The Milgram Experiment

One of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology, “The Milgram Experiment” was an ethically controversial experiment carried out in 1961 by an American social psychologist by the name of Stanley Milgram. A psychologist at Yale university, Milgram conducted experiments focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and the personal conscience. Milgrams Experiments were in response to his investigation into how Nazi soldiers in WWII could blindly accept obviously morally wrong orders. Such as the atrocities committed during the holocaust. Milgram selected participants for his experiment by newspaper articles advertising for male participants to take part in a study on “memory and learning” which was being held at Yale University.

The experiment would begin with two participants pairing together. Each would draw lots on who would be the “learner”, and who would be the “teacher”. The draw of course, was fixed so that all the participants would draw a “teacher” ballot and the “learner” ballots would be drawn by Milgram’s assistants. The teacher would watch the learner be strapped into a chair and electrodes attached. The subject was then seated in another room in front of a shock generator (not Real), unable to see the learner.

The subject was then instructed to teach word-pairs to the learner. If a mistake was made the teacher was instructed to punish the learner by giving them a shock of 15 volts which would increase with every mistake made, the learner (milgrams assistants) would begin to scream as if being shocked for real. The experimenter (man conducting experiment), was seated in the same room and would periodically give subtle orders such as “please go on”, “please continue”, “you have no other choice, you must go on”, “it is absolutely essential that you continue”, to the teacher starting off as mild prods, eventually turning more authoritarian each time the subject tried to resist. Should the subject ask who would be responsible if anything would happen to the learner. The experimenter would then answer “I am”. This would typically give the subjects relief and many continued even though they were aware that what they were doing was morally wrong. Sixty five percent of participants continued shocking the learners to up to 450 volts per mistake.

The conclusion made by Milgram was that ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. He stated that people would tend to obey orders from authority figures who they thought of as morally right and / or Legally based. This response to authority is learned in a variety of situations such as family, school and the workplace.

Milgram summed this up in his article “The Perils of Obedience”

“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.”
The ethical issues brought forth by this experiment have long since brought controversy and criticism to the world of psychology. In many cases participants that took part in this experiment reported emotional scarring lasting for months and years after the study.

I’ve always wanted to believe that man truly has free will. That when put into a situation were one must choose between right and wrong, that people would typically choose to do the right thing, regardless of whos orders they come from. Unfortunately this is a very wishful way of thinking, and though, try as i might to believe in integrity of man, reality always seems to pull me back. I find it very upsetting that out of the 40 participants, so few had the courage to stand up for their fellow man and stop the shocking.

Thanks for reading!

What do you guys think of the experiment?
Do you think this experiment was morally wrong, or was it justifiable?
Leave a comment With your opinion!

Sources and additional information:
http://www.integratedsociopsychology.net/milgram_variations.html
https://explorable.com/stanley-milgram-experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Milgram_experiment