all right uh today we are talking about two of my favorite experiments the Salomon Ash Conformity test and Stanley milgram's behavioral study on Disobedience now excuse me one second now the ash test I'm only going to talk about for a couple of minutes because I've covered that previously but I do want to begin this video by hitting on one of the final notes from Ash's study so let's go ahead and get into it all right so this is Ash's original article um you know it's this was published in 1955 I believe yeah Scientific American opinions and social pressure again just to kind of recap what this experiment was uh Professor Ash he would have several people come into a room and he would show them sets of cards and you had to match the line on one card with the length on the other card and as the test progressed the members in the group would start giving the incorrect answer and the test was to see if the one individual would follow the rest of the group and uh in his studies uh he notes that uh under group pressure the minority subject so the individual swung to acceptance of the misleading majority's wrong judgments and 36.8 percent of the selections right so uh and this was a relatively inconsequential experiment right this was you know 1955 World War II had only been over for about a decade so very much in the minds of Professor Ash and his colleagues and the the point that I want to hit on and this will be the transition into the Milgram experiment is towards the end of his article uh Ash he says quote the study provides clear answers to a few relatively simple questions and it raises many others that await investigation we would like to know the degree of consistency of persons in situations which differ in content and structure if consistency of Independence or Conformity and behavior is shown to be a fact how is it functionally related to qualities of character and personality so are there certain character traits or certain kinds of people that are maybe more or less resistant to uh group think right uh Professor Ash continues in what ways is Independence related to sociological or cultural conditions our leaders more independent than other people or they Adept at following their followers all right these are many these and many other questions May perhaps be answerable by investigations of the type described here now this last paragraph I think is what leads to what Milgram ultimately wanted to study which is seeing how far a person could be pushed until they disobey right until they go against Authority or like in Ash's case against the group Ash and his concluding section says life and Society requires consensus as an indispensable condition a consensus to be productive requires that each individual contribute independently out of his experience and insight when consensus comes under the dominance of Conformity the social process is polluted and the individual at the same time surrenders the powers on which is functioning as a feeling and thinking being depends that we have found the tendency to conformity in our society so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern it raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct so Ash he and Milgram picks up on this like in that first paragraph of his paper Ash is saying that in order for society to work we all have to agree to certain things right you can't just walk down the street punching people in the face uh there's going to be consequences for that but consensus according to Ash should be reached organically and not by force or Fiat because then that in ashes terms pollutes uh the social process using his term so let's go ahead and pick up with Stanley milgram's behavioral study of obedience uh this paper the original paper was published in 1963 . so not long after the ash study it's and I'm not I don't know this but I wouldn't be surprised if Milgram and Ash were aware of each other I mean this was very much like the height of um you know the social psychology this was when social psychology really started to take off uh as a movement so to get us going with this you know kind of picking up on milgram's final note or excuse me Ash's final note Milgram begins his paper by saying obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living and it is only the man dwelling in isolation who's not forced to respond through Defiance or submission to the commands of others so Milgram very similar to Ash is cognizant of the fact that in order for society to work in order for society to function we all have to be on the same program right we all have to be on the same page and agree to certain things um Milgram is a little bit more forthcoming and he full-on acknowledges that this is a study that looks at how Nazis or what could potentially lead to someone becoming uh deluded by Nazi ideology uh so that's what he's referencing here like with you know the Nazi system right here and with gas Chambers and the death camps and all that okay uh and he says these inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person and we're going to hear more about that single person later in the semester um but we'll get there uh but he says they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders I've long been a fan of the saying no one raindrop believes it's responsible for the flood uh in interviews with Nazi officials and when you know many of them were on trial following World War II you had a number of them saying well you know I was just doing my job I was just doing what I was told I didn't know you know or even if they weren't affiliated with like the death camps or anything yeah they'd say you know I was just responsible for Logistics or whatever but every one of those things factors in right so back with Milgram uh Milgram says obedience his definition is obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose it is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority uh just as a side note that's a very well constructed sentence uh and it does pack a certain power to it so obediency continues serves numerous productive functions and indeed the very life of society is predicated on its existence obedience may be ennobling and educated and referred to acts of Charity and kindness as well as to destruction you know cue like Thunderbolts and you know uh very dramatic that uh I'm not going to spend too much time going over the setup of his experiment uh because this is pretty well known but before we get into the results and some of the details of his experiment we do have to question obedience just as a concept right because it's on the one hand we acknowledge both Milgram and Ash that we do have to be obedient to a certain degree um in order to make Society work right had to go and do something real quick so on the one hand we acknowledge that obedience is necessary and in some cases it can be good right we want Society to function we all have to be on the same page however obedience can obviously become problematic and how do you know when to question obedience if you have never been raised to question those in Authority rules laws etc etc um and I mentioned this because when we talk about the rise of Nazism and how someone becomes a Nazi I think it's really important that we acknowledge that Nazism just didn't happen overnight one of the last readings we're going to talk about uh by Susan Griffin our time one of the things she actually looks at is German child rearing manuals from the late 19th and early 20th century and what we see is that for a couple of generations parents were instructed to be very authoritarian towards their children and children were taught to be very submissive to their parents to not question their parents things like that in the United States we pride ourselves on individuality questioning Authority um being skeptical of those in power so this is why it's all the more telling that milgram's experiment happens in the United States not that long after World War II again 1963 you know it's only a decade and a half after the end of World War II so still very present uh in the mind now again kind of looking through so they you know had individuals uh men which is a data point with worth considering uh from age range from 20 to 50 blue collar workers white collar workers um you know barely finishing grade school all the way to you know graduating college so a wide variety of individuals okay and he goes into this here they were brought to the elegant interactions laboratory at Yale University and again this is one of those uh details that is actually important if something's happening at Yale you know it seems you know it's it's a world-renowned institution you know so certainly they would never do anything that could potentially cause harm right uh it's not like this is some CD Warehouse you know on the waterfront or like the basement of I don't know University of Phoenix right so the fact that this experiment is happening at Yale University that seems above board right to the participants uh they are also paid for their time they're told that no matter what they can leave at any time that is key they can leave any time in the experiment right he says the subjects were told that payment was simply coming to the laboratory the money was there so no matter what happened after they arrived so they get paid they get brought in um I am going to refer here real quickly to a diagram of the experiment so the experimenter is dressed in a lab coat again appearance all this is very intentionally designed we see someone in a lab coat we associate them with a scientist with position of authority whatever right and this was played by uh Milgram says a 31 year old high school teacher of biology so you know someone who is you know in The Sciences um knows how to kind of get people to do things right he's a he's a high school teacher and I like milgram's description of him uh Milgram says his manner was impassive and his appearance somewhat Stern throughout the experiment um and then on the flip side the learner the guy supposedly being tortured is described as a 47 year old accountant trained for the role of Irish American Stock who most observers found mild-mannered and likable and again these details are important because what if you know the person being shocked like what if they were an right and you know the other person didn't like him it's like yeah I'm going to shock him now something worth noting that and I don't know if Milgram was aware of this 450 volts I've heard I'm not an expert on this but I've heard is enough to kill a person um people have died receiving lower uh shocks of electricity so uh the fact that his supposed machine went all the way up to 450 volts that's that's bananas and by the way again the appearance of the machine is also very intentional um you know here is a pretty good image of it I mean it's it's about the size of a desk like if you watch video footage it's a pretty impressive machine it emitted noises all of the lights lit up and again if you watch video demonstration or if you read milgram's paper one of the buttons does actually work uh I think it's the 15 or the 45 volt button this is for a test shock for um the teacher right the person delivering the shocks so again it's giving them the appearance that the machine is real and that it works okay so back to milgram's article uh in the setup the teacher is told by the experimenter quote although the shocks can be extremely painful they cause no permanent tissue damage again the messaging is very intentional and this is to assuage any potential guilt or concern from you know the teacher as the experiment proceeds and in the video footage of milgram's experiment you know you see one individual who's clearly having a hard time and he repeatedly asks uh the experimenter you know that sounds like that guy over there is having you know is in bad shape you know I don't want to be responsible for this and to experimental reassures him says you know no the responsibilities all mine nothing will come to you he's like you know are you sure he's like yes please continue so again kind of that assuaging of guilt so looking through uh uh so you know the the experiment proceeds uh the gentleman in the opposite room at a certain point starts screaming and you know complaining that he's in pain uh and at one point he just stops like there's just no response and the teacher is told to still continue to administer the shocks because that you know a non-answer is a incorrect answer uh if the teacher refuses um the experimenter is told to go through a series of frauds uh if a teacher makes it through prod four and continues to refuse then the experiment would end right but every time they would you know they would do around if he refused it would restart right so it wouldn't be like oh you go one round I don't want to do it prod one next round I don't want to do it prod two no it would start back over at prod one uh looking through this and let's just get to the results right um not a single person stopped before level 300. and 26 of the 40 people went all the way to the end so more than half when all the way to the end um when looking at the reactions Milgram says in a large number of cases the degree of tension reached extremes that are rarely seen in socio-psychological laboratory studies subjects were observed to sweat tremble stutter bite their lips groan and dig their fingernails into their flesh one sign of tension was the regular occurrence of nervous laughing fit laughing fits a full-blown uncontrollable seizures were observed for three subjects and on one occasion it was so violently convulsive they had to stop the experiment um you know the individual was likely going to hurt themselves or somebody else uh Milgram notes of the 40 subjects five people refused to go beyond the 300 volt level uh four administered one further shock two broke off at 3 30 one each at 3 45 360 and 375 the remaining 14. yeah uh uh defied the experimenter so looking through this uh after the maximum number of shocks had been delivered and the experimenter ended the procedure Pilgrim says many obedient subjects heaved size of relief mopped their brows rubbed their fingers over their eyes or nervously fumbled cigarettes some shook their heads apparently in regret some subjects had remained calm throughout the experiment and displayed only minimal signs of tension I've also heard that some of the participants after the experiment were convinced that they had actually killed someone and some of them would look in the newspapers and you know and listen to the radio days after looking for reports on you know a science experiment gone wrong at Yale University right because they were just totally convinced that they had killed someone um which is horrifying I mean the whole experiment is horrifying which we're going to get to here in a moment because we do need to comment on that right so in his discussion Milgram says subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against as well and again you know this was in the United States which Prides itself on questioning Authority you know questioning you know anything that may cause harm right and here we have 26 seemingly random people just in their minds torturing someone because dude behind them in the lab coat is saying You must continue the experiment requires that you go on and in video footage and interviews with the you know subjects after the experiment you know that Milgram would ask them like you know why didn't you stop and you hear the subject say things you hear the subject say things like well he told me to keep going the Milgram continues and says but why didn't you stop no harm you know and this is what Milgram says to disobey would bring no material loss to the subject no punishment would ensue you know the money was theirs they could leave at any time no one was holding a gun to their head nothing bad would have happened to these individuals yet they proceeded nevertheless uh looking at I'm just looking through my notes real quick a few other things you know when looking at I do really like this last section where Milgram looks at some of the defining features of the experiment and maybe how he was able to attain the results that he was able to um I'm just looking through this to do he he uses this phrase somewhere in here where he says like the the experimenters caught up in a sequence of events um that he can't stop right or he feels like he can't stop and so the Milgram experiment when we look at it historically you know the 1960s were something of a interesting era for social psychology Ash's experiment is relatively un problematic I don't know if it would pass IRB mustard today it might uh or it might need some requirements to be tweaked but Milgram experiment and then later the Stanford Prison Experiment are absolutely the reason why we have institutional review boards uh today is to make sure you know that participants and experiments are aware of what's going to happen um you know this is why informed consent is absolutely a thing even if you're doing a simple survey like I did a survey of students at three different colleges for a paper I was writing and it was just a simple survey just asking them questions like how would you describe yourself as a writer how would you describe yourself as a student seemingly inconsequential took me three months to get that survey approved um so informed consent institutional review boards uh they exist for a reason and the Milgram experiment is in the absolutely the Stanford Prison Experiment are those reasons right uh Vanessa bonds and her work on you know kind of a follow-up to the Milgram experiment has done more ethical work kind of investigating the same phenomenon that Milgram was investigating but from a significantly less problematic Viewpoint so again I wanted to talk about this in connection with the ash experiment because even though it is an extraordinarily problematic uh experiment it yielded extraordinarily fascinating results clearly it's still being talked about today uh you know 60 years later 60 years actually you know right so it is worth discussing because it does provide a certain insight into the human psyche so uh let me know what you think if you have questions as always please feel free to reach out and I will see you all in the next video take it easy