hey everyone tom here and welcome back to our series of videos exploring the psychology of social influence social influence is all about how behavior can be shaped and changed by those around us in the previous two videos we've explored the psychology of conformity and specifically the famous and controversial stanford prison experiment and in this video we're going to focus on obedience to authority and the work of stanley milgram and his literally shocking experiment you'll find below time stamps for this video if you want to jump to a certain section but for now let's dive in during world war ii one of the high-ranking officers of nazi germany was this one this man is adolf eichmann and he was responsible for the deportation of millions of jews to death camps once the allied forces beat nazi germany adolf eichmann fled to argentina and it wasn't until 1960 when israeli massage agents caught him and then in 1961 adolf eichmann stood trial in jerusalem for crimes against humanity one famous account of eichmann's trial referred to him as quote the banality of evil which for someone who committed such atrocities and who was responsible for such evil during world war ii people were expecting this horrific monster of a figure who did terrible things but in the end he turned out to be an ordinary and boring man during eichmann's trial he was asked to explain why he did what he did and in essence eichmann said that it wasn't his fault he was simply following orders as one man put it hikeman wasn't just a travel agent indifferent to the destination of his passengers he was personally responsible a responsibility he blindly denied right to the end two days after his trial adolf eichmann was hung for a more recent example of such obedience to authority we only have to turn back to 2004 and the events that took place in abu ghraib prison in iraq accounts of torture rape and the murder of prisoners came to public attention when photographs of the abuse emerged this abuse was carried out by none other than u.s military police personnel who when asked why they did what they did said they were simply following orders lindy england was one of these people she was photographed with an iraqi prisoner smiling and pointing at his naked body why did she do it she said she was doing what she was ordered to do another photo emerged from abu ghraib this time of linda england holding a leash with one end around the neck of a prisoner lying naked to quote lindy england when she was interviewed she said we don't feel like we were doing things we weren't supposed to because we were told to do them we think everything was justified because we were instructed to do this and to do that so whether it's world war ii and the horrors carried out by nazi germany or whether the behavior of u.s army personnel in iraq these inhumane behaviors whilst they may have been orchestrated by people higher up crucially are carried out by large numbers of people who are simply following orders the cases of adolf eichmann and linda england raise lots of questions and we often ask why did they do what they did and maybe it should raise the question for us to ask how many of us would have behaved like them and followed orders if we were in the same situation as them so now we come to the shocking experiment by stanley milgram in the 1960s and this study was done whilst adolf eichmann's trial was taking place and with all that as background the question of this study was the following if an experimenter instructed a participant to intentionally hurt another person under what conditions would the participant obey the participants were 40 males aged between 20 and 50 all taken from the local area and each of these participants responded to this newspaper advert inviting them to the very prestigious yale university where there was a study taking place on learning and the effects of punishment on memory all of the participants were of a wide range of occupations some being high school teachers salesmen or engineers and they all had a wide range of education some not even completing elementary school all the way to others who had doctorates and other professional degrees they were paid four dollars an hour to take part in the experiment however it was made very clear to them that they would receive this money for taking part in the study no matter what their behavior was or the outcome was when each participant turned up to take part in the study there was another participant there too however this participant wasn't really a participant they were a confederate who was working for milgram as part of the study the experimenter introduced himself and gave a little bit of context to the study admitting that scientists knew little at that time about the links between learning and memory and punishment and he stated for this experiment one of the participants would need to take the role of a teacher and the other participant would need to take the role of the learner participants then drew paper out of a hat to decide who would play the role of the teacher or the learner however this drawing out of the hat was rigged so that the real participant would always end up with the role of the teacher and the fake participant the confederate would always end up in the position of the learner the learner was taken into a room and strapped to an electric chair with electrodes placed on his wrist at this point the teacher and the experimenter left the room and went to a room next door where there was a shock generator and this shock generator had a series of voltages from 15 volts which simply read slight shock to 375 volts which read danger sophia shock all the way up to 450 volts which simply read x x x the experimenter was in the room with the teacher throughout the remainder of the experiment now the learner who's the confederate member would never actually receive any electric shocks but the real participant the teacher didn't know this they thought that every time the learner answered the question and they got it wrong that they would receive a real electric shock in order to make the teacher believe that these electric shocks were real prior to the beginning of the participant playing the teacher role they received a mild 45 volt shock from the actual shot generator that was used the teacher understood that their task was to test learners on their ability to remember sets of words from a previous task if the learner was to get a word wrong or they simply weren't to answer at all they were to receive an electric shock and these electric shocks would increase each time as the electric shocks increased the learner starts to behave in a prepared and planned way by milgram where he starts making noises and screams that is incorrect the prep phrase is rich boy let me out of here to the point at 300 volts where you can hear the learner pounding on the wall and then at 315 volts it goes silent what's the teacher going to do obviously at this point you'd imagine that the teacher is going to be feeling uncomfortable and he's going to start to look to the experimenter as what to do milgram had planned for this if the participant the teacher turned to the experimenter and asked him what he should do or expressed how uncomfortable he felt about the task or even how he wanted to quit the experiment the experimenter would respond with one of four carefully designed and standardized prods prod one please continue prod 2 the experiment requires that you continue prompt 3 it is absolutely essential that you continue prod 4 you have no other choice you must go on before the study milgram did something rather interesting something i haven't told you about yet milgram approached 14 yale university psychology students and he gave them a detailed description of the study he was about to conduct and he asked them to imagine that there were 100 hypothetical participants and he wanted them to predict how they would behave what did these psychology students think the participants would do in fact how many of them did they think out of 100 would go all the way and obey up to 450 volts their answer an average of 1.2 percent in other words there'll be one there'll be one person out of 100 one nutcase who will obey all the way up to 450 volts and kill the person in the room next door so what did milgram actually find from his real participants well the first shock in more ways than one was that every single participant obeyed all the way up to 300 volts and the biggest shock of them all was that 65 of people obeyed all the way up to 450 volts now let's make that a little bit more real imagine back to your school days you're sat in your assembly hall and your lecture theater with imagine a hundred of your mates this means as you look around the room and everybody you went to school with 65 of them would have killed the person in the room next door because somebody in a gray lab coat told them to as well as measuring the behavior of the participants in terms of how far they obeyed in the voltage they gave he also had people through a one-way mirror observe the behavior of the participants too participants were observed sweating profusely trembling stuttering biting their lips groaning and digging their fingernails into their flesh and these were typical behaviors of the participants not the exception milgram didn't stop there he wanted to find out under what circumstances obedience was more or less likely to happen and so in addition to his baseline study he conducted a number of variations we're just going to consider three proximity uniform and location proximity variation one involved the teacher and the learner being in the same room originally importantly the teacher and the learner were in separate rooms and couldn't see one another but in this variation he reduced the distance between the two and put the teacher and the learner in the same room and when this happened the obedience rate dropped from 65 to 40 and this makes sense because if the teacher can see the victim of his electric shocks right in front of him and he can see into the eyes of the person who's experiencing the pain it makes it all that bit harder to obey proximity variation number two was much more extreme in this case when the learner refused to answer a question the teacher not only had to administer the electric shock but they had to force the learner's hand down onto the electric plate and in this condition the obedience rate dropped from 65 to 30 proximity variation number three this time involved not the teacher and the learner but the proximity of the teacher and the experimenter in this variation milgram removed the experimenter from being in the same room as the teacher and instead simply had communication with the teacher via telephone when this happened the obedience rate for the teacher dropped from 65 to 20.5 in the next variation milgram focused on location the location in which the experiment took place and if we consider closely in our everyday lives where the behavior takes place the location on context in which we obey authority figures it can be rather interesting this variation looks at location and what milgram called background authority milgram's original experiment took place at yale university so could it be that the prestigious yale university setting increased the likelihood of people obeying in order to investigate this milgram moved the experiment to a set of office buildings that were sort of run down and in this situation he found that the obedience rate dropped from 65 to 48 in this last variation milgram wanted to see the influence that uniform could have on obedience in the original experiment the experimenter wore a grey lab coat like a scientist however in this variation milgram had the experimented dress as an ordinary member of the public in everyday clothes as a result the obedience rate dropped from 65 to 20 with such a shocking study like this you won't be surprised that milgram hasn't been without his critics firstly let's consider the obvious ethical issue of protection from harm now remember the learners were in on the experiment they were confederates and they never actually received any electric shocks so no harm done there however the teacher did experience a great deal of harm as experienced by their reactions which were observed the profuse sweating the trembling the biting of the fingernails but then there is also the knowledge having taking part in the study that you were willing to kill somebody in the room next door what does that kind of knowledge do to a person however to milgram's defense he argued that the stress that the participants experienced was only short term and what he made sure to do was to debrief the participants straight after the study so they understood the nature and the purpose of what was being done participants were reassured that their behaviour was quite typical and normal and milgram made sure to follow them up one year later to make sure there was no lasting psychological harm another ethical issue relates to deception firstly the participants were deceived because they were under the impression that they were taking part in a study that was all about the links between learning and punishment when actually it was an experiment into obedience to authority and secondly and perhaps more importantly the participants believed that they were administering real electric shocks to a human being when this was all a lie however milgram argued that some level of deception like this was needed in the study if you've defined real and significant results for this important and complicated behavior and milgram went one step further and made sure to give a questionnaire to each of his participants asking them how happy they were to have taken part in a study like this and 84 percent of them said that they were happy to have taken part methodological criticism number one relates to ecological validity despite the fact that participants the teachers obviously thought what they were taking part in was real and that they were administering real electric shocks the study was taken part in a laboratory experiment which possibly tells us less about real life obedience for example the setup in milgram study was much more like a military situation of obedience than the everyday examples of obedience we might face where the instructions and influence tend to be much more subtle and indirect methodological criticism number two relates to population validity milgram's research can be questioned because of the sample that he had and firstly the baseline study was based on the behavior of an all male population and secondly all of these male participants took part through responding to a newspaper advert for their involvement this is a problem because often volunteers tend to have certain personality features like being more helpful and keen and outgoing than those who don't volunteer and maybe there were people who read that newspaper advert who didn't respond because it didn't quite fit with their personality type and as such the findings from such research may be limited to the type of people who took part milgram himself wrote at the end of the study with numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority people do what they are told to do so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority whilst we wouldn't want to deny that in many situations in life obedience to authority is designed for our good and the good of others however we need to bear it in mind that we can be influenced to such a degree by authority figures and situational factors that we might obey to the point where we end up doing things we never dreamed we were capable [Music] 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