milgram 1963 obedience background stanley milgram was a psychology professor at yale university during the 1960s having received his phd in social psychology from harvard in 1961. he took a particular interest in the holocaust that took place during world war ii which resulted in millions of innocent people being systematically killed and he wanted to understand why and how nazi soldiers and their accomplices were capable of committing the atrocities that they did as a basis for his research milgram examined some of the justifications that were given by prominent nazi members at the nuremberg trials that took place in 1946 one of the common defenses provided by the defendants was that they were merely following orders and obeyed the will of their superiors rather than carrying out the acts of their own free will based on this milgram theorized that the holocaust was carried out due to a cascade of obedience that ran through the nazi hierarchy and that nazi soldiers were simply normal people who followed orders that many of us in their position would have been capable of similar behavior a quote from the original study by milgram into obedience reads these inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders aim to test his theory about obedience milgram decided to devise an experiment the aim of the study was to investigate the extent to which obedience would be shown by participants who were told by a figure of authority to administer electric shocks to another person and also to find out whether nazi soldiers were fundamentally different to the average person or whether everyone is susceptible to similar levels of obedience that were present during the holocaust sample milgram used a volunteer sample for the study via an advertisement in a newspaper that covered the area near yale university participants were told they would be paid 4.50 cents just for turning up the sample consisted of 40 male participants who were all aged between 20 and 50 and were from a variety of occupations and educational backgrounds milgram excluded students from taking part in the study because he had previously run a pilot study that only used students and concluded that there was something quote fundamentally different about students compared to other types of people methodology the study used an independent measures design in which the participants all took part in one condition so there was no control group contrary to popular belief this study was actually a controlled observation it was not a laboratory experiment however it was in a laboratory setting and collected data in the form of quantitative data the maximum level of electric shock recorded for each participant and also in the form of qualitative data which were the comments from participants during the study procedure when participants arrived on the day of the study they were met by a researcher wearing a grey lab coat who explained that they would be taking part in a study about learning and memory which was in fact a lie they were then introduced to another person who they were told was also a participant in the study however this was also not true they were a confederate which in the context of this study meant that they knew the true nature of the experiment and were just playing along the researcher told participants and the confederate that they would be taking part in a study as either a learner or a teacher and that they had to draw straws to decide who would be in each of the roles however in reality this was always fixed so that the participant would always be allocated as a teacher and the confederate would be the learner once the roles had been allocated the confederate learner was taken to a room where the participant was shown them being strapped into a chair with electrodes placed on their head the learner also mentioned that they had a heart condition then the participant was taken to a room next to the learner and was told that the learner had been given a list of word pairs to learn the teacher's job was to test the learner by naming each of the words in the list then asking the learner to recall its pair from a list of four possible choices the teacher was presented with an electric shock generator and was told that if the learner repeated one of the items wrongly they were to use the shock generator to administer an electric shock to the learner the shock generator wasn't actually real but created realistic electrical sounds when the quote shock button was pressed to enhance the impression that it was actually real the researcher told the participant to first shock the learner with 15 volts and then increase the shock voltage by 15 volt intervals for every subsequent answer that the learner got wrong the maximum voltage that the teacher could go up to was 450 volts and the researcher explained that the shocks could be painful but not harmful to make the shock generator seem more real milgram placed warning labels next to some of the intervals which corresponded to the severity of the sharks these started at slight shock for 15 volts and moved through moderate shock strong shock very strong shock intense shock extreme intensity shock danger severe shock and finally xxx for 450 volts before the study began the researcher also gave the participant a real shock of 45 volts which was very small and was intended to quote prove to them that the shock generator was real even though it wasn't when the study got underway the participant began shocking the learner every time they gave a wrong response increasing the voltage by 15 volts each time as instructed the learner mainly gave wrong answers on purpose each time the participant increased the voltage audio recordings of the learner complaining were played from the learner's room and the participant thought that these were actually the confederate complaining since they didn't know that it was actually an audio recording once 300 volts were reached the learner was heard to be banging on the wall and screaming in agony and after 300 volts the learner refused to continue repeating the list of items in the absence of a response from the learner for the subsequent questions the researcher told the participant to continue giving shocks regardless if the participant refused to continue at any point during the experiment the researcher had four verbal prods that they would use to try to coerce the participant to continue these were please continue or please go on the experiment requires that you continue it is absolutely essential that you continue you have no of a choice you must go on the prods were always made in sequence and if the participant still refused to obey the experimenter after the fourth prod then the experiment was terminated there were also two special prods that the experimenter used if the participant asked if the learner might suffer permanent physical injury the researcher would reply although the shocks may be painful there is no permanent tissue damage so please go on if the participant said that the learner did not want to go on the researcher replied whether the learner likes it or not you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly so please go on once participants either reached 450 volts or had refused to continue the study ended and they were debriefed by the researcher about the true nature of the study they were interviewed and a friendly reconciliation was arranged between the participant and the learner a quote from the original study by milgram states procedures were undertaken to assure that the subject would leave the laboratory in a state of well-being results before revealing the results of his experiment milgram asked 14 senior psychology majors of yale university to predict what the outcome of the study would be they predicted that only an insignificant minority of the participants would actually end up administering all of the shocks up to and including 450 volts they estimated that only around three percent of participants would actually continue up to the highest number of vaults however in reality the results revealed that in total 65 of participants continue to the highest level of 450 volts and 100 of participants continued up to 300 volts despite the fact that at this level the learner would kick on the wall and no longer provide answers to the teacher's questions of the 40 participants five refused to obey beyond 300 volts four more administered one further shock and then refused to go on two refused at 330 volts and one each at 345 360 and 375 volts therefore a total of 14 participants defied the experimenter during the study some of the comments from participants who defied the experimenter were recorded by audio tapes they included things like i don't think this is very humane i can't go on with this this isn't right i'm gonna chicken out i'd like to continue but i can't do that to a man another key finding was the display of extreme tension among participants especially when administering the more powerful sharks they were observed to sweat tremble stutter bite their lips groan and dig their fingernails into their flesh milgram noted that these were common characteristics among all participants and not exceptions 14 of the 40 participants displayed nervous laughter and smiling milgram remarked that the laughter seemed entirely out of place and even bizarre however perhaps the most concerning finding was that free participants had quote full-blown uncontrollable seizures and on one occasion a participant had such a violent seizure that it was necessary to terminate the experiment the participant in question mentioned in the post-experimental debrief that he was seriously embarrassed by his untoward and uncontrollable behavior conclusions the main conclusions drawn from the experiment was that ordinary people are likely to follow orders even when they believe it may cause substantial harm to others and goes against their morals milgram suspected that people tend to obey others if they regard them as possessing a position of authority particularly where that authority has significant standing in society which is learned in a variety of places such as family school and the workplace when considering the results of his study milgram offered a number of possible explanations for why participants were so obedient to the experimenter despite most of them clearly feeling a great deal of disapproval and unease about administering the electric shocks firstly because the study took place at yang university which is a very high ranking university with an excellent reputation the participants may have reasonably presumed that the personnel in charge of the study were competent and reputable and that this meant that they should do what they said he also thought that perhaps participants were willing to forego their unwillingness to cooperate because the experiment had a worthy purpose to advance knowledge about learning and memory and that therefore at the very least the complicit behavior during the study was meaningful and significant moreover he postulated that participants may have rationalized their obedience partly by acknowledging that because their learner had volunteered for the experiment they were not an unwilling captive and had consented to take part in the experiment this may have also extended to the participants themselves the fact that they had volunteered for the experiment may have meant that they felt obligated to continue the study the fact that the experiment took place in an enclosed laboratory room may have played a role in encouraging obedience since the participants were not able to discuss the situation with other people and only and the only witness to their behavior was the experimenter a further explanation may have been that the participants were reassured that the electric shocks were quote painful but not dangerous so they may have calculated that the benefits of continuing the experiment outweighed the discomfort felt by both the learner and themselves evaluations the study was conducted as a controlled observation which raises a question about ecological validity the unique and highly controlled design of the study may make it more difficult to generalize the findings to everyday life people obey a wide variety of orders in real life which are much more subtle than giving people electric shocks therefore one could argue that the results from milgram's study are more applicable to a military context in addition a weakness of using controlled observations is that participants in milgram study knew that they were being observed because the situation was controlled which could have created demand characteristics or social desirability bias and lowers the validity on the other hand the use of a controlled observation enables researchers to control any extraneous variables or co-founding variables and therefore increase the validity of the results and making them more reliable and replicable however the fact that there was no control group means that it is hard to establish whether the independent variable the experimenter was the cause of obedience one consideration is the sample and sampling method all of the participants in the experiment were male from a very specific location in a highly affluent area of the united states with a relatively small sample of 40 participants it's debatable how generalizable the results are to females and people from other countries around the world perhaps people of other countries are more or less obedient the sample was collected via self-selected sample also known as a volunteer sample so it cannot be seen as totally representative of the american population the experiment also had numerous ethical issues including the fact that participants actually believed that they were giving electric shocks to a real person who appeared to be in a lot of pain and discomfort in the latter stages of the experiment milgram argued that the deception was necessary and it's certainly true that the fact that participants were not aware of the true nature of the learner being a confederate was key to the experiment's function milgram also interviewed participants afterwards and held a reconciliation between the participant and the learner to ensure that they received a debrief milgram addressed some of the physical symptoms exhibited by participants during the study including trembling sweating laughing nervously and uncontrollable seizures with many pleading to be allowed to stop the experiment he argued that these effects were only temporary and once the participants had been debriefed their stress levels decreased however despite this it's hard to see if this type of extreme behavior being allowed to occur in a contemporary experiment without additional safeguards being in place for participants is due to the development of more stringent ethical guidelines in the decades since milgram's experiment for example it is standard practice in modern psychological studies for researchers to make it very clear to the participants that they have the right to withdraw from a study at any time regardless of payment however it is clear that milgram's experiment did not make this abundantly clear and in fact gave four verbal prods to discourage participants from withdrawing milgram justified this by saying that because the study was about obedience these prods were necessary and he pointed out that although the right to withdraw was made difficult it was possible as 35 of participants had chosen to withdraw early milgram also followed up with participants one year after the experiment and found that 84 said that they were quote glad to be in the experiment and only 1.3 percent said they wish that they had not been involved on the face of it this seems to suggest that most participants had no issue with taking part however we should be cautious with interviews and other types of self-report since respondents may give answers that are not entirely true due to demand characteristics and social desirability the usefulness of the study has also been debated the study does seem to provide some support to the theory that nazi soldiers were simply following orders which is what milgram was initially interested in investigating it also added to a body of evidence and research about how people have a tendency to obey people in authority and forms a basis for further psychological research in this area on the other hand it has been argued that the usefulness is somewhat limited due to the lack of explanation from participants about exactly why they obeyed authority during the experiment this would have been useful to know from the participants point of view and could potentially have provided a valuable insight to their thought process and how they rationalize their behavior during the study you