Transcript for: Exploring Obedience and Authority in Humans
[Voiceover] The Milgram
studies were conducted in order to study the
willingness of participants, average everyday Americans,
to obey authority figures who instructed them to perform behaviors that conflicted with their
personal beliefs and morals, and as you can probably imagine, it might be hard to recruit participants when that's what you're trying to study. And so in order to keep the
participants from finding out what he was actually trying to look at, Milgram used deception. He started by posting
ads looking for people to participate in a study
about learning and memory, and I actually have an image
of the original flyer here. And you can see that they
really tried to make it a point to recruit average, everyday people. When they arrived at
the lab, they were told that they were going to be
participating in a study that was trying to look at the effects of punishment on learning. So do people learn best after they've been punished for making a mistake? And there were two participants
involved in the study, and they randomly decided
by picking out of a hat, who was going to play the role of teacher and who was going to play
the role of the learner. In reality, one of the participants was actually a confederate, meaning that they were working with the experimenter and were secretly in on
the point of the study. And choosing the roles out of a hat wasn't actually random in this case because it was rigged in such a way that the actual participant always got the teacher role and the confederates always got the learner role. While the teacher was watching, the experimenter hooked the learner up to a number of electrodes,
and they were both told that the teacher was
going to teach the learner a number of word pairs,
and that the learner would be shocked whenever
they gave the wrong answer. In some versions of the study, the person playing the learner noted
that they were worried about the experiment because
they had a heart condition, so they were worried about the shocks, at which point the
experimenter would explain to them not to worry, that the shocks would be painful but not dangerous. The teacher was then
taken to a different room where they couldn't see the learner. They had no visual contact with them. And they were sat in
front of a box of switches that they were told was a shock box. The first switch was labeled 15 volts, and the switches increased
at 15 volt increments until it reached 450 volts. Along with an indication of voltage, there were also labels that
went along with the switches. And I wrote a number of them down here, but they went from slight shock to moderate shock to strong shock and then things like very strong shock and intense shock and
extremely intense shock, and then kind of troublingly,
a label that noted that the switches would
give a severe shock and the warning of danger XXX. The teacher was instructed
to read a long list of word pairs to the learner, and then when they were finished, to go back and read the first word of each pair and then offer four possible pair words. Of those possible four pair words, the learner would
indicate what they thought the answer was by pressing a button and this was displayed on
a screen to the teacher. And whenever they made an error, the teacher was instructed
to give them a shock at increasing increments. So the first wrong answer
got a shock of 15 volts, the second one 30 volts, etcetera. And just so you're aware,
even though the teacher thought that they were
giving the learner shocks, no actual shocks were given. But of course it was really important that the teacher really thought that the punishment was being administered. After giving a number of correct answers, the participants seemingly
started giving incorrect ones. And of course, the pattern of correct and incorrect answers
that the learner was given was determined by the
experimenter well before hand. And the first couple
of shocks really didn't elicit that much of a reaction. The learner would kind of
gasp when they happened, but nothing more than that, however after several increasing shocks, the learner would start
to pound on the wall and cry out in pain. And eventually, they
would start to complain about their heart condition, saying things like "let
me out, my heart is "bothering me, let me out." And as the shocks increased, they would continue to yell and scream
that they wanted to quit. And after this, after a certain point, all responses from the learner would cease and there would only be
silence from the other room. If at any point during the study, the participant playing
the role of the teacher wanted to check on the other participant, or stop the experiment,
or even just looked back at the experimenter for guidance to see what they should do, they were told things
like "please continue" and "the experiment
requires that you continue." And even "you have no other
choice, you must go on." The experiment came to an end after either four verbal
protests from the teacher, from the participant, or after they had given the final shock of 450 volts to the silent learner three times. Before he started his experiment, Milgram had asked a number of professors and psychology students
and clinical psychologists whether or not people
would obey the commands of the experimenter, and they overwhelmingly
said that people would not, that most of them would stop
when the learner protested, and that very very few people
would shock all the way, and that those that did
were probably psychopaths. And so when the results
of the study came out, they were actually really disturbing because 65% of participants
shocked all the way. 65%. And to be clear, those participants didn't do so without feeling. They had protested and they were sweating, and they were trembling,
but they still obeyed the commands of the experimenter and shocked to 450 volts. And in the versions of the experiment where the learner claimed
to have a heart condition, and specifically claimed that the shocks were hurting their heart,
full compliance did drop, but not by much. It dropped to 63%. And again, these were
everyday, average Americans who heard the cries of
people they were tomenting and continued with the task. And I want to end with
a quote from Milgram, and it's kind of a long quote,
and I've written it out here. But I think that it's really important and really sums up the
results of the study. He wrote, "I set up a
simple experiment at Yale "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' "strongest moral imperatives against "hurting others, and with
the subjects' ears ringing "with the screams of the victims, "authority won more often than not. "The extreme willingness
of adults to go to almost "any length on the command of an authority "constitutes the chief
finding of the study "and the fact most urgently
demanding explanation. "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, "and without any particular
hostility on their parts, "can become agents in a
terrible destructive process. "Moreover, even when
the destructive effects "of their work became patently clear, "and they were asked to carry out actions "incompatible with fundamental standards "of morality, relatively few people have "the resources needed
to resist authority."