,”’ i.e.,” participants might not have believed the experimental set-up they found themselves in and knew the learner wasn’t receiving electric shocks.

“It’s more truthful to say that only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real, and of those two-thirds disobeyed the experimenter,” observes Perry (p. 139).

Milgram’s sample was biased:

The participants in Milgram’s study were all male. Do the findings transfer to females?
Milgram’s study cannot be seen as representative of the American population as his sample was self-selected. This is because they became participants only by electing to respond to a newspaper advertisement (selecting themselves).
They may also have a typical “volunteer personality” – not all the newspaper readers responded so perhaps it takes this personality type to do so.

Yet a total of 636 participants were tested in 18 separate experiments across the New Haven area, which was seen as being reasonably representative of a typical American town.

Milgram’s findings have been replicated in a variety of cultures and most lead to the same conclusions as Milgram’s original study and in some cases see higher obedience rates.

However, Smith and Bond (1998) point out that with the exception of Jordan (Shanab & Yahya, 1978), the majority of these studies have been conducted in industrialized Western cultures, and we should be cautious before we conclude that a universal trait of social behavior has been identified.

Selective reporting of experimental findings:

Perry (2013) found Milgram omitted findings from some obedience experiments he conducted, reporting only results supporting his conclusions. A key omission was the Relationship condition (conducted in 1962 but unpublished), where participant pairs were relatives or close acquaintances.

When the learner protested being shocked, most teachers disobeyed, contradicting Milgram’s emphasis on obedience to authority.

Perry argued Milgram likely did not publish this 85% disobedience rate because it undermined his narrative and would be difficult to defend ethically since the teacher and learner knew each other closely.

Milgram’s selective reporting biased interpretations of his findings. His failure to publish all his experiments raises issues around researchers’ ethical obligation to completely and responsibly report their results, not just those fitting their expectations.

Unreported analysis of participants’ skepticism and its impact on their behavior:

Perry (2013) found archival evidence that many participants expressed doubt about the experiment’s setup, impacting their behavior. This supports Orne and Holland’s (1968) criticism that Milgram overlooked participants’ perceptions.

Incongruities like apparent danger, but an unconcerned experimenter likely cued participants that no real harm would occur. Trust in Yale’s ethics reinforced this. Yet Milgram did not publish his assistant’s analysis showing participant skepticism correlated with disobedience rates and varied by condition.

Obedient participants were more skeptical that the learner was harmed. This selective reporting biased interpretations. Additional unreported findings further challenge Milgram’s conclusions.

This highlights issues around thoroughly and responsibly reporting all results, not just those fitting expectations. It shows how archival evidence makes Milgram’s study a contentious classic with questionable methods and conclusions.

Ethical Issues

What are the potential ethical concerns associated with Milgram’s research on obedience?

While not a “contribution to psychology” in the traditional sense, Milgram’s obedience experiments sparked significant debate about the ethics of psychological research.

Baumrind (1964) criticized the ethics of Milgram’s research as participants were prevented from giving their informed consent to take part in the study.

Participants assumed the experiment was benign and expected to be treated with dignity.

As a result of studies like Milgram’s, the APA and BPS now require researchers to give participants more information before they agree to take part in a study.

The participants actually believed they were shocking a real person and were unaware the learner was a confederate of Milgram’s.

However, Milgram argued that “illusion is used when necessary in order to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at-truths.”

Milgram also interviewed participants afterward to find out the effect of the deception. Apparently, 83.7% said that they were “glad to be in the experiment,” and 1.3% said that they wished they had not been involved.

Protection of participants

Participants were exposed to extremely stressful situations that may have the potential to cause psychological harm. Many of the participants were visibly distressed (Baumrind, 1964).

Signs of tension included trembling, sweating, stuttering, laughing nervously, biting lips and digging fingernails into palms of hands. Three participants had uncontrollable seizures, and many pleaded to be allowed to stop the experiment.

Milgram described a businessman reduced to a “twitching stuttering wreck” (1963, p. 377),

In his defense, Milgram argued that these effects were only short-term. Once the participants were debriefed (and could see the confederate was OK), their stress levels decreased.

“At no point,” Milgram (1964) stated, “were subjects exposed to danger and at no point did they run the risk of injurious effects resulting from participation” (p. 849).

To defend himself against criticisms about the ethics of his obedience research, Milgram cited follow-up survey data showing that 84% of participants said they were glad they had taken part in the study.

Milgram used this to claim that the study caused no serious or lasting harm, since most participants retrospectively did not regret their involvement.

Yet archival accounts show many participants endured lasting distress, even trauma, refuting Milgram’s insistence the study caused only fleeting “excitement.” By not debriefing all, Milgram misled participants about the true risks involved (Perry, 2013).

However, Milgram did debrief the participants fully after the experiment and also followed up after a period of time to ensure that they came to no harm.

Milgram debriefed all his participants straight after the experiment and disclosed the true nature of the experiment.

Participants were assured that their behavior was common, and Milgram also followed the sample up a year later and found no signs of any long-term psychological harm.

The majority of the participants (83.7%) said that they were pleased that they had participated, and 74% had learned something of personal importance.

Perry’s (2013) archival research found Milgram misrepresented debriefing – around 600 participants were not properly debriefed soon after the study, contrary to his claims. Many only learned no real shocks occurred when reading a mailed study report months later, which some may have not received.

Milgram likely misreported debriefing details to protect his credibility and enable future obedience research. This raises issues around properly informing and debriefing participants that connect to APA ethics codes developed partly in response to Milgram’s study.

Right to Withdrawal

The BPS states that researchers should make it plain to participants that they are free to withdraw at any time (regardless of payment).

When expressing doubts, the experimenter assured them all was well. Trusting Yale scientists, many took the experimenter at his word that “no permanent tissue damage” would occur, and continued administering shocks despite reservations.

Did Milgram give participants an opportunity to withdraw? The experimenter gave four verbal prods which mostly discouraged withdrawal from the experiment:

Please continue.
The experiment requires that you continue.
It is absolutely essential that you continue.
You have no other choice, you must go on.

Milgram argued that they were justified as the study was about obedience, so orders were necessary.

Milgram pointed out that although the right to withdraw was made partially difficult, it was possible as 35% of participants had chosen to withdraw.

Replications

Direct replications have not been possible due to current ethical standards . However, several researchers have conducted partial replications and variations that aim to reproduce some aspects of Milgram’s methods ethically.

One important replication was conducted by Jerry Burger in 2009. Burger’s partial replication included several safeguards to protect participant welfare, such as screening out high-risk individuals, repeatedly reminding participants they could withdraw, and stopping at the 150-volt shock level. This was the point where Milgram’s participants first heard the learner’s protests.

As 79% of Milgram’s participants who went past 150 volts continued to the maximum 450 volts, Burger (2009) argued that 150 volts provided a reasonable estimate for obedience levels. He found 70% of participants continued to 150 volts, compared to 82.5% in Milgram’s comparable condition.

Another replication by Thomas Blass (1999) examined whether obedience rates had declined over time due to greater public awareness of the experiments. Blass correlated obedience rates from replication studies between 1963 and 1985 and found no relationship between year and obedience level. He concluded that obedience rates have not systematically changed, providing evidence against the idea of “enlightenment effects”.

Some variations have explored the role of gender. Milgram found equal rates of obedience for male and female participants. Reviews have found most replications also show no gender difference, with a couple of exceptions (Blass, 1999). For example, Kilham and Mann (1974) found lower obedience in female participants.

Partial replications have also examined situational factors. Having another person model defiance reduced obedience compared to a solo participant in one study, but did not eliminate it (Burger, 2009). The authority figure’s perceived expertise seems to be an influential factor (Blass, 1999). Replications have supported Milgram’s observation that stepwise increases in demands promote obedience.

Personality factors have been studied as well. Traits like high empathy and desire for control correlate with some minor early hesitation, but do not greatly impact eventual obedience levels (Burger, 2009). Authoritarian tendencies may contribute to obedience (Elms, 2009).

In sum, the partial replications confirm Milgram’s degree of obedience. Though ethical constraints prevent full reproductions, the key elements of his procedure seem to consistently elicit high levels of compliance across studies, samples, and eras. The replications continue to highlight the power of situational pressures to yield obedience.

Milgram (1963) Audio Clips

Below you can also hear some of the audio clips taken from the video that was made of the experiment. Just click on the clips below.

Why was the Milgram experiment so controversial?

The Milgram experiment was controversial because it revealed people’s willingness to obey authority figures even when causing harm to others, raising ethical concerns about the psychological distress inflicted upon participants and the deception involved in the study.

Would Milgram’s experiment be allowed today?

Milgram’s experiment would likely not be allowed today in its original form, as it violates modern ethical guidelines for research involving human participants, particularly regarding informed consent, deception, and protection from psychological harm.

Did anyone refuse the Milgram experiment?

Yes, in the Milgram experiment, some participants refused to continue administering shocks, demonstrating individual variation in obedience to authority figures. In the original Milgram experiment, approximately 35% of participants refused to administer the highest shock level of 450 volts, while 65% obeyed and delivered the 450-volt shock.

How can Milgram’s study be applied to real life?

Milgram’s study can be applied to real life by demonstrating the potential for ordinary individuals to obey authority figures even when it involves causing harm, emphasizing the importance of questioning authority, ethical decision-making, and fostering critical thinking in societal contexts.

Were all participants in Milgram’s experiments male?

Yes, in the original Milgram experiment conducted in 1961, all participants were male, limiting the generalizability of the findings to women and diverse populations.

Why was the Milgram experiment unethical?

The Milgram experiment was considered unethical because participants were deceived about the true nature of the study and subjected to severe emotional distress. They believed they were causing harm to another person under the instruction of authority.

Additionally, participants were not given the right to withdraw freely and were subjected to intense pressure to continue. The psychological harm and lack of informed consent violates modern ethical guidelines for research.

Baumrind, D. (1964). Some thoughts on ethics of research: After reading Milgram’s” Behavioral study of obedience.”. American Psychologist , 19 (6), 421.

Blass, T. (1999). The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority 1. Journal of Applied Social Psychology , 29 (5), 955-978.

Brannigan, A., Nicholson, I., & Cherry, F. (2015). Introduction to the special issue: Unplugging the Milgram machine. Theory & Psychology , 25 (5), 551-563.

Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist, 64 , 1–11.

Elms, A. C. (2009). Obedience lite. American Psychologist, 64 (1), 32–36.

Gibson, S. (2013). Milgram’s obedience experiments: A rhetorical analysis. British Journal of Social Psychology, 52, 290–309.

Gibson, S. (2017). Developing psychology’s archival sensibilities: Revisiting Milgram’s obedience’ experiments. Qualitative Psychology , 4 (1), 73.

Griggs, R. A., Blyler, J., & Jackson, S. L. (2020). Using research ethics as a springboard for teaching Milgram’s obedience study as a contentious classic. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology , 6 (4), 350.

Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2018). A truth that does not always speak its name: How Hollander and Turowetz’s findings confirm and extend the engaged followership analysis of harm-doing in the Milgram paradigm. British Journal of Social Psychology, 57, 292–300.

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Birney, M. E. (2016). Questioning authority: New perspectives on Milgram’s ‘obedience’ research and its implications for intergroup relations. Current Opinion in Psychology, 11 , 6–9.

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., Birney, M. E., Millard, K., & McDonald, R. (2015). ‘Happy to have been of service’: The Yale archive as a window into the engaged followership of participants in Milgram’s ‘obedience’ experiment. British Journal of Social Psychology, 54 , 55–83.

Kaplan, D. E. (1996). The Stanley Milgram papers: A case study on appraisal of and access to confidential data files. American Archivist, 59 , 288–297.

Kaposi, D. (2022). The second wave of critical engagement with Stanley Milgram’s ‘obedience to authority’experiments: What did we learn?. Social and Personality Psychology Compass , 16 (6), e12667.

Kilham, W., & Mann, L. (1974). Level of destructive obedience as a function of transmitter and executant roles in the Milgram obedience paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29 (5), 696–702.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience . Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67, 371-378.

Milgram, S. (1964). Issues in the study of obedience: A reply to Baumrind. American Psychologist, 19 , 848–852.

Milgram, S. (1965). Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority . Human Relations, 18(1) , 57-76.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view . Harpercollins.

Miller, A. G. (2009). Reflections on” Replicating Milgram”(Burger, 2009), American Psychologis t, 64 (1):20-27

Nicholson, I. (2011). “Torture at Yale”: Experimental subjects, laboratory torment and the “rehabilitation” of Milgram’s “obedience to authority”. Theory & Psychology, 21 , 737–761.

Nicholson, I. (2015). The normalization of torment: Producing and managing anguish in Milgram’s “obedience” laboratory. Theory & Psychology, 25 , 639–656.

Orne, M. T., & Holland, C. H. (1968). On the ecological validity of laboratory deceptions. International Journal of Psychiatry, 6 (4), 282-293.

Orne, M. T., & Holland, C. C. (1968). Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority. On the ecological validity of laboratory deceptions. International Journal of Psychiatry, 6 , 282–293.

Perry, G. (2013). Behind the shock machine: The untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments . New York, NY: The New Press.

Reicher, S., Haslam, A., & Miller, A. (Eds.). (2014). Milgram at 50: Exploring the enduring relevance of psychology’s most famous studies [Special issue]. Journal of Social Issues, 70 (3), 393–602

Russell, N. (2014). Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority “relationship condition”: Some methodological and theoretical implications. Social Sciences, 3, 194–214

Shanab, M. E., & Yahya, K. A. (1978). A cross-cultural study of obedience. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society .

Smith, P. B., & Bond, M. H. (1998). Social psychology across cultures (2nd Edition) . Prentice Hall.

Learning Check

Which is true regarding the Milgram obedience study?

The aim was to see how obedient people would be in a situation where following orders would mean causing harm to another person.
Participants were under the impression they were part of a learning and memory experiment.
The “learners” in the study were actual participants who volunteered to be shocked as part of the experiment.
The “learner” was an actor who was in on the experiment and never actually received any real shocks.
Although the participant could not see the “learner”, he was able to hear him clearly through the wall
The study was directly influenced by Milgram’s observations of obedience patterns in post-war Europe.
The experiment was designed to understand the psychological mechanisms behind war crimes committed during World War II.
The Milgram study was universally accepted in the psychological community, and no ethical concerns were raised about its methodology.
When Milgram’s experiment was repeated in a rundown office building in Bridgeport, the percentage of the participants who fully complied with the commands of the experimenter remained unchanged.
The experimenter (authority figure) delivered verbal prods to encourage the teacher to continue, such as ‘Please continue’ or ‘Please go on’.
Over 80% of participants went on to deliver the maximum level of shock.
Milgram sent participants questionnaires after the study to assess the effects and found that most felt no remorse or guilt, so it was ethical.
The aftermath of the study led to stricter ethical guidelines in psychological research.
The study emphasized the role of situational factors over personality traits in determining obedience.

Answers : Items 3, 8, 9, and 11 are the false statements.

Short Answer Questions

Briefly explain the results of the original Milgram experiments. What did these results prove?
List one scenario on how an authority figure can abuse obedience principles.
List one scenario on how an individual could use these principles to defend their fellow peers.
In a hospital, you are very likely to obey a nurse. However, if you meet her outside the hospital, for example in a shop, you are much less likely to obey. Using your knowledge of how people resist pressure to obey, explain why you are less likely to obey the nurse outside the hospital.
Describe the shock instructions the participant (teacher) was told to follow when the victim (learner) gave an incorrect answer.
State the lowest voltage shock that was labeled on the shock generator.
What would likely happen if Milgram’s experiment included a condition in which the participant (teacher) had to give a high-level electric shock for the first wrong answer?

Group Activity

Gather in groups of three or four to discuss answers to the short answer questions above.

For question 2, review the different scenarios you each came up with. Then brainstorm on how these situations could be flipped.

For question 2, discuss how an authority figure could instead empower those below them in the examples your groupmates provide.

For question 3, discuss how a peer could do harm by using the obedience principles in the scenarios your groupmates provide.

Essay Topic

What’s the most important lesson of Milgram’s Obedience Experiments? Fully explain and defend your answer.
Milgram selectively edited his film of the obedience experiments to emphasize obedient behavior and minimize footage of disobedience. What are the ethical implications of a researcher selectively presenting findings in a way that fits their expected conclusions?

Stanley Milgram papers

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Scope and Contents

The Stanley Milgram Papers consist of correspondence, research files, writings files, and teaching files, which document Milgram's work as an innovative researcher and teacher in the field of social psychology. Files concerning his experiments cover the entire span of his career and highlight his work on obedience to authority, television violence, urban psychology, and communication patterns within society. While all phases of Milgram's teaching career are represented in the papers, the bulk of the teaching files date from Milgram's years at CUNY. The Stanley Milgram Papers date from 1927-1986, though the bulk of the papers date after 1960. They are arranged in five series. The arrangement reflects, for the most part, Milgram's filing order. No general attempt has been made to rearrange material into series by topic or format. The dates given for individual files are the dates of the material in the files. Since there are printed materials in the files which Milgram used for background information, some files bear dates prior to Milgram's active professional career. Similarly, files for audio tapes and films which have recently been copied to allow research access on current equipment bear the date of the reformatting. The original copies of these materials, however, are in files dating from the time Milgram created them. Series I, GENERAL FILES, is arranged in two sections: Chronological and Alphabetical. The Chronological section is composed almost entirely of correspondence arranged in very rough chronological order. The Alphabetical section includes: correspondence with selected individuals, which is filed by correspondent name; subject files, which incorporate correspondence, background material, and notes concerning a wide variety of topics, and files of personal material arranged by record type such as drawings and poems. The files in this section are arranged in alphabetical order. The topics covered by the subject files in this series do not duplicate or overlap with those of files found in Series II through V. The Chronological section contains both incoming letters and copies of outgoing copies of Milgram's letters from 1954-1985. Some incoming letters are attached to Milgram's outgoing response, though there is no consistent pattern for filing by either the first or last date. Correspondents include personal friends, former students, and professional colleagues, such as Howard Leventhal, Andre Modigliani, Jeff Travers, Charles Korte, Robert L. Shotland, Phil Zimbardo, Elinor Mannucci, Roger Brown, Irving Janis, Judith Waters, Jerome Singer, Zick Rubin, Henri Tajfel, John Sabini, and Harold Takooshian. There is also correspondence with publishers, agents, co-authors like Hans Toch, organizations requesting Milgram to speak, persons requesting reprints, and members of the general public writing to comment on Milgram's work. Included in these files are also Milgram's critiques of manuscripts by others and reviews of grant proposals. The exchanges include some discussions of teaching and administrative duties at Yale and Harvard. There is a much larger quantity of this type of correspondence during Milgram's tenure at CUNY, which includes exchanges with Mina Rees, Irwin Katz, Harold Proshansky, and Mort Bard. The Alphabetical section also includes correspondence with personal friends, former teachers, former students, and professional colleagues, such as Stuart Albert, Gordon Allport, Elliot Aronson, Solomon Asch, Alan Elms, Roy Feldman, Robert Frager, Harry Fromm, Paul Hollander, Sparks Lunney, Leon Mann, Serge Moscovici, and Maury Silver. There are also voluminous files on administrative matters at CUNY. The Milgram papers have only a small quantity of personal memorabilia, most of which is filed in this section. These files are composed of audio tapes, drawings, films, notes taken by Milgram in classes at Harvard, photographs, poems, and writings about Milgram and his work. Series II, STUDIES, contains materials such as correspondence, notes, financial records, sample forms and instructions, writings of others concerning the subject of the experiment which serve as background for the study and as comment on the results of the study, and analyses of data for experiments designed and conducted by Milgram. (Data generated in the course of these studies is arranged in Series V. Files from experiments conducted as part of a course are filed in Series IV with other teaching materials about that course.) Each study is identified in the listing by a shortened descriptive title which is underlined. These titles appear in the listing in alphabetical order. For some of the fourteen studies there may be as little as one folder of such material, but there are extensive files for Cyranic, New York-Paris, Obedience, Small world, and TV violence. Milgram kept detailed notes about the structuring of his experiments and the complex variations he undertook. The researcher will find it helpful to refer to study notebooks for Obedience (Series II, folder 163) and TV violence (Series II, folders 222-224) before trying to utilize the other material available for these studies. These notebooks outline the multiple conditions in each of these experiments. Grant applications, where available, are another useful source for understanding Milgram's research and interpreting the relevance of other material to a study. Series III, WRITINGS, includes materials relating to Milgram's numerous books and articles, speeches, films, and one exhibition. The series reflects the themes explored in Milgram's studies but also includes Milgram's letters to the editor, reviews, and commentary on other areas of interest to him. The series includes files for published works, complete but unpublished works, and works never completed. For any given title, the series may contain correspondence with publishers, producers, reviewers, or persons making arrangements for a speaking engagement. There may also be notes, financial records, drafts, illustrations, printed copies, promotional materials, itineraries, and copies of reviews. (More general comments about Milgram's writings may be found in Series I under the heading "Writings on Milgram or his work." For the films there are also production materials such as outtakes and audio and video tapes. Series IV, TEACHING FILES, includes course materials from Milgram's teaching assignments at Yale University, Harvard University, and the City University of New York. The series includes Milgram's notes, audio tapes of some class lectures and discussions, class rosters, syllabi, examination questions, and student papers and other assignments. The most extensive files are those for courses in experimental psychology. These files include the apparatus of studies carried out by the class as well as some data and data analysis generated by the study and records of expenditures. Some of these class studies relate to work Milgram developed in his own later studies, such as the lost letter technique and the cyranoid study. Milgram's interests in photography, film, and video are also reflected in these files. Series V, DATA FILES, is composed of data collected by Milgram in the course of eleven of his studies; Milgram generated the bulk of the data in the Cyranic, New York-Paris, Obedience, Small world, and TV violence studies. The accumulated data includes lists of subjects, correspondence with subjects, questionnaires and other forms completed by subjects, audio and video tapes of experiments, and transcripts of interviews. (Some examples of questionnaire forms are included in Series II.) Motion picture film footage of actual experimental situations, made at the end of the obedience to authority study, was used in the production of Milgram's film Obedience . This data is arranged with other material pertaining to the film in Series III. anonymized copies of the film have been transferred to a video tape (box 85), which is open to research. Oversize materials from all series and anonymized copies of data files in Series V are filed at the end of the papers. The listing includes cross-references to all materials which have been arranged with the oversize or anonymized data. The reader should note from these descriptions that there is no one place to look for all material on a particular topic or of a particular document type. In searching a subject, Milgram's work on obedience or on his cyranic studies for example, relevant material might be found in: the Chronological section of GENERAL FILES around the time of the experiment or in exchanges with selected correspondents in the Alphabetical section; in STUDIES under the name of the experiment; in the WRITINGS series, since Milgram often wrote or spoke about his experimental work; in TEACHING FILES since Milgram often used his studies as the basis for class assignments and discussion; and in DATA FILES which contain the raw data from an experiment. Similarly, there is no one series for all of Milgram's correspondence, audio tapes, photographs or any other document type. One can find correspondence, for example, in the GENERAL FILES in either the chronological or alphabetical sections; in the files for any particular experiment in STUDIES; in the WRITINGS concerning a publication or speaking engagement; or with subjects in the DATA FILES. The folder listing highlights files of audio tapes, video tapes, and films. Photographs are also noted, though individual photographs attached as enclosures in a letter are not listed separately.

Milgram, Stanley, 1933-1984

Conditions Governing Access

Recommendations in boxes 19 and 20 are restricted until 2060. Materials in Series V, Data Files, are restricted for seventy-five years from the date of the conclusion of the experiment (2035-2060). Original audiovisual materials, as well as preservation and duplicating masters, may not be played. Researchers must consult use copies, or if none exist must pay for a use copy, which is retained by the repository. Researchers wishing to obtain an additional copy for their personal use should consult Copying Services information on the Manuscripts and Archives web site.

Conditions Governing Use

Copyright and other associated proprietary rights are retained by the estate of Alexandra Milgram for materials authored or otherwise produced by Stanley Milgram. Copyright status for other collection materials is unknown. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.) beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owners. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Gift of Alexandra Milgram, 1985, 1992, 1993, 1998, 2007, 2008, and 2016.

Arrangement

The materials are arranged in five series and four additions: I. General Files, 1954-1985; II. Studies, 1927-1984; III. Writings, 1954-1993; IV. Teaching Files, 1960-1984; V. Data files, 1960-1984.

293.85 Linear Feet (614 boxes)

Language of Materials

Catalog record.

A record for this collection is available in Orbis, the Yale University Library catalog

Persistent URL

https://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/mssa.ms.1406

Additional Description

The papers consist of correspondence, research and data files, writings, audiovisual material, and course material, documenting Stanley Milgram's work as an innovative researcher and teacher in the field of social psychology. The papers highlight Milgram's work on obedience to authority, television violence, urban psychology, and communication patterns within society.

Biographical / Historical

Stanley Milgram was born in New York City, on August 15, 1933. He attended James Monroe High School in the Bronx, graduating in 1950. After receiving an A.B. degree from Queens College in 1954, he entered Harvard University's Department of Social Relations as a Ford Foundation fellow in the behavioral sciences. At Harvard, Milgram studied with Gordon W. Allport and Solomon E. Asch. Milgram served as Asch's teaching assistant at Harvard and later worked as his research assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. From 1957 to 1959 Milgram conducted field research leading to his 1960 Ph.D. dissertation "Conformity in Norway and France." Milgram continued to examine conformity and the effects of group pressure in later experiments at Yale University. From 1960 to 1963 Milgram was an assistant professor of psychology at Yale. During this time he conducted his innovative and controversial experiments on obedience to authority. Milgram's experiment was designed to examine how far one individual will go in hurting another at the behest of a recognized authority figure. Employing more than twenty variations of the experimental situation, Milgram examined the relation of gender, setting, education, and other factors on an individual's willingness to comply with the experimenter's orders to give electric shocks to another person. The experiments also provoked controversy relating to the ethics of experimenting on human subjects. Milgram's findings appeared in numerous articles. He later described his work in the book Obedience to Authority: an Experimental View (1974). From 1963 through 1967 Milgram taught psychology at Harvard University and served as the executive director of the Comparative International Program in the Department of Social Research. During this period he investigated communications systems. Using his lost letter technique Milgram developed a method for gauging community attitudes toward political groups and other institutions. By deliberately losing stamped envelopes addressed to various organizations and individuals and comparing the proportions of letters found and mailed to each target, Milgram was able to gauge the prevailing attitude toward the various organizations. In his small world research, Milgram sought a method to determine how many intermediate acquaintance links are needed to connect any two people in the world. Milgram accepted a professorship in psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1967, on whose faculty he would remain until the end of his life. He received a Guggenheim fellowship to study in Paris during the academic year 1972-1973. In 1980 he was made Distinguished Professor of Psychology. Early in his tenure at CUNY, Milgram designed an experiment to examine the influence of violence in television programming on individual behavior. Milgram was able to get CBS to produce a particular episode of its dramatic series Medical Center with three different endings and he used these three versions in a series of field experiments in which resulting anti-social acts could be observed. At CUNY Milgram also expanded his interest in the field of urban psychology, studying such concepts as groups and crowds, overload, social intrusion, the familiar stranger, and cognitive maps. In the latter study Milgram analyzed and compared the ability of New Yorkers and Parisians to identify photographs of various locations throughout their cities and to represent their city on a hand-drawn map. While at CUNY Milgram also studied the sociological and psychological effects of the camera and photography as a human activity. At the very end of his life, Milgram was engaged in a set of experiments in which subjects interviewed an individual who appeared to be conversing normally but who in fact was delivering the responses and comments of a third person. The third person would communicate to him through a tiny radio receiver in the ear. Milgram called this technique "cyranic speech." In addition to his books and numerous papers, Milgram was an accomplished documentary filmmaker. His films included Obedience , Invitation to Social Psychology , Independence and Conformity , Nonverbal Communication , and Human Aggression . He won a silver medal at the International Film and Television Festival in 1972 for his work on The City and the Self . His films were distributed widely for use in teaching about social psychology. Milgram was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died on December 20, 1984.

Albert, Stuart, 1941-
Allport, Gordon W. (Gordon Willard), 1897-1967
Aronson, Elliot, 1932-
Asch, Solomon E. (Solomon Elliott), 1907-1996
City University of New York -- Faculty
Environmental psychology
Frager, Robert, 1940-
Geographical perception
Harvard University (Faculty)
Hollander, Paul, 1932-
Human experimentation in psychology
Influence (Psychology)
Moscovici, Serge, 1925-2014
New York (N.Y.) -- Description and travel
Paris (France) -- Description and travel
Psychologists
Silver, Maury, 1944-
Social networks
Social psychology
Television -- Social aspects
Video tapes in psychology
Violence on television
Yale University -- Faculty

Finding Aid & Administrative Information

Revision statements.

April 2017: accession added

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Part of the Manuscripts and Archives Repository

Sterling Memorial Library Room 147 120 High Street New Haven, CT 06511

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Stanley Milgram Papers (MS 1406). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

Cite Item Description

Stanley Milgram Papers (MS 1406). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/4865 Accessed September 03, 2024.

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Understanding the Milgram Experiment in Psychology

A closer look at Milgram's controversial studies of obedience

Isabelle Adam (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) via Flickr

Factors That Influence Obedience

Ethical Concerns
Replications

How far do you think people would go to obey an authority figure? Would they refuse to obey if the order went against their values or social expectations? Those questions were at the heart of an infamous and controversial study known as the Milgram obedience experiments.

Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted these experiments during the 1960s. They explored the effects of authority on obedience. In the experiments, an authority figure ordered participants to deliver what they believed were dangerous electrical shocks to another person. These results suggested that people are highly influenced by authority and highly obedient . More recent investigations cast doubt on some of the implications of Milgram's findings and even the results and procedures themselves. Despite its problems, the study has, without question, made a significant impact on psychology .

At a Glance

Milgram's experiments posed the question: Would people obey orders, even if they believed doing so would harm another person? Milgram's findings suggested the answer was yes, they would. The experiments have long been controversial, both because of the startling findings and the ethical problems with the research. More recently, experts have re-examined the studies, suggesting that participants were often coerced into obeying and that at least some participants recognized that the other person was just pretending to be shocked. Such findings call into question the study's validity and authenticity, but some replications suggest that people are surprisingly prone to obeying authority.

History of the Milgram Experiments

Milgram started his experiments in 1961, shortly after the trial of the World War II criminal Adolf Eichmann had begun. Eichmann’s defense that he was merely following instructions when he ordered the deaths of millions of Jews roused Milgram’s interest.

In his 1974 book "Obedience to Authority," Milgram posed the question, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

Procedure in the Milgram Experiment

The participants in the most famous variation of the Milgram experiment were 40 men recruited using newspaper ads. In exchange for their participation, each person was paid $4.50.

Milgram developed an intimidating shock generator, with shock levels starting at 15 volts and increasing in 15-volt increments all the way up to 450 volts. The many switches were labeled with terms including "slight shock," "moderate shock," and "danger: severe shock." The final three switches were labeled simply with an ominous "XXX."

Each participant took the role of a "teacher" who would then deliver a shock to the "student" in a neighboring room whenever an incorrect answer was given. While participants believed that they were delivering real shocks to the student, the “student” was a confederate in the experiment who was only pretending to be shocked.

As the experiment progressed, the participant would hear the learner plead to be released or even complain about a heart condition. Once they reached the 300-volt level, the learner would bang on the wall and demand to be released.

Beyond this point, the learner became completely silent and refused to answer any more questions. The experimenter then instructed the participant to treat this silence as an incorrect response and deliver a further shock.

Most participants asked the experimenter whether they should continue. The experimenter then responded with a series of commands to prod the participant along:

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

Results of the Milgram Experiment

In the Milgram experiment, obedience was measured by the level of shock that the participant was willing to deliver. While many of the subjects became extremely agitated, distraught, and angry at the experimenter, they nevertheless continued to follow orders all the way to the end.

Milgram's results showed that 65% of the participants in the study delivered the maximum shocks. Of the 40 participants in the study, 26 delivered the maximum shocks, while 14 stopped before reaching the highest levels.

Why did so many of the participants in this experiment perform a seemingly brutal act when instructed by an authority figure? According to Milgram, there are some situational factors that can explain such high levels of obedience:

The physical presence of an authority figure dramatically increased compliance .
The fact that Yale (a trusted and authoritative academic institution) sponsored the study led many participants to believe that the experiment must be safe.
The selection of teacher and learner status seemed random.
Participants assumed that the experimenter was a competent expert.
The shocks were said to be painful, not dangerous.

Later experiments conducted by Milgram indicated that the presence of rebellious peers dramatically reduced obedience levels. When other people refused to go along with the experimenter's orders, 36 out of 40 participants refused to deliver the maximum shocks.

More recent work by researchers suggests that while people do tend to obey authority figures, the process is not necessarily as cut-and-dried as Milgram depicted it.

In a 2012 essay published in PLoS Biology , researchers suggested that the degree to which people are willing to obey the questionable orders of an authority figure depends largely on two key factors:

How much the individual agrees with the orders
How much they identify with the person giving the orders

While it is clear that people are often far more susceptible to influence, persuasion , and obedience than they would often like to be, they are far from mindless machines just taking orders.

Another study that analyzed Milgram's results concluded that eight factors influenced the likelihood that people would progress up to the 450-volt shock:

The experimenter's directiveness
Legitimacy and consistency
Group pressure to disobey
Indirectness of proximity
Intimacy of the relation between the teacher and learner
Distance between the teacher and learner

Ethical Concerns in the Milgram Experiment

Milgram's experiments have long been the source of considerable criticism and controversy. From the get-go, the ethics of his experiments were highly dubious. Participants were subjected to significant psychological and emotional distress.

Some of the major ethical issues in the experiment were related to:

The use of deception
The lack of protection for the participants who were involved
Pressure from the experimenter to continue even after asking to stop, interfering with participants' right to withdraw

Due to concerns about the amount of anxiety experienced by many of the participants, everyone was supposedly debriefed at the end of the experiment. The researchers reported that they explained the procedures and the use of deception.

Critics of the study have argued that many of the participants were still confused about the exact nature of the experiment, and recent findings suggest that many participants were not debriefed at all.

Replications of the Milgram Experiment

While Milgram’s research raised serious ethical questions about the use of human subjects in psychology experiments , his results have also been consistently replicated in further experiments. One review further research on obedience and found that Milgram’s findings hold true in other experiments. In one study, researchers conducted a study designed to replicate Milgram's classic obedience experiment. The researchers made several alterations to Milgram's experiment.

The maximum shock level was 150 volts as opposed to the original 450 volts.
Participants were also carefully screened to eliminate those who might experience adverse reactions to the experiment.

The results of the new experiment revealed that participants obeyed at roughly the same rate that they did when Milgram conducted his original study more than 40 years ago.

Some psychologists suggested that in spite of the changes made in the replication, the study still had merit and could be used to further explore some of the situational factors that also influenced the results of Milgram's study. But other psychologists suggested that the replication was too dissimilar to Milgram's original study to draw any meaningful comparisons.

One study examined people's beliefs about how they would do compared to the participants in Milgram's experiments. They found that most people believed they would stop sooner than the average participants. These findings applied to both those who had never heard of Milgram's experiments and those who were familiar with them. In fact, those who knew about Milgram's experiments actually believed that they would stop even sooner than other people.

Another novel replication involved recruiting participants in pairs and having them take turns acting as either an 'agent' or 'victim.' Agents then received orders to shock the victim. The results suggest that only around 3.3% disobeyed the experimenter's orders.

Recent Criticisms and New Findings

Psychologist Gina Perry suggests that much of what we think we know about Milgram's famous experiments is only part of the story. While researching an article on the topic, she stumbled across hundreds of audiotapes found in Yale archives that documented numerous variations of Milgram's shock experiments.

Participants Were Often Coerced

While Milgram's reports of his process report methodical and uniform procedures, the audiotapes reveal something different. During the experimental sessions, the experimenters often went off-script and coerced the subjects into continuing the shocks.

"The slavish obedience to authority we have come to associate with Milgram’s experiments comes to sound much more like bullying and coercion when you listen to these recordings," Perry suggested in an article for Discover Magazine .

Few Participants Were Really Debriefed

Milgram suggested that the subjects were "de-hoaxed" after the experiments. He claimed he later surveyed the participants and found that 84% were glad to have participated, while only 1% regretted their involvement.

However, Perry's findings revealed that of the 700 or so people who took part in different variations of his studies between 1961 and 1962, very few were truly debriefed.

A true debriefing would have involved explaining that the shocks weren't real and that the other person was not injured. Instead, Milgram's sessions were mainly focused on calming the subjects down before sending them on their way.

Many participants left the experiment in a state of considerable distress. While the truth was revealed to some months or even years later, many were simply never told a thing.

Variations Led to Differing Results

Another problem is that the version of the study presented by Milgram and the one that's most often retold does not tell the whole story. The statistic that 65% of people obeyed orders applied only to one variation of the experiment, in which 26 out of 40 subjects obeyed.

In other variations, far fewer people were willing to follow the experimenters' orders, and in some versions of the study, not a single participant obeyed.

Participants Guessed the Learner Was Faking

Perry even tracked down some of the people who took part in the experiments, as well as Milgram's research assistants. What she discovered is that many of his subjects had deduced what Milgram's intent was and knew that the "learner" was merely pretending.

Such findings cast Milgram's results in a new light. It suggests that not only did Milgram intentionally engage in some hefty misdirection to obtain the results he wanted but that many of his participants were simply playing along.

An analysis of an unpublished study by Milgram's assistant, Taketo Murata, found that participants who believed they were really delivering a shock were less likely to obey, while those who did not believe they were actually inflicting pain were more willing to obey. In other words, the perception of pain increased defiance, while skepticism of pain increased obedience.

A review of Milgram's research materials suggests that the experiments exerted more pressure to obey than the original results suggested. Other variations of the experiment revealed much lower rates of obedience, and many of the participants actually altered their behavior when they guessed the true nature of the experiment.

Impact of the Milgram Experiment

Since there is no way to truly replicate the experiment due to its serious ethical and moral problems, determining whether Milgram's experiment really tells us anything about the power of obedience is impossible to determine.

So why does Milgram's experiment maintain such a powerful hold on our imaginations, even decades after the fact? Perry believes that despite all its ethical issues and the problem of never truly being able to replicate Milgram's procedures, the study has taken on the role of what she calls a "powerful parable."

Milgram's work might not hold the answers to what makes people obey or even the degree to which they truly obey. It has, however, inspired other researchers to explore what makes people follow orders and, perhaps more importantly, what leads them to question authority.

Recent findings undermine the scientific validity of the study. Milgram's work is also not truly replicable due to its ethical problems. However, the study has led to additional research on how situational factors can affect obedience to authority.

Milgram’s experiment has become a classic in psychology , demonstrating the dangers of obedience. The research suggests that situational variables have a stronger sway than personality factors in determining whether people will obey an authority figure. However, other psychologists argue that both external and internal factors heavily influence obedience, such as personal beliefs and overall temperament.

Milgram S. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper & Row.

Russell N, Gregory R. The Milgram-Holocaust linkage: challenging the present consensus . State Crim J. 2015;4(2):128-153.

Russell NJC. Milgram's obedience to authority experiments: origins and early evolution . Br J Soc Psychol . 2011;50:140-162. doi:10.1348/014466610X492205

Haslam SA, Reicher SD. Contesting the "nature" of conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo's studies really show . PLoS Biol. 2012;10(11):e1001426. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001426

Milgram S. Liberating effects of group pressure . J Person Soc Psychol. 1965;1(2):127-234. doi:10.1037/h0021650

Haslam N, Loughnan S, Perry G. Meta-Milgram: an empirical synthesis of the obedience experiments . PLoS One . 2014;9(4):e93927. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0093927

Perry G. Deception and illusion in Milgram's accounts of the obedience experiments . Theory Appl Ethics . 2013;2(2):79-92.

Blass T. The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: some things we now know about obedience to authority . J Appl Soc Psychol. 1999;29(5):955-978. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.1999.tb00134.x

Burger J. Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? . Am Psychol . 2009;64(1):1-11. doi:10.1037/a0010932

Elms AC. Obedience lite . American Psychologist . 2009;64(1):32-36. doi:10.1037/a0014473

Miller AG. Reflections on “replicating Milgram” (Burger, 2009) . American Psychologist . 2009;64(1):20-27. doi:10.1037/a0014407

Grzyb T, Dolinski D. Beliefs about obedience levels in studies conducted within the Milgram paradigm: Better than average effect and comparisons of typical behaviors by residents of various nations . Front Psychol . 2017;8:1632. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01632

Caspar EA. A novel experimental approach to study disobedience to authority . Sci Rep . 2021;11(1):22927. doi:10.1038/s41598-021-02334-8

Haslam SA, Reicher SD, Millard K, McDonald R. ‘Happy to have been of service’: The Yale archive as a window into the engaged followership of participants in Milgram’s ‘obedience’ experiments . Br J Soc Psychol . 2015;54:55-83. doi:10.1111/bjso.12074

Perry G, Brannigan A, Wanner RA, Stam H. Credibility and incredulity in Milgram’s obedience experiments: A reanalysis of an unpublished test . Soc Psychol Q . 2020;83(1):88-106. doi:10.1177/0190272519861952

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Milgram experiment

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Open University - OpenLearn - Psychological research, obedience and ethics: 1 Milgram’s obedience study
Social Science LibreTexts - The Milgram Experiment- The Power of Authority
Verywell Mind - What was the Milgram Experiment?
BCcampus Open Publishing - Ethics in Law Enforcement - The Milgram Experiment
Nature - Modern Milgram experiment sheds light on power of authority
SimplyPsychology - Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment: Summary, Results, & Ethics
University of California - College of Natural Resources - Milgrams Experiment on Obedience to Authority

Milgram experiment , controversial series of experiments examining obedience to authority conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram . In the experiment, an authority figure, the conductor of the experiment, would instruct a volunteer participant, labeled the “teacher,” to administer painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to the “learner,” who was actually an actor. Although the shocks were faked, the experiments are widely considered unethical today due to the lack of proper disclosure, informed consent, and subsequent debriefing related to the deception and trauma experienced by the teachers. Some of Milgram’s conclusions have been called into question. Nevertheless, the experiments and their results have been widely cited for their insight into how average people respond to authority.

Milgram conducted his experiments as an assistant professor at Yale University in the early 1960s. In 1961 he began to recruit men from New Haven , Connecticut , for participation in a study he claimed would be focused on memory and learning . The recruits were paid $4.50 at the beginning of the study and were generally between the ages of 20 and 50 and from a variety of employment backgrounds. When they volunteered, they were told that the experiment would test the effect of punishment on learning ability. In truth, the volunteers were the subjects of an experiment on obedience to authority. In all, about 780 people, only about 40 of them women, participated in the experiments, and Milgram published his results in 1963.

Volunteers were told that they would be randomly assigned either a “teacher” or “learner” role, with each teacher administering electric shocks to a learner in another room if the learner failed to answer questions correctly. In actuality, the random draw was fixed so that all the volunteer participants were assigned to the teacher role and the actors were assigned to the learner role. The teachers were then instructed in the electroshock “punishment” they would be administering, with 30 shock levels ranging from 15 to 450 volts. The different shock levels were labeled with descriptions of their effects, such as “Slight Shock,” “Intense Shock,” and “Danger: Severe Shock,” with the final label a grim “XXX.” Each teacher was given a 45-volt shock themselves so that they would better understand the punishment they believed the learner would be receiving. Teachers were then given a series of questions for the learner to answer, with each incorrect answer generally earning the learner a progressively stronger shock. The actor portraying the learner, who was seated out of sight of the teacher, had pre-recorded responses to these shocks that ranged from grunts of pain to screaming and pleading, claims of suffering a heart condition, and eventually dead silence. The experimenter, acting as an authority figure, would encourage the teachers to continue administering shocks, telling them with scripted responses that the experiment must continue despite the reactions of the learner. The infamous result of these experiments was that a disturbingly high number of the teachers were willing to proceed to the maximum voltage level, despite the pleas of the learner and the supposed danger of proceeding.

Milgram’s interest in the subject of authority, and his dark view of the results of his experiments, were deeply informed by his Jewish identity and the context of the Holocaust , which had occurred only a few years before. He had expected that Americans, known for their individualism , would differ from Germans in their willingness to obey authority when it might lead to harming others. Milgram and his students had predicted only 1–3% of participants would administer the maximum shock level. However, in his first official study, 26 of 40 male participants (65%) were convinced to do so and nearly 80% of teachers that continued to administer shocks after 150 volts—the point at which the learner was heard to scream—continued to the maximum of 450 volts. Teachers displayed a range of negative emotional responses to the experiment even as they continued to obey, sometimes pleading with the experimenters to stop the experiment while still participating in it. One teacher believed that he had killed the learner and was moved to tears when he eventually found out that he had not.

Milgram included several variants on the original design of the experiment. In one, the teachers were allowed to select their own voltage levels. In this case, only about 2.5% of participants used the maximum shock level, indicating that they were not inclined to do so without the prompting of an authority figure. In another, there were three teachers, two of whom were not test subjects, but instead had been instructed to protest against the shocks. The existence of peers protesting the experiment made the volunteer teachers less likely to obey. Teachers were also less likely to obey in a variant where they could see the learner and were forced to interact with him.

The Milgram experiment has been highly controversial, both for the ethics of its design and for the reliability of its results and conclusions. It is commonly accepted that the ethics of the experiment would be rejected by mainstream science today, due not only to the handling of the deception involved but also to the extreme stress placed on the teachers, who often reacted emotionally to the experiment and were not debriefed . Some teachers were actually left believing they had genuinely and repeatedly shocked a learner before having the truth revealed to them later. Later researchers examining Milgram’s data also found that the experimenters conducting the tests had sometimes gone off-script in their attempts to coerce the teachers into continuing, and noted that some teachers guessed that they were the subjects of the experiment. However, attempts to validate Milgram’s findings in more ethical ways have often produced similar results.

The Milgram Experiment: How Far Will You Go to Obey an Order?

Understand the infamous study and its conclusions about human nature

Archaeology
Ph.D., Psychology, University of California - Santa Barbara
B.A., Psychology and Peace & Conflict Studies, University of California - Berkeley

A brief Milgram experiment summary is as follows: In the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of studies on the concepts of obedience and authority. His experiments involved instructing study participants to deliver increasingly high-voltage shocks to an actor in another room, who would scream and eventually go silent as the shocks became stronger. The shocks weren't real, but study participants were made to believe that they were.

Today, the Milgram experiment is widely criticized on both ethical and scientific grounds. However, Milgram's conclusions about humanity's willingness to obey authority figures remain influential and well-known.

Key Takeaways: The Milgram Experiment

The goal of the Milgram experiment was to test the extent of humans' willingness to obey orders from an authority figure.
Participants were told by an experimenter to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to another individual. Unbeknownst to the participants, shocks were fake and the individual being shocked was an actor.
The majority of participants obeyed, even when the individual being shocked screamed in pain.
The experiment has been widely criticized on ethical and scientific grounds.

Detailed Milgram’s Experiment Summary

In the most well-known version of the Milgram experiment, the 40 male participants were told that the experiment focused on the relationship between punishment, learning, and memory. The experimenter then introduced each participant to a second individual, explaining that this second individual was participating in the study as well. Participants were told that they would be randomly assigned to roles of "teacher" and "learner." However, the "second individual" was an actor hired by the research team, and the study was set up so that the true participant would always be assigned to the "teacher" role.

During the Milgram experiment, the learner was located in a separate room from the teacher (the real participant), but the teacher could hear the learner through the wall. The experimenter told the teacher that the learner would memorize word pairs and instructed the teacher to ask the learner questions. If the learner responded incorrectly to a question, the teacher would be asked to administer an electric shock. The shocks started at a relatively mild level (15 volts) but increased in 15-volt increments up to 450 volts. (In actuality, the shocks were fake, but the participant was led to believe they were real.)

Participants were instructed to give a higher shock to the learner with each wrong answer. When the 150-volt shock was administered, the learner would cry out in pain and ask to leave the study. He would then continue crying out with each shock until the 330-volt level, at which point he would stop responding.

During this process, whenever participants expressed hesitation about continuing with the study, the experimenter would urge them to go on with increasingly firm instructions, culminating in the statement, "You have no other choice, you must go on." The study ended when participants refused to obey the experimenter’s demand, or when they gave the learner the highest level of shock on the machine (450 volts).

Milgram found that participants obeyed the experimenter at an unexpectedly high rate: 65% of the participants gave the learner the 450-volt shock.

Critiques of the Milgram Experiment

The Milgram experiment has been widely criticized on ethical grounds. Milgram’s participants were led to believe that they acted in a way that harmed someone else, an experience that could have had long-term consequences. Moreover, an investigation by writer Gina Perry uncovered that some participants appear to not have been fully debriefed after the study —they were told months later, or not at all, that the shocks were fake and the learner wasn’t harmed. Milgram’s studies could not be perfectly recreated today, because researchers today are required to pay much more attention to the safety and well-being of human research subjects.

Researchers have also questioned the scientific validity of Milgram’s results. In her examination of the study, Perry found that Milgram’s experimenter may have gone off script and told participants to obey many more times than the script specified. Additionally, some research suggests that participants may have figured out that the learner was not harmed: in interviews conducted after the Milgram experiment, some participants reported that they didn’t think the learner was in any real danger. This mindset is likely to have affected their behavior in the study.

Variations on the Milgram Experiment

Milgram and other researchers conducted numerous versions of the experiment over time. The participants' levels of compliance with the experimenter’s demands varied greatly from one study to the next. For example, when participants were in closer proximity to the learner (e.g. in the same room), they were less likely to give the learner the highest level of shock.

Another version of the Milgram experiment brought three "teachers" into the experiment room at once. One was a real participant, and the other two were actors hired by the research team. During the experiment, the two non-participant teachers would quit as the level of shocks began to increase. Milgram found that these conditions made the real participant far more likely to "disobey" the experimenter, too: only 10% of participants gave the 450-volt shock to the learner.

In yet another version of the Milgram experiment, two experimenters were present, and during the experiment, they would begin arguing with one another about whether it was right to continue the study. In this version, none of the participants gave the learner the 450-volt shock.

Replicating the Milgram Experiment

Researchers have sought to replicate Milgram's original study with additional safeguards in place to protect participants. In 2009, Jerry Burger replicated Milgram’s famous experiment at Santa Clara University with new safeguards in place: the highest shock level was 150 volts, and participants were told that the shocks were fake immediately after the experiment ended. Additionally, participants were screened by a clinical psychologist before the experiment began, and those found to be at risk of a negative reaction to the study were deemed ineligible to participate.

Burger found that participants obeyed at similar levels as Milgram’s participants: 82.5% of Milgram’s participants gave the learner the 150-volt shock, and 70% of Burger’s participants did the same.

The Legacy of the Milgram Experiment

Milgram’s interpretation of his research was that everyday people are capable of carrying out unthinkable actions in certain circumstances. His research has been used to explain atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, though these applications are by no means widely accepted or agreed upon.

Importantly, not all participants obeyed the experimenter’s demands , and Milgram’s studies shed light on the factors that enable people to stand up to authority. In fact, as sociologist Matthew Hollander writes, we may be able to learn from the participants who disobeyed, as their strategies may enable us to respond more effectively to an unethical situation. The Milgram experiment suggested that human beings are susceptible to obeying authority, but it also demonstrated that obedience is not inevitable.

Baker, Peter C. “Electric Schlock: Did Stanley Milgram's Famous Obedience Experiments Prove Anything?” Pacific Standard (2013, Sep. 10). https://psmag.com/social-justice/electric-schlock-65377
Burger, Jerry M. "Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?." American Psychologist 64.1 (2009): 1-11. http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2008-19206-001
Gilovich, Thomas, Dacher Keltner, and Richard E. Nisbett. Social Psychology . 1st edition, W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
Hollander, Matthew. “How to Be a Hero: Insight From the Milgram Experiment.” HuffPost Contributor Network (2015, Apr. 29). https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-to-be-a-hero-insight-_b_6566882
Jarrett, Christian. “New Analysis Suggests Most Milgram Participants Realised the ‘Obedience Experiments’ Were Not Really Dangerous.” The British Psychological Society: Research Digest (2017, Dec. 12). https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/12/12/interviews-with-milgram-participants-provide-little-support-for-the-contemporary-theory-of-engaged-followership/
Perry, Gina. “The Shocking Truth of the Notorious Milgram Obedience Experiments.” Discover Magazine Blogs (2013, Oct. 2). http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2013/10/02/the-shocking-truth-of-the-notorious-milgram-obedience-experiments/
Romm, Cari. “Rethinking One of Psychology's Most Infamous Experiments.” The Atlantic (2015, Jan. 28) . https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinking-one-of-psychologys-most-infamous-experiments/384913/
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Research on the collection characteristics of a hydraulic collector for seafloor massive sulfides, 1. introduction, 2. numerical method, 2.1. governing equation, 2.2. force acting on particles, 2.2.1. fluid–particle interaction, 2.2.2. particle collision force, 2.3. cfd-dem coupling method, 3. design parameters and modeling, 3.1. design parameters, 3.2. numerical modeling, 3.2.1. geometric model and mesh model, 3.2.2. initial state of particles, 3.2.3. numerical setups, 4. results and discussions, 4.1. analysis of flow field characteristics, 4.2. ore collection mechanism, 4.3. the effect of drum speeds on collection characteristics, 4.3.1. flow field characteristics, 4.3.2. particle dynamics characteristics, 4.3.3. the influence of drum speed on ore collection performance, 5. preliminary assessment of simulation results, 5.1. experimental setup and materials, 5.2. experimental assessment, 6. conclusions, author contributions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Click here to enlarge figure

Cutter Head		Suction Head
Parameters	Value	Parameters	Value
Diameter (m)	1	L (m)	1
Width (m)	1	H (m)	0.2
Drum diameter (m)	0.76	B (m)	0.4
Number of teeth	30	(°)	120
Installation angle (°)	45	d (m)	0.235
		(°)	135

Particle Size Range/mm	Value	F(d)	Mass Ratio of Particle Size Range
≤5.9	5.9	0.08	8%
5.9~7	6.3	0.1407	6.07%
7~8.39	7.8	0.2472	10.65%
8.39~10	9.5	0.4104	16.32%
10~11.88	11.1	0.6186	20.82%
11.88~16.75	14.5	0.9598	34.12%
16.75~20	18.2	1	4.02%

Parameter		Similarity Ratio
Type	Name	Similarity Ratio
Geometric parameters	Diameter, width, tooth spacing, cross-sectional depth
Geometric parameters	angle, number of teeth	1
Operation parameters	Rotating speed
Operation parameters	Forward speed, outlet velocity of the fluid
Particle	Density	1
Particle	Particle size
Result	Volume concentration	1
Result	Mass flow

		Forward Speed (m/s)	Rotation Speed (r/min)	Outlet Velocity (×10 m/s)
Case 1	Simulation	0.047	60	3
Case 1	Experiment	0.03	95	1.87
Case 2	Simulation	0.047	60	3.62
Case 2	Experiment	0.03	95	2.29

	Mass Flow Rate (kg/s)			Volume Concentration (%)
		Test	Error	Simulation	Test	Error
Case 1	1.87	1.74	7.7%	5.08	4.95	2.6%
Case 2	1.92	1.87	2.7%	4.46	4.25	4.9%

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Dai, H.; Li, Y. Research on the Collection Characteristics of a Hydraulic Collector for Seafloor Massive Sulfides. J. Mar. Sci. Eng. 2024 , 12 , 1534. https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse12091534

Dai H, Li Y. Research on the Collection Characteristics of a Hydraulic Collector for Seafloor Massive Sulfides. Journal of Marine Science and Engineering . 2024; 12(9):1534. https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse12091534

Dai, Huan, and Yan Li. 2024. "Research on the Collection Characteristics of a Hydraulic Collector for Seafloor Massive Sulfides" Journal of Marine Science and Engineering 12, no. 9: 1534. https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse12091534

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Credibility and Incredulity in Milgram's Obedience Experiments: A
Gina Perry is an Australian writer and author of Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments (2012) and The Lost Boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif's Robber Cave Experiment (2018). Both works draw on extensive archival research and interviews with experimental participants. She completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne, where she is an associate ...
Meta-Milgram: An Empirical Synthesis of the Obedience Experiments
Abstract. Milgram's famous experiment contained 23 small-sample conditions that elicited striking variations in obedient responding. A synthesis of these diverse conditions could clarify the factors that influence obedience in the Milgram paradigm. We assembled data from the 21 conditions ( N = 740) in which obedience involved progression to ...
Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiments: origins and early
Abstract. Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiments remain one of the most inspired contributions in the field of social psychology. Although Milgram undertook more than 20 experimental variations, his most (in)famous result was the first official trial run - the remote condition and its 65% completion rate.
A novel experimental approach to study disobedience to authority
Inspired by subsequent versions of Milgram-like paradigms and by combining the strengths of each, this paper presents a novel experimental approach to the study of (dis)obedience to authority. Volunteers are recruited in pairs and take turns to be 'agents' or 'victims', making the procedure fully reciprocal.
In Defense of Milgram Experiments
the philosophical community is still that Milgram's obedience experiments were largely unethical, and that his procedure would never be approved by an IRB today. This paper, however, challenges this popular notion. To do so, it reexamines the criticism of some of Milgram's sharpest detractors, namely Diana Baumrind, Steven Patten, and
Milgram's Obedience to Authority: Its Origins, Controversies, and
Obedience to Authority (Milgram, 1974) is a landmark study that deserves careful. reconsideration from a historical and ethical perspective. Stanley Milgram (1963) first published. his findings in ...
The Milgram experiment: Its impact and interpretation
Milgram conducted a great deal of research on obedience to authority (Blass, 2009). Since a considerable amount of research that has been conducted on this subject concerns one particular experiment that he conducted in 1963, the present paper will be limited to a review of this experiment titled Behavioral study of Obedience (Milgram, 1963 ...
Modern Milgram experiment sheds light on power of authority
Milgram's original experiments were motivated by the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who famously argued that he was 'just following orders' when he sent Jews to their deaths. The new findings ...
Perspectives on Obedience to Authority: The Legacy of the Milgram
The experiments of Stanley Milgram on obedience to authority have achieved a truly remarkable visibility, one that is rare in the social sciences. Although conducted over 30 years ago, Milgram's ...
The Milgram experiment: Its impact and interpretation
Milgrams' experiment which investigated obedience to authority is one of the most well-known psychological studies of all time. The study is widely considered ethically controversial, and found its results striking and disturbing. This raises the question as to which part of the study contributed the most to the way it was interpreted by the scientific community. Milgrams' study had a harmful ...
(PDF) Milgram's Experiment: Obedience or Emotional Adaptation on
This article has given efforts to analyze and interpret one of the famous psychological experiment, conducted by Stanley Milgram, in the light of understanding of nature of emotions. Milgram's ...
Neurobiology of the Milgram Obedience Experiment
This manuscript presents a comprehensive review of the neurobiology underlying the Milgram Obedience Experiment, a cornerstone in understanding human behavior under authority. Beginning with an examination of traumatic historical events, particularly the Holocaust, the manuscript delves into the psychological underpinnings of obedience. It discusses how individuals, like Adolf Eichmann ...
Behavioral Study of obedience.
This articles describes a procedure for the study of destructive obedience in the laboratory. It consists of ordering a naive S to administer increasingly more severe punishment to a victim in the context of a learning experiment. Punishment is administered by means of a shock generator with 30 graded switches ranging from Slight Shock to Danger: Severe Shock. The victim is a confederate of ...
PDF Behavioral Study of Obedience
dienceStanley Milgram(1963)This article describes a procedure for the study of destruc-tiv. obedience in the laboratory. It consists of ordering a naive S to administer increasingly more severe punish-ment to a victim in the con. ext of a learning experiment. Punishment is administered by means of a shock genera-tor with 30 graded switches ...
Milgram Shock Experiment
Milgram experiment, controversial series of experiments examining obedience to authority conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. ... (1964) criticized the ethics of Milgram's research as participants were prevented from giving their informed consent to take part in the study. ... D. E. (1996). The Stanley Milgram papers: A case ...
Collection: Stanley Milgram papers
The Stanley Milgram Papers consist of correspondence, research files, writings files, and teaching files, which document Milgram's work as an innovative researcher and teacher in the field of social psychology. ... Milgram's experiment was designed to examine how far one individual will go in hurting another at the behest of a recognized ...
Milgram Experiment: Overview, History, & Controversy
Replications of the Milgram Experiment . While Milgram's research raised serious ethical questions about the use of human subjects in psychology experiments, his results have also been consistently replicated in further experiments. One review further research on obedience and found that Milgram's findings hold true in other experiments.
Milgram experiment
Milgram first described his research in a 1963 article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology [1] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to ... The subject and actor drew slips of paper to determine their roles. Unknown to the subject, both slips said "teacher". ... The subjects of Milgram ...
Milgram experiment
Milgram experiment, controversial series of experiments examining obedience to authority conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram.In the experiment, an authority figure, the conductor of the experiment, would instruct a volunteer participant, labeled the "teacher," to administer painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to the "learner," who was actually an actor.
The Milgram Experiment: Summary, Conclusion, Ethics
The goal of the Milgram experiment was to test the extent of humans' willingness to obey orders from an authority figure. Participants were told by an experimenter to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to another individual. Unbeknownst to the participants, shocks were fake and the individual being shocked was an actor.
PDF BEHAVIORAL STUD Y OF OBEDIENCE
BEHAVIORAL STUDY OF OBEDIENCE1. NLEY MILGRAM 2YaleUniversityThis article describes a procedure for the study of destructi. e obedience in the laboratory. It consists of ordering a naive S to administer increasingly more severe punishment to a victim in the co. text of a learning experiment. Punishment is administered by means of a shock ...
The Milgram Experiments, Learned Helplessness, and Character Traits
obedience decreases to 20.5%. The presence of the victim is als o important in. reducing obedience, but only half as much. In Experiment 3, when both. experimenter and victim are in the same room ...
The Milgram Experiment: Theory, Results, & Ethical Issues
The Milgram experiments are some of the most foundational--and controversial--psychology research studies ever conducted. Let's look at what makes them important. ... The original and classic Milgram experiment was described by Stanley Milgram in an academic paper he wrote sixty years ago. Milgram was a young, Harvard-trained social ...
Information Systems IE&IS
In order to do that, the IS group helps organizations to: (i) understand the business needs and value propositions and accordingly design the required business and information system architecture; (ii) design, implement, and improve the operational processes and supporting (information) systems that address the business need, and (iii) use advanced data analytics methods and techniques to ...
JMSE
Ore collection is very important in deep-sea mining for seafloor massive sulfide (SMS). In view of the characteristics of SMS ores produced by mechanical crushing, which contain coarse particles and a wide particle size distribution, in-depth research on the collection process with a device combining a rotary crushing head and a flat suction mouth was conducted. In this paper, solid-liquid ...

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Prosocial disobedience across variants

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