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The Milgram experiment was a famous scientific experiment of social psychology. The experiment was first described by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University in an article titled Behavioral study of obedience published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963, and later summarized in his 1974 book Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. It was intended to measure the willingness of a participant to obey an authority who instructs the participant to do something that may conflict with the participant's personal conscience.
The method of one experiment was as follows:
Participants were recruited via a newspaper ad for work in a "study of memory" at Yale. The experiment was advertised as taking one hour, for which those responding would be paid $4.50. Participants were men between the ages of 20 and 50, excluding college and high school students.
The participant and an actor pretending to be another participant are told by the experimenter that they will be participating in an experiment to test the effectiveness of punishment on learning behavior.
Two slips of paper are handed to the participant and actor. The participant is led to believe that one of the slips said "learner" and one said "teacher" and that the participant is randomly given one of the slips. The participant slip says "teacher." The actor claims to have been assigned as "learner," so the participant is led to believe that the roles have been chosen randomly. In actuality both slips say "teacher," while the actor just misreports what is on his slip; no element of randomness is involved.
Both are then given a sample 45-volt electric shock from an apparatus attached to a chair into which the actor is strapped. The "teacher" is then given simple memory tasks to give to the "learner" and instructed to administer a shock by pressing a button each time the learner makes a mistake.
The "teacher" is then told that the voltage is to be raised by 15 volts after each mistake. In reality, there are no shocks being given to the actor ? the actor is merely acting. At "150 volts" the actor requests that the experiment ends. He is told by the experimenter: "The experiment requires that you continue. Please go on." The teacher participant continues, and the actor feigns at first greater discomfort, then considerable pain, and finally screams for the experiment to stop as the simulated shocks continue. If the teacher participant becomes reluctant, the teacher participant is instructed that the experimenter takes all responsibility for the results of the experiment and the safety of the learner, and that the experiment requires that the teacher participant continue.
Before the experiment was conducted Milgram polled fellow psychologists as to what the results would be. They unanimously believed that only a few sadists would be prepared to give the maximum voltage.
In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent of experimental participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock, though many were quite uncomfortable in doing so. No participant stopped before the 300-volt level. The experiment has been repeated by other psychologists around the world with similar results. Variations have been performed to test for variables in the experimental setup. For example, participants are much more likely to be obedient when the experimenter is physically present, as opposed to when the instructions are given over telephone.
Thomas Blass of the University of Maryland writes in Psychology Today (March/April 2002) that he has collected results from repeats of the experiment done at various times since, in the US and elsewhere, and found that the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages remains remarkably constant, between 61% and 66%, regardless of time or location. [Blass, 2002] The full results were published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. [Blass, 1999]
Milgram describes 19 variations of the experiment that he conducted in Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. In general, he found that when the immediacy of the victim was increased, compliance decreased, and when immediacy of the authority increased, compliance increased (Experiments 1-4). For instance, in one variation where participants received instructions from the experimenter only by telephone (Experiment 2), compliance greatly decreased; interestingly, a number of participants deceived the experimenter by pretending to continue the experiment. In the variation where immediacy of the "learner" was closest, participants had to physically hold the learner's arm onto a shock plate, which decreased compliance (Experiment 4). In this latter condition 30 percent still completed the experiment.
In Experiment 8, women were used as participants (all of Milgram's other experiments used only men). Obedience did not differ significantly, though they indicated experiencing higher levels of stress.
In one version (Experiment 10), Milgram rented a modest office in Bridgeport, Connecticut, purporting to be run by a commercial entity called "Research Associates of Bridgeport" with no apparent connection to Yale, in order to eliminate the prestige of the university as a possible factor influencing participants' behavior. The results of this experiment did not significantly differ from those conducted at the Yale campus.
Milgram also combined the power of authority with that of conformity. In these experiments, the participant was joined by one or two additional "teachers" (who were actually actors, like the "learner"). The behavior of the participants' apparent peers strongly affected results. When two additional teachers refused to comply (Experiment 17), only four participants of 40 continued the experiment. In another version, (Experiment 18) the participant performed a subsidiary task with another "teacher" who complied fully. In this variation only three of 40 defied the experimenter. This variation is the reference of Peter Gabriel's "Milgram's 37" .
The experiment raised questions about the ethics of scientific experimentation itself because of the extreme emotional stress suffered by the participants (even though it could be said that this stress was brought on by their own free actions). Most modern scientists would consider the experiment unethical today, though it resulted in valuable insights into human psychology.
In Milgram's defense, given the choice between "positive," "neutral," and "negative," 84 percent of former participants contacted later rated their role in the experiments as a positive experience and 15 percent chose neutral. Many later wrote expressing thanks. Milgram repeatedly received offers of assistance and requests to join his staff from former participants.
Why so many former participants reported they were "glad" to have been involved despite the apparent levels of stress, one participant explained to Milgram in correspondence six years after he participated in the experiment, during the height of the Vietnam war:
In contrast to the life-changing experience reported by some former participants, however, participants were not fully debriefed by modern standards and many seemed to never fully understand the nature of the experiment according to exit interviews.
Milgram summed up in the article "The Perils of Obedience" (Milgram 1974), writing:
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 created a documentary film showing the experiment and its results, titled "Obedience". It is now very hard to find copies of it, but it can be very informative viewing. He also produced a series of five other films on social psychology with Asch conformity experiments
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