One of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology was carried out by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In 1963, Milgram 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.
Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question, could it be that those who committed such atrocities in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices? Milgram 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 a 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 an actor hired. pretending to be a real participant.
The learner, who was an actor 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, which is a slight shock, to 375 volts, which had a danger reading of severe shock. and up to 450 volts which is enough to kill a human being. Get me out of here please. Continue please.
Go right ahead. You refuse to go in. Let me out.
You refuse to go in. The experiment requires you to continue teacher. Please continue. Participants were comprised of 40 males aged between 20 and 50 whose job ranged from unskilled to professional.
They were paid four and a half dollars just for turning up to the study. At the beginning of the experiment they were introduced to the other participant. which was the actor taking on the role as the learner.
The experimenter, who was also an actor, was dressed in a grey lab coat, played by an actor, not Milgram himself. Two rooms in the Yale laboratory were used, one for the learner with an electric chair, and another for the teacher and the experimenter with an electric shock generator. The learner, Mr. Wallace, was strapped to a chair by electrodes. After he had learned a list of paired words given to him to learn, The teacher tests him by naming a word and then asking the learner to recall its partner or pair from a list of four possible choices. The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner made a mistake.
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 and prods to ensure that they continue. There were four prods.
And if one was not obeyed, then the experimenter, who was called Mr. Williams, read out the next prod, and so on. The four prods were, firstly, please continue. Secondly, the experiment requires you to continue. Three, it is absolutely essential you continue. Four, you have no other choice but to continue.
So what were the results of this study? Mulgrim found that 65%, almost two-thirds of the participants, the participants who played the role as the teachers administering the electric shock, continued to the highest levels of 450 volts. All the participants continued to at least 300 volts. Mulgrim did more than one experiment.
In fact, he carried out 18 variations of the study, all with similar results. So this can't be taken as once-off random and non-occurring event. All he did was alter the situation to see how this affected obedience. From the results of the study, Milgram developed a theory called the agency theory.
Milgram explained the behavior of his participants by suggesting that people have two states of behavior when they are in a social situation. The first is the autonomous state. People direct their own actions and they take responsibility for the results of those actions.
Then there is the agentic state. People allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the Responsibility for those 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 this eugenic state Firstly the person giving the orders is perceived as being qualified to direct other people's behavior That is they are seen as a legitimate source of authority Secondly, the person being ordered is able to believe that the authority will accept responsibility for what happens. Agency theory stipulates that people will obey an authority when they believe that that authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. And that's all for today's video. I hope you found it interesting.
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