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Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, carried out one of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology.

He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.

Milgram (1963) 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.

The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question:

Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974).

Milgram (1963) 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 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 one of Milgram’s confederates (pretending to be a real participant).

The learner (a confederate 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 (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX).

The shocks in Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments were not real. The “learners” were actors who were part of the experiment and did not actually receive any shocks.

However, the “teachers” (the real participants of the study) believed the shocks were real, which was crucial for the experiment to measure obedience to authority figures even when it involved causing harm to others.

Milgram’s Experiment (1963)

Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person.

Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities, for example, Germans in WWII.

Volunteers were recruited for a controlled experiment investigating “learning” (re: ethics: deception). 

Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional, from the New Haven area. They were paid $4.50 for just turning up.

At the beginning of the experiment, they were introduced to another participant, a confederate of the experimenter (Milgram).

They drew straws to determine their roles – learner or teacher – although this was fixed, and the confederate was always the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a gray lab coat, played by an actor (not Milgram).

Two rooms in the Yale Interaction Laboratory were used – one for the learner (with an electric chair) and another for the teacher and experimenter with an electric shock generator.

The “learner” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped to a chair with electrodes.

After he has learned a list of word pairs given to him to learn, the “teacher” tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.

The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).

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/prods to ensure they continued.

There were four prods, and if one was not obeyed, then the experimenter (Mr. Williams) read out the next prod, and so on.

Prod 1 : Please continue. Prod 2: The experiment requires you to continue. Prod 3 : It is absolutely essential that you continue. Prod 4 : You have no other choice but to continue.

These prods were to be used in order, and begun afresh for each new attempt at defiance (Milgram, 1974, p. 21). The experimenter also had two special prods available. These could be used as required by the situation:

• Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on’ (ibid.)
• ‘Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on’ (ibid., p. 22).

65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.

Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations of his study.  All he did was alter the situation (IV) to see how this affected obedience (DV).

Conclusion 

The individual explanation for the behavior of the participants would be that it was something about them as people that caused them to obey, but a more realistic explanation is that the situation they were in influenced them and caused them to behave in the way that they did.

Some aspects of the situation that may have influenced their behavior include the formality of the location, the behavior of the experimenter, and the fact that it was an experiment for which they had volunteered and been paid.

Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being.  Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.

People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in the family, school, and workplace.

Milgram summed up in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), writing:

“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University 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’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”

Milgram’s Agency Theory

Milgram (1974) explained the behavior of his participants by suggesting that people have two states of behavior when they are in a social situation:

• The autonomous state – people direct their own actions, and they take responsibility for the results of those actions.
• The agentic state – people allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the responsibility for the 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 the agentic state:

• The person giving the orders is perceived as being qualified to direct other people’s behavior. That is, they are seen as legitimate.
• The person being ordered about is able to believe that the authority will accept responsibility for what happens.

According to Milgram, when in this agentic state, the participant in the obedience studies “defines himself in a social situation in a manner that renders him open to regulation by a person of higher status. In this condition the individual no longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others” (Milgram, 1974, p. 134).

Agency theory says that people will obey an authority when they believe that the authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This is supported by some aspects of Milgram’s evidence.

For example, when participants were reminded that they had responsibility for their own actions, almost none of them were prepared to obey.

In contrast, many participants who were refusing to go on did so if the experimenter said that he would take responsibility.

According to Milgram (1974, p. 188):

“The behavior revealed in the experiments reported here is normal human behavior but revealed under conditions that show with particular clarity the danger to human survival inherent in our make-up.

And what is it we have seen? Not aggression, for there is no anger, vindictiveness, or hatred in those who shocked the victim….

Something far more dangerous is revealed: the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.”

Milgram Experiment Variations

The Milgram experiment was carried out many times whereby Milgram (1965) varied the basic procedure (changed the IV).  By doing this Milgram could identify which factors affected obedience (the DV).

Obedience was measured by how many participants shocked to the maximum 450 volts (65% in the original study). Stanley Milgram conducted a total of 23 variations (also called conditions or experiments) of his original obedience study:

In total, 636 participants were tested in 18 variation studies conducted between 1961 and 1962 at Yale University.

In the original baseline study – the experimenter wore a gray lab coat to symbolize his authority (a kind of uniform).

The lab coat worn by the experimenter in the original study served as a crucial symbol of scientific authority that increased obedience. The lab coat conveyed expertise and legitimacy, making participants see the experimenter as more credible and trustworthy.

Milgram carried out a variation in which the experimenter was called away because of a phone call right at the start of the procedure.

The role of the experimenter was then taken over by an ‘ordinary member of the public’ ( a confederate) in everyday clothes rather than a lab coat. The obedience level dropped to 20%.

Change of Location:  The Mountain View Facility Study (1963, unpublished)

Milgram conducted this variation in a set of offices in a rundown building, claiming it was associated with “Research Associates of Bridgeport” rather than Yale.

The lab’s ordinary appearance was designed to test if Yale’s prestige encouraged obedience. Participants were led to believe that a private research firm experimented.

In this non-university setting, obedience rates dropped to 47.5% compared to 65% in the original Yale experiments. This suggests that the status of location affects obedience.

Private research firms are viewed as less prestigious than certain universities, which affects behavior. It is easier under these conditions to abandon the belief in the experimenter’s essential decency.

The impressive university setting reinforced the experimenter’s authority and conveyed an implicit approval of the research.

Milgram filmed this variation for his documentary Obedience , but did not publish the results in his academic papers. The study only came to wider light when archival materials, including his notes, films, and data, were studied by later researchers like Perry (2013) in the decades after Milgram’s death.

Two Teacher Condition

When participants could instruct an assistant (confederate) to press the switches, 92.5% shocked to the maximum of 450 volts.

Allowing the participant to instruct an assistant to press the shock switches diffused personal responsibility and likely reduced perceptions of causing direct harm.

By attributing the actions to the assistant rather than themselves, participants could more easily justify shocking to the maximum 450 volts, reflected in the 92.5% obedience rate.

When there is less personal responsibility, obedience increases. This relates to Milgram’s Agency Theory.

Touch Proximity Condition

The teacher had to force the learner’s hand down onto a shock plate when the learner refused to participate after 150 volts. Obedience fell to 30%.

Forcing the learner’s hand onto the shock plate after 150 volts physically connected the teacher to the consequences of their actions. This direct tactile feedback increased the teacher’s personal responsibility.

No longer shielded from the learner’s reactions, the proximity enabled participants to more clearly perceive the harm they were causing, reducing obedience to 30%. Physical distance and indirect actions in the original setup made it easier to rationalize obeying the experimenter.

The participant is no longer buffered/protected from seeing the consequences of their actions.

Social Support Condition

When the two confederates set an example of defiance by refusing to continue the shocks, especially early on at 150 volts, it permitted the real participant also to resist authority.

Two other participants (confederates) were also teachers but refused to obey. Confederate 1 stopped at 150 volts, and Confederate 2 stopped at 210 volts.

Their disobedience provided social proof that it was acceptable to disobey. This modeling of defiance lowered obedience to only 10% compared to 65% without such social support. It demonstrated that social modeling can validate challenging authority.

The presence of others who are seen to disobey the authority figure reduces the level of obedience to 10%.

Absent Experimenter Condition 

It is easier to resist the orders from an authority figure if they are not close by. When the experimenter instructed and prompted the teacher by telephone from another room, obedience fell to 20.5%.

Many participants cheated and missed out on shocks or gave less voltage than ordered by the experimenter. The proximity of authority figures affects obedience.

The physical absence of the authority figure enabled participants to act more freely on their own moral inclinations rather than the experimenter’s commands. This highlighted the role of an authority’s direct presence in influencing behavior.

A key reason the obedience studies fascinate people is Milgram presented them as a scientific experiment, contrasting himself as an “empirically grounded scientist” compared to philosophers. He claimed he systematically varied factors to alter obedience rates.

However, recent scholarship using archival records shows Milgram’s account of standardizing the procedure was misleading. For example, he published a list of standardized prods the experimenter used when participants questioned continuing. Milgram said these were delivered uniformly in a firm but polite tone.

Analyzing audiotapes, Gibson (2013) found considerable variation from the published protocol – the prods differed across trials. The point is not that Milgram did poor science, but that the archival materials reveal the limitations of the textbook account of his “standardized” procedure.

The qualitative data like participant feedback, Milgram’s notes, and researchers’ actions provide a fuller, messier picture than the obedience studies’ “official” story. For psychology students, this shows how scientific reporting can polish findings in a way that strays from the less tidy reality.

Critical Evaluation

Inaccurate description of the prod methodology:.

A key reason the obedience studies fascinate people is Milgram (1974) presented them as a scientific experiment, contrasting himself as an “empirically grounded scientist” compared to philosophers. He claimed he systematically varied factors to alter obedience rates.

However, recent scholarship using archival records shows Milgram’s account of standardizing the procedure was misleading. For example, he published a list of standardized prods the experimenter used when participants questioned continuing. Milgram said these were delivered uniformly in a firm but polite tone (Gibson, 2013; Perry, 2013; Russell, 2010).

Perry’s (2013) archival research revealed another discrepancy between Milgram’s published account and the actual events. Milgram claimed standardized prods were used when participants resisted, but Perry’s audiotape analysis showed the experimenter often improvised more coercive prods beyond the supposed script.

This off-script prodding varied between experiments and participants, and was especially prevalent with female participants where no gender obedience difference was found – suggesting the improvisation influenced results. Gibson (2013) and Russell (2009) corroborated the experimenter’s departures from the supposed fixed prods. 

Prods were often combined or modified rather than used verbatim as published.

Russell speculated the improvisation aimed to achieve outcomes the experimenter believed Milgram wanted. Milgram seemed to tacitly approve of the deviations by not correcting them when observing.

This raises significant issues around experimenter bias influencing results, lack of standardization compromising validity, and ethical problems with Milgram misrepresenting procedures.

Milgram’s experiment lacked external validity:

The Milgram studies were conducted in laboratory-type conditions, and we must ask if this tells us much about real-life situations.

We obey in a variety of real-life situations that are far more subtle than instructions to give people electric shocks, and it would be interesting to see what factors operate in everyday obedience. The sort of situation Milgram investigated would be more suited to a military context.

Orne and Holland (1968) accused Milgram’s study of lacking ‘experimental realism,”’ i.e.,” participants might not have believed the experimental set-up they found themselves in and knew the learner wasn’t receiving electric shocks.

“It’s more truthful to say that only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real, and of those two-thirds disobeyed the experimenter,” observes Perry (p. 139).

Milgram’s sample was biased:

• The participants in Milgram’s study were all male. Do the findings transfer to females?
• Milgram’s study cannot be seen as representative of the American population as his sample was self-selected. This is because they became participants only by electing to respond to a newspaper advertisement (selecting themselves).
• They may also have a typical “volunteer personality” – not all the newspaper readers responded so perhaps it takes this personality type to do so.

Yet a total of 636 participants were tested in 18 separate experiments across the New Haven area, which was seen as being reasonably representative of a typical American town.

Milgram’s findings have been replicated in a variety of cultures and most lead to the same conclusions as Milgram’s original study and in some cases see higher obedience rates.

However, Smith and Bond (1998) point out that with the exception of Jordan (Shanab & Yahya, 1978), the majority of these studies have been conducted in industrialized Western cultures, and we should be cautious before we conclude that a universal trait of social behavior has been identified.

Selective reporting of experimental findings:

Perry (2013) found Milgram omitted findings from some obedience experiments he conducted, reporting only results supporting his conclusions. A key omission was the Relationship condition (conducted in 1962 but unpublished), where participant pairs were relatives or close acquaintances.

When the learner protested being shocked, most teachers disobeyed, contradicting Milgram’s emphasis on obedience to authority.

Perry argued Milgram likely did not publish this 85% disobedience rate because it undermined his narrative and would be difficult to defend ethically since the teacher and learner knew each other closely.

Milgram’s selective reporting biased interpretations of his findings. His failure to publish all his experiments raises issues around researchers’ ethical obligation to completely and responsibly report their results, not just those fitting their expectations.

Unreported analysis of participants’ skepticism and its impact on their behavior:

Perry (2013) found archival evidence that many participants expressed doubt about the experiment’s setup, impacting their behavior. This supports Orne and Holland’s (1968) criticism that Milgram overlooked participants’ perceptions.

Incongruities like apparent danger, but an unconcerned experimenter likely cued participants that no real harm would occur. Trust in Yale’s ethics reinforced this. Yet Milgram did not publish his assistant’s analysis showing participant skepticism correlated with disobedience rates and varied by condition.

Obedient participants were more skeptical that the learner was harmed. This selective reporting biased interpretations. Additional unreported findings further challenge Milgram’s conclusions.

This highlights issues around thoroughly and responsibly reporting all results, not just those fitting expectations. It shows how archival evidence makes Milgram’s study a contentious classic with questionable methods and conclusions.

Ethical Issues

What are the potential ethical concerns associated with Milgram’s research on obedience?

While not a “contribution to psychology” in the traditional sense, Milgram’s obedience experiments sparked significant debate about the ethics of psychological research.

Baumrind (1964) criticized the ethics of Milgram’s research as participants were prevented from giving their informed consent to take part in the study. 

Participants assumed the experiment was benign and expected to be treated with dignity.

As a result of studies like Milgram’s, the APA and BPS now require researchers to give participants more information before they agree to take part in a study.

The participants actually believed they were shocking a real person and were unaware the learner was a confederate of Milgram’s.

However, Milgram argued that “illusion is used when necessary in order to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at-truths.”

Milgram also interviewed participants afterward to find out the effect of the deception. Apparently, 83.7% said that they were “glad to be in the experiment,” and 1.3% said that they wished they had not been involved.

Protection of participants 

Participants were exposed to extremely stressful situations that may have the potential to cause psychological harm. Many of the participants were visibly distressed (Baumrind, 1964).

Signs of tension included trembling, sweating, stuttering, laughing nervously, biting lips and digging fingernails into palms of hands. Three participants had uncontrollable seizures, and many pleaded to be allowed to stop the experiment.

Milgram described a businessman reduced to a “twitching stuttering wreck” (1963, p. 377),

In his defense, Milgram argued that these effects were only short-term. Once the participants were debriefed (and could see the confederate was OK), their stress levels decreased.

“At no point,” Milgram (1964) stated, “were subjects exposed to danger and at no point did they run the risk of injurious effects resulting from participation” (p. 849).

To defend himself against criticisms about the ethics of his obedience research, Milgram cited follow-up survey data showing that 84% of participants said they were glad they had taken part in the study.

Milgram used this to claim that the study caused no serious or lasting harm, since most participants retrospectively did not regret their involvement.

Yet archival accounts show many participants endured lasting distress, even trauma, refuting Milgram’s insistence the study caused only fleeting “excitement.” By not debriefing all, Milgram misled participants about the true risks involved (Perry, 2013).

However, Milgram did debrief the participants fully after the experiment and also followed up after a period of time to ensure that they came to no harm.

Milgram debriefed all his participants straight after the experiment and disclosed the true nature of the experiment.

Participants were assured that their behavior was common, and Milgram also followed the sample up a year later and found no signs of any long-term psychological harm.

The majority of the participants (83.7%) said that they were pleased that they had participated, and 74% had learned something of personal importance.

Perry’s (2013) archival research found Milgram misrepresented debriefing – around 600 participants were not properly debriefed soon after the study, contrary to his claims. Many only learned no real shocks occurred when reading a mailed study report months later, which some may have not received.

Milgram likely misreported debriefing details to protect his credibility and enable future obedience research. This raises issues around properly informing and debriefing participants that connect to APA ethics codes developed partly in response to Milgram’s study.

Right to Withdrawal 

The BPS states that researchers should make it plain to participants that they are free to withdraw at any time (regardless of payment).

When expressing doubts, the experimenter assured them all was well. Trusting Yale scientists, many took the experimenter at his word that “no permanent tissue damage” would occur, and continued administering shocks despite reservations.

Did Milgram give participants an opportunity to withdraw? The experimenter gave four verbal prods which mostly discouraged withdrawal from the experiment:

• Please continue.
• The experiment requires that you continue.
• It is absolutely essential that you continue.
• You have no other choice, you must go on.

Milgram argued that they were justified as the study was about obedience, so orders were necessary.

Milgram pointed out that although the right to withdraw was made partially difficult, it was possible as 35% of participants had chosen to withdraw.

Replications

Direct replications have not been possible due to current ethical standards . However, several researchers have conducted partial replications and variations that aim to reproduce some aspects of Milgram’s methods ethically.

One important replication was conducted by Jerry Burger in 2009. Burger’s partial replication included several safeguards to protect participant welfare, such as screening out high-risk individuals, repeatedly reminding participants they could withdraw, and stopping at the 150-volt shock level. This was the point where Milgram’s participants first heard the learner’s protests.

As 79% of Milgram’s participants who went past 150 volts continued to the maximum 450 volts, Burger (2009) argued that 150 volts provided a reasonable estimate for obedience levels. He found 70% of participants continued to 150 volts, compared to 82.5% in Milgram’s comparable condition.

Another replication by Thomas Blass (1999) examined whether obedience rates had declined over time due to greater public awareness of the experiments. Blass correlated obedience rates from replication studies between 1963 and 1985 and found no relationship between year and obedience level. He concluded that obedience rates have not systematically changed, providing evidence against the idea of “enlightenment effects”.

Some variations have explored the role of gender. Milgram found equal rates of obedience for male and female participants. Reviews have found most replications also show no gender difference, with a couple of exceptions (Blass, 1999). For example, Kilham and Mann (1974) found lower obedience in female participants.

Partial replications have also examined situational factors. Having another person model defiance reduced obedience compared to a solo participant in one study, but did not eliminate it (Burger, 2009). The authority figure’s perceived expertise seems to be an influential factor (Blass, 1999). Replications have supported Milgram’s observation that stepwise increases in demands promote obedience.

Personality factors have been studied as well. Traits like high empathy and desire for control correlate with some minor early hesitation, but do not greatly impact eventual obedience levels (Burger, 2009). Authoritarian tendencies may contribute to obedience (Elms, 2009).

In sum, the partial replications confirm Milgram’s degree of obedience. Though ethical constraints prevent full reproductions, the key elements of his procedure seem to consistently elicit high levels of compliance across studies, samples, and eras. The replications continue to highlight the power of situational pressures to yield obedience.

Milgram (1963) Audio Clips

Below you can also hear some of the audio clips taken from the video that was made of the experiment. Just click on the clips below.

Why was the Milgram experiment so controversial?

The Milgram experiment was controversial because it revealed people’s willingness to obey authority figures even when causing harm to others, raising ethical concerns about the psychological distress inflicted upon participants and the deception involved in the study.

Would Milgram’s experiment be allowed today?

Milgram’s experiment would likely not be allowed today in its original form, as it violates modern ethical guidelines for research involving human participants, particularly regarding informed consent, deception, and protection from psychological harm.

Did anyone refuse the Milgram experiment?

Yes, in the Milgram experiment, some participants refused to continue administering shocks, demonstrating individual variation in obedience to authority figures. In the original Milgram experiment, approximately 35% of participants refused to administer the highest shock level of 450 volts, while 65% obeyed and delivered the 450-volt shock.

How can Milgram’s study be applied to real life?

Milgram’s study can be applied to real life by demonstrating the potential for ordinary individuals to obey authority figures even when it involves causing harm, emphasizing the importance of questioning authority, ethical decision-making, and fostering critical thinking in societal contexts.

Were all participants in Milgram’s experiments male?

Yes, in the original Milgram experiment conducted in 1961, all participants were male, limiting the generalizability of the findings to women and diverse populations.

Why was the Milgram experiment unethical?

The Milgram experiment was considered unethical because participants were deceived about the true nature of the study and subjected to severe emotional distress. They believed they were causing harm to another person under the instruction of authority.

Additionally, participants were not given the right to withdraw freely and were subjected to intense pressure to continue. The psychological harm and lack of informed consent violates modern ethical guidelines for research.

Baumrind, D. (1964). Some thoughts on ethics of research: After reading Milgram’s” Behavioral study of obedience.”.  American Psychologist ,  19 (6), 421.

Blass, T. (1999). The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority 1.  Journal of Applied Social Psychology ,  29 (5), 955-978.

Brannigan, A., Nicholson, I., & Cherry, F. (2015). Introduction to the special issue: Unplugging the Milgram machine.  Theory & Psychology ,  25 (5), 551-563.

Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist, 64 , 1–11.

Elms, A. C. (2009). Obedience lite. American Psychologist, 64 (1), 32–36.

Gibson, S. (2013). Milgram’s obedience experiments: A rhetorical analysis. British Journal of Social Psychology, 52, 290–309.

Gibson, S. (2017). Developing psychology’s archival sensibilities: Revisiting Milgram’s obedience’ experiments.  Qualitative Psychology ,  4 (1), 73.

Griggs, R. A., Blyler, J., & Jackson, S. L. (2020). Using research ethics as a springboard for teaching Milgram’s obedience study as a contentious classic.  Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology ,  6 (4), 350.

Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2018). A truth that does not always speak its name: How Hollander and Turowetz’s findings confirm and extend the engaged followership analysis of harm-doing in the Milgram paradigm. British Journal of Social Psychology, 57, 292–300.

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Birney, M. E. (2016). Questioning authority: New perspectives on Milgram’s ‘obedience’ research and its implications for intergroup relations. Current Opinion in Psychology, 11 , 6–9.

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., Birney, M. E., Millard, K., & McDonald, R. (2015). ‘Happy to have been of service’: The Yale archive as a window into the engaged followership of participants in Milgram’s ‘obedience’ experiment. British Journal of Social Psychology, 54 , 55–83.

Kaplan, D. E. (1996). The Stanley Milgram papers: A case study on appraisal of and access to confidential data files. American Archivist, 59 , 288–297.

Kaposi, D. (2022). The second wave of critical engagement with Stanley Milgram’s ‘obedience to authority’experiments: What did we learn?.  Social and Personality Psychology Compass ,  16 (6), e12667.

Kilham, W., & Mann, L. (1974). Level of destructive obedience as a function of transmitter and executant roles in the Milgram obedience paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29 (5), 696–702.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience . Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67, 371-378.

Milgram, S. (1964). Issues in the study of obedience: A reply to Baumrind. American Psychologist, 19 , 848–852.

Milgram, S. (1965). Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority . Human Relations, 18(1) , 57-76.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view . Harpercollins.

Miller, A. G. (2009). Reflections on” Replicating Milgram”(Burger, 2009), American Psychologis t, 64 (1):20-27

Nicholson, I. (2011). “Torture at Yale”: Experimental subjects, laboratory torment and the “rehabilitation” of Milgram’s “obedience to authority”. Theory & Psychology, 21 , 737–761.

Nicholson, I. (2015). The normalization of torment: Producing and managing anguish in Milgram’s “obedience” laboratory. Theory & Psychology, 25 , 639–656.

Orne, M. T., & Holland, C. H. (1968). On the ecological validity of laboratory deceptions. International Journal of Psychiatry, 6 (4), 282-293.

Orne, M. T., & Holland, C. C. (1968). Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority. On the ecological validity of laboratory deceptions. International Journal of Psychiatry, 6 , 282–293.

Perry, G. (2013). Behind the shock machine: The untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments . New York, NY: The New Press.

Reicher, S., Haslam, A., & Miller, A. (Eds.). (2014). Milgram at 50: Exploring the enduring relevance of psychology’s most famous studies [Special issue]. Journal of Social Issues, 70 (3), 393–602

Russell, N. (2014). Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority “relationship condition”: Some methodological and theoretical implications. Social Sciences, 3, 194–214

Shanab, M. E., & Yahya, K. A. (1978). A cross-cultural study of obedience. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society .

Smith, P. B., & Bond, M. H. (1998). Social psychology across cultures (2nd Edition) . Prentice Hall.

Further Reading

• The power of the situation: The impact of Milgram’s obedience studies on personality and social psychology
• Seeing is believing: The role of the film Obedience in shaping perceptions of Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Experiments
• Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today?

Learning Check

Which is true regarding the Milgram obedience study?

• The aim was to see how obedient people would be in a situation where following orders would mean causing harm to another person.
• Participants were under the impression they were part of a learning and memory experiment.
• The “learners” in the study were actual participants who volunteered to be shocked as part of the experiment.
• The “learner” was an actor who was in on the experiment and never actually received any real shocks.
• Although the participant could not see the “learner”, he was able to hear him clearly through the wall
• The study was directly influenced by Milgram’s observations of obedience patterns in post-war Europe.
• The experiment was designed to understand the psychological mechanisms behind war crimes committed during World War II.
• The Milgram study was universally accepted in the psychological community, and no ethical concerns were raised about its methodology.
• When Milgram’s experiment was repeated in a rundown office building in Bridgeport, the percentage of the participants who fully complied with the commands of the experimenter remained unchanged.
• The experimenter (authority figure) delivered verbal prods to encourage the teacher to continue, such as ‘Please continue’ or ‘Please go on’.
• Over 80% of participants went on to deliver the maximum level of shock.
• Milgram sent participants questionnaires after the study to assess the effects and found that most felt no remorse or guilt, so it was ethical.
• The aftermath of the study led to stricter ethical guidelines in psychological research.
• The study emphasized the role of situational factors over personality traits in determining obedience.

Answers : Items 3, 8, 9, and 11 are the false statements.

Short Answer Questions

• Briefly explain the results of the original Milgram experiments. What did these results prove?
• List one scenario on how an authority figure can abuse obedience principles.
• List one scenario on how an individual could use these principles to defend their fellow peers.
• In a hospital, you are very likely to obey a nurse. However, if you meet her outside the hospital, for example in a shop, you are much less likely to obey. Using your knowledge of how people resist pressure to obey, explain why you are less likely to obey the nurse outside the hospital.
• Describe the shock instructions the participant (teacher) was told to follow when the victim (learner) gave an incorrect answer.
• State the lowest voltage shock that was labeled on the shock generator.
• What would likely happen if Milgram’s experiment included a condition in which the participant (teacher) had to give a high-level electric shock for the first wrong answer?

Group Activity

Gather in groups of three or four to discuss answers to the short answer questions above.

For question 2, review the different scenarios you each came up with. Then brainstorm on how these situations could be flipped.

For question 2, discuss how an authority figure could instead empower those below them in the examples your groupmates provide.

For question 3, discuss how a peer could do harm by using the obedience principles in the scenarios your groupmates provide.

Essay Topic

• What’s the most important lesson of Milgram’s Obedience Experiments? Fully explain and defend your answer.
• Milgram selectively edited his film of the obedience experiments to emphasize obedient behavior and minimize footage of disobedience. What are the ethical implications of a researcher selectively presenting findings in a way that fits their expected conclusions?

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Milgram experiment

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• Open University - OpenLearn - Psychological research, obedience and ethics: 1 Milgram’s obedience study
• Social Science LibreTexts - The Milgram Experiment- The Power of Authority
• Verywell Mind - What was the Milgram Experiment?
• BCcampus Open Publishing - Ethics in Law Enforcement - The Milgram Experiment
• Nature - Modern Milgram experiment sheds light on power of authority
• SimplyPsychology - Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment: Summary, Results, & Ethics
• University of California - College of Natural Resources - Milgrams Experiment on Obedience to Authority

Milgram experiment , controversial series of experiments examining obedience to authority conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram . In the experiment, an authority figure, the conductor of the experiment, would instruct a volunteer participant, labeled the “teacher,” to administer painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to the “learner,” who was actually an actor. Although the shocks were faked, the experiments are widely considered unethical today due to the lack of proper disclosure, informed consent, and subsequent debriefing related to the deception and trauma experienced by the teachers. Some of Milgram’s conclusions have been called into question. Nevertheless, the experiments and their results have been widely cited for their insight into how average people respond to authority.

Milgram conducted his experiments as an assistant professor at Yale University in the early 1960s. In 1961 he began to recruit men from New Haven , Connecticut , for participation in a study he claimed would be focused on memory and learning . The recruits were paid $4.50 at the beginning of the study and were generally between the ages of 20 and 50 and from a variety of employment backgrounds. When they volunteered, they were told that the experiment would test the effect of punishment on learning ability. In truth, the volunteers were the subjects of an experiment on obedience to authority. In all, about 780 people, only about 40 of them women, participated in the experiments, and Milgram published his results in 1963.

Volunteers were told that they would be randomly assigned either a “teacher” or “learner” role, with each teacher administering electric shocks to a learner in another room if the learner failed to answer questions correctly. In actuality, the random draw was fixed so that all the volunteer participants were assigned to the teacher role and the actors were assigned to the learner role. The teachers were then instructed in the electroshock “punishment” they would be administering, with 30 shock levels ranging from 15 to 450 volts. The different shock levels were labeled with descriptions of their effects, such as “Slight Shock,” “Intense Shock,” and “Danger: Severe Shock,” with the final label a grim “XXX.” Each teacher was given a 45-volt shock themselves so that they would better understand the punishment they believed the learner would be receiving. Teachers were then given a series of questions for the learner to answer, with each incorrect answer generally earning the learner a progressively stronger shock. The actor portraying the learner, who was seated out of sight of the teacher, had pre-recorded responses to these shocks that ranged from grunts of pain to screaming and pleading, claims of suffering a heart condition, and eventually dead silence. The experimenter, acting as an authority figure, would encourage the teachers to continue administering shocks, telling them with scripted responses that the experiment must continue despite the reactions of the learner. The infamous result of these experiments was that a disturbingly high number of the teachers were willing to proceed to the maximum voltage level, despite the pleas of the learner and the supposed danger of proceeding.

Milgram’s interest in the subject of authority, and his dark view of the results of his experiments, were deeply informed by his Jewish identity and the context of the Holocaust , which had occurred only a few years before. He had expected that Americans, known for their individualism , would differ from Germans in their willingness to obey authority when it might lead to harming others. Milgram and his students had predicted only 1–3% of participants would administer the maximum shock level. However, in his first official study, 26 of 40 male participants (65%) were convinced to do so and nearly 80% of teachers that continued to administer shocks after 150 volts—the point at which the learner was heard to scream—continued to the maximum of 450 volts. Teachers displayed a range of negative emotional responses to the experiment even as they continued to obey, sometimes pleading with the experimenters to stop the experiment while still participating in it. One teacher believed that he had killed the learner and was moved to tears when he eventually found out that he had not.

Milgram included several variants on the original design of the experiment. In one, the teachers were allowed to select their own voltage levels. In this case, only about 2.5% of participants used the maximum shock level, indicating that they were not inclined to do so without the prompting of an authority figure. In another, there were three teachers, two of whom were not test subjects, but instead had been instructed to protest against the shocks. The existence of peers protesting the experiment made the volunteer teachers less likely to obey. Teachers were also less likely to obey in a variant where they could see the learner and were forced to interact with him.

The Milgram experiment has been highly controversial, both for the ethics of its design and for the reliability of its results and conclusions. It is commonly accepted that the ethics of the experiment would be rejected by mainstream science today, due not only to the handling of the deception involved but also to the extreme stress placed on the teachers, who often reacted emotionally to the experiment and were not debriefed . Some teachers were actually left believing they had genuinely and repeatedly shocked a learner before having the truth revealed to them later. Later researchers examining Milgram’s data also found that the experimenters conducting the tests had sometimes gone off-script in their attempts to coerce the teachers into continuing, and noted that some teachers guessed that they were the subjects of the experiment. However, attempts to validate Milgram’s findings in more ethical ways have often produced similar results.

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Understanding the Milgram Experiment in Psychology

A closer look at Milgram's controversial studies of obedience

Isabelle Adam (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) via Flickr

Factors That Influence Obedience

• Ethical Concerns
• Replications

How far do you think people would go to obey an authority figure? Would they refuse to obey if the order went against their values or social expectations? Those questions were at the heart of an infamous and controversial study known as the Milgram obedience experiments.

Yale University  psychologist   Stanley Milgram  conducted these experiments during the 1960s. They explored the effects of authority on obedience. In the experiments, an authority figure ordered participants to deliver what they believed were dangerous electrical shocks to another person. These results suggested that people are highly influenced by authority and highly obedient . More recent investigations cast doubt on some of the implications of Milgram's findings and even the results and procedures themselves. Despite its problems, the study has, without question, made a significant impact on psychology .

At a Glance

Milgram's experiments posed the question: Would people obey orders, even if they believed doing so would harm another person? Milgram's findings suggested the answer was yes, they would. The experiments have long been controversial, both because of the startling findings and the ethical problems with the research. More recently, experts have re-examined the studies, suggesting that participants were often coerced into obeying and that at least some participants recognized that the other person was just pretending to be shocked. Such findings call into question the study's validity and authenticity, but some replications suggest that people are surprisingly prone to obeying authority.

History of the Milgram Experiments

Milgram started his experiments in 1961, shortly after the trial of the World War II criminal Adolf Eichmann had begun. Eichmann’s defense that he was merely following instructions when he ordered the deaths of millions of Jews roused Milgram’s interest.

In his 1974 book "Obedience to Authority," Milgram posed the question, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

Procedure in the Milgram Experiment

The participants in the most famous variation of the Milgram experiment were 40 men recruited using newspaper ads. In exchange for their participation, each person was paid $4.50.

Milgram developed an intimidating shock generator, with shock levels starting at 15 volts and increasing in 15-volt increments all the way up to 450 volts. The many switches were labeled with terms including "slight shock," "moderate shock," and "danger: severe shock." The final three switches were labeled simply with an ominous "XXX."

Each participant took the role of a "teacher" who would then deliver a shock to the "student" in a neighboring room whenever an incorrect answer was given. While participants believed that they were delivering real shocks to the student, the “student” was a confederate in the experiment who was only pretending to be shocked.

As the experiment progressed, the participant would hear the learner plead to be released or even complain about a heart condition. Once they reached the 300-volt level, the learner would bang on the wall and demand to be released.

Beyond this point, the learner became completely silent and refused to answer any more questions. The experimenter then instructed the participant to treat this silence as an incorrect response and deliver a further shock.

Most participants asked the experimenter whether they should continue. The experimenter then responded with a series of commands to prod the participant along:

• "Please continue."
• "The experiment requires that you continue."
• "It is absolutely essential that you continue."
• "You have no other choice; you must go on."

Results of the Milgram Experiment

In the Milgram experiment, obedience was measured by the level of shock that the participant was willing to deliver. While many of the subjects became extremely agitated, distraught, and angry at the experimenter, they nevertheless continued to follow orders all the way to the end.

Milgram's results showed that 65% of the participants in the study delivered the maximum shocks. Of the 40 participants in the study, 26 delivered the maximum shocks, while 14 stopped before reaching the highest levels.

Why did so many of the participants in this experiment perform a seemingly brutal act when instructed by an authority figure? According to Milgram, there are some situational factors that can explain such high levels of obedience:

• The physical presence of an authority figure dramatically increased compliance .
• The fact that Yale (a trusted and authoritative academic institution) sponsored the study led many participants to believe that the experiment must be safe.
• The selection of teacher and learner status seemed random.
• Participants assumed that the experimenter was a competent expert.
• The shocks were said to be painful, not dangerous.

Later experiments conducted by Milgram indicated that the presence of rebellious peers dramatically reduced obedience levels. When other people refused to go along with the experimenter's orders, 36 out of 40 participants refused to deliver the maximum shocks.

More recent work by researchers suggests that while people do tend to obey authority figures, the process is not necessarily as cut-and-dried as Milgram depicted it.

In a 2012 essay published in PLoS Biology , researchers suggested that the degree to which people are willing to obey the questionable orders of an authority figure depends largely on two key factors:

• How much the individual agrees with the orders
• How much they identify with the person giving the orders

While it is clear that people are often far more susceptible to influence, persuasion , and obedience than they would often like to be, they are far from mindless machines just taking orders. 

Another study that analyzed Milgram's results concluded that eight factors influenced the likelihood that people would progress up to the 450-volt shock:

• The experimenter's directiveness
• Legitimacy and consistency
• Group pressure to disobey
• Indirectness of proximity
• Intimacy of the relation between the teacher and learner
• Distance between the teacher and learner

Ethical Concerns in the Milgram Experiment

Milgram's experiments have long been the source of considerable criticism and controversy. From the get-go, the ethics of his experiments were highly dubious. Participants were subjected to significant psychological and emotional distress.

Some of the major ethical issues in the experiment were related to:

• The use of deception
• The lack of protection for the participants who were involved
• Pressure from the experimenter to continue even after asking to stop, interfering with participants' right to withdraw

Due to concerns about the amount of anxiety experienced by many of the participants, everyone was supposedly debriefed at the end of the experiment. The researchers reported that they explained the procedures and the use of deception.

Critics of the study have argued that many of the participants were still confused about the exact nature of the experiment, and recent findings suggest that many participants were not debriefed at all.

Replications of the Milgram Experiment

While Milgram’s research raised serious ethical questions about the use of human subjects in psychology experiments , his results have also been consistently replicated in further experiments. One review further research on obedience and found that Milgram’s findings hold true in other experiments. In one study, researchers conducted a study designed to replicate Milgram's classic obedience experiment. The researchers made several alterations to Milgram's experiment.

• The maximum shock level was 150 volts as opposed to the original 450 volts.
• Participants were also carefully screened to eliminate those who might experience adverse reactions to the experiment.

The results of the new experiment revealed that participants obeyed at roughly the same rate that they did when Milgram conducted his original study more than 40 years ago.

Some psychologists suggested that in spite of the changes made in the replication, the study still had merit and could be used to further explore some of the situational factors that also influenced the results of Milgram's study. But other psychologists suggested that the replication was too dissimilar to Milgram's original study to draw any meaningful comparisons.

One study examined people's beliefs about how they would do compared to the participants in Milgram's experiments. They found that most people believed they would stop sooner than the average participants. These findings applied to both those who had never heard of Milgram's experiments and those who were familiar with them. In fact, those who knew about Milgram's experiments actually believed that they would stop even sooner than other people.

Another novel replication involved recruiting participants in pairs and having them take turns acting as either an 'agent' or 'victim.' Agents then received orders to shock the victim. The results suggest that only around 3.3% disobeyed the experimenter's orders.

Recent Criticisms and New Findings

Psychologist Gina Perry suggests that much of what we think we know about Milgram's famous experiments is only part of the story. While researching an article on the topic, she stumbled across hundreds of audiotapes found in Yale archives that documented numerous variations of Milgram's shock experiments.

Participants Were Often Coerced

While Milgram's reports of his process report methodical and uniform procedures, the audiotapes reveal something different. During the experimental sessions, the experimenters often went off-script and coerced the subjects into continuing the shocks.

"The slavish obedience to authority we have come to associate with Milgram’s experiments comes to sound much more like bullying and coercion when you listen to these recordings," Perry suggested in an article for Discover Magazine .

Few Participants Were Really Debriefed

Milgram suggested that the subjects were "de-hoaxed" after the experiments. He claimed he later surveyed the participants and found that 84% were glad to have participated, while only 1% regretted their involvement.

However, Perry's findings revealed that of the 700 or so people who took part in different variations of his studies between 1961 and 1962, very few were truly debriefed.

A true debriefing would have involved explaining that the shocks weren't real and that the other person was not injured. Instead, Milgram's sessions were mainly focused on calming the subjects down before sending them on their way.

Many participants left the experiment in a state of considerable distress. While the truth was revealed to some months or even years later, many were simply never told a thing.

Variations Led to Differing Results

Another problem is that the version of the study presented by Milgram and the one that's most often retold does not tell the whole story. The statistic that 65% of people obeyed orders applied only to one variation of the experiment, in which 26 out of 40 subjects obeyed.

In other variations, far fewer people were willing to follow the experimenters' orders, and in some versions of the study, not a single participant obeyed.

Participants Guessed the Learner Was Faking

Perry even tracked down some of the people who took part in the experiments, as well as Milgram's research assistants. What she discovered is that many of his subjects had deduced what Milgram's intent was and knew that the "learner" was merely pretending.

Such findings cast Milgram's results in a new light. It suggests that not only did Milgram intentionally engage in some hefty misdirection to obtain the results he wanted but that many of his participants were simply playing along.

An analysis of an unpublished study by Milgram's assistant, Taketo Murata, found that participants who believed they were really delivering a shock were less likely to obey, while those who did not believe they were actually inflicting pain were more willing to obey. In other words, the perception of pain increased defiance, while skepticism of pain increased obedience.

A review of Milgram's research materials suggests that the experiments exerted more pressure to obey than the original results suggested. Other variations of the experiment revealed much lower rates of obedience, and many of the participants actually altered their behavior when they guessed the true nature of the experiment.

Impact of the Milgram Experiment

Since there is no way to truly replicate the experiment due to its serious ethical and moral problems, determining whether Milgram's experiment really tells us anything about the power of obedience is impossible to determine.

So why does Milgram's experiment maintain such a powerful hold on our imaginations, even decades after the fact? Perry believes that despite all its ethical issues and the problem of never truly being able to replicate Milgram's procedures, the study has taken on the role of what she calls a "powerful parable."

Milgram's work might not hold the answers to what makes people obey or even the degree to which they truly obey. It has, however, inspired other researchers to explore what makes people follow orders and, perhaps more importantly, what leads them to question authority.

Recent findings undermine the scientific validity of the study. Milgram's work is also not truly replicable due to its ethical problems. However, the study has led to additional research on how situational factors can affect obedience to authority.

Milgram’s experiment has become a classic in psychology , demonstrating the dangers of obedience. The research suggests that situational variables have a stronger sway than personality factors in determining whether people will obey an authority figure. However, other psychologists argue that both external and internal factors heavily influence obedience, such as personal beliefs and overall temperament.

Milgram S.  Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.  Harper & Row.

Russell N, Gregory R. The Milgram-Holocaust linkage: challenging the present consensus . State Crim J. 2015;4(2):128-153.

Russell NJC. Milgram's obedience to authority experiments: origins and early evolution . Br J Soc Psychol . 2011;50:140-162. doi:10.1348/014466610X492205

Haslam SA, Reicher SD. Contesting the "nature" of conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo's studies really show . PLoS Biol. 2012;10(11):e1001426. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001426

Milgram S. Liberating effects of group pressure . J Person Soc Psychol. 1965;1(2):127-234. doi:10.1037/h0021650

Haslam N, Loughnan S, Perry G. Meta-Milgram: an empirical synthesis of the obedience experiments .  PLoS One . 2014;9(4):e93927. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0093927

Perry G. Deception and illusion in Milgram's accounts of the obedience experiments . Theory Appl Ethics . 2013;2(2):79-92.

Blass T. The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: some things we now know about obedience to authority . J Appl Soc Psychol. 1999;29(5):955-978. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.1999.tb00134.x

Burger J. Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? . Am Psychol . 2009;64(1):1-11. doi:10.1037/a0010932

Elms AC. Obedience lite . American Psychologist . 2009;64(1):32-36. doi:10.1037/a0014473

Miller AG. Reflections on “replicating Milgram” (Burger, 2009) . American Psychologist . 2009;64(1):20-27. doi:10.1037/a0014407

Grzyb T, Dolinski D. Beliefs about obedience levels in studies conducted within the Milgram paradigm: Better than average effect and comparisons of typical behaviors by residents of various nations .  Front Psychol . 2017;8:1632. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01632

Caspar EA. A novel experimental approach to study disobedience to authority .  Sci Rep . 2021;11(1):22927. doi:10.1038/s41598-021-02334-8

Haslam SA, Reicher SD, Millard K, McDonald R. ‘Happy to have been of service’: The Yale archive as a window into the engaged followership of participants in Milgram’s ‘obedience’ experiments . Br J Soc Psychol . 2015;54:55-83. doi:10.1111/bjso.12074

Perry G, Brannigan A, Wanner RA, Stam H. Credibility and incredulity in Milgram’s obedience experiments: A reanalysis of an unpublished test . Soc Psychol Q . 2020;83(1):88-106. doi:10.1177/0190272519861952

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

More From Forbes

Election 2016: the milgram experiment revisited.

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Adolf Eichmann’s trial for Nazi war crimes captivated the world in 1961. Coolly, and without regret, Eichmann acknowledged the horrors he had committed, defending them as the acts of an obedient patriot. Watching coverage of the trial, psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to understand how this could happen. Was Eichmann an aberration, some form of moral monster? Was there a cultural trait specific to Germans that influenced his actions? Or did Eichmann represent a dark, universal reality lurking behind our apparent civility. Milgram was looking for a scientific answer to a political question that haunts every student of the Holocaust – could it happen here?

Milgram decided to explore the relative strength of our moral center with a test of empathy. He devised an experiment to determine whether healthy, well-socialized people could be persuaded to commit acts of inhumanity under the influence an authority figure. His results proved haunting, both to the scientific community and to many of his test subjects.

This election amounts to a mass rerun of Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience and morality, with all of us as test subjects. Results, so far, have been a sobering confirmation of Milgram’s conclusions and a stark warning for the future.

To test his theory, Milgram designed a scenario made to look like a memory test. A volunteer was asked to act as a teacher who would administer a quiz to a learner. An experimenter instructed the teacher to administer an escalating series of electric shocks to the learner upon incorrect answers. The learner was positioned behind glass and apparently connected to electrodes.

Both the experimenter and the learner were researchers who understood the experiment and were cooperating. The learner was not actually being shocked, but would display signs of severe pain and physical damage as the apparent shocks grew more powerful.

Details of the experiment and its findings merit deeper review than is possible here . To Milgram’s surprise and horror, 65% of the subjects in his original experiment complied fully with the experimenter’s orders, administering the maximum shock to the learner despite the learner’s apparent suffering. Along the way, many of the test subjects displayed considerable distress, including sweating and stuttering. A few even developed seizures. Yet the majority continued to obey.

In the years that followed Milgram continued his experiments with several variations, further demonstrating his disturbing thesis. He wrote a book in 1974 outlining his conclusions. From his book:

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Placed in a setting in which social norms conflict with basic human empathy, those norms will generally predict individual behavior. Election 2016 has developed into a repeat of Milgram’s experiment. We have a chance, at least within the ranks of the GOP, to see Milgram’s findings play out in life.

For a committed Republican with a lifelong investment in the party, refusing to support the party’s Presidential nominee is an almost unthinkable breach of social norms. However, Donald Trump is no conventional party nominee. Outside the tribal socialization of the Republican Party in the United States, almost no one views Donald Trump as a remotely credible leadership figure. Beyond that partisan social structure, Trump is universally recognized as a demagogue who not only threatens American democracy, but the global security order protecting the free world.

He is a self-described sexual predator with a legendary propensity to lie, who has promised restrictive measures on a wide range of ethnic and religious minorities. Beyond threatening to jail political opponents, intimidate the press, and unleash a wave of recrimination against minority groups, he offers no coherent policy program whatsoever. Trump has enjoyed the open endorsement and organizational support of the KKK and the American Nazi Party . He is the nearest thing to a Nazi that could possibly rise to power from an American social context.

His opponent is, by any detached observation, a well-qualified and thoroughly ordinary political figure, with a common and unremarkable package of strengths and weaknesses. In posture and policy Hillary Clinton has more in common with traditional Republicans like Mitt Romney, John McCain or Paul Ryan than with Donald Trump.

Trump is an unprecedented and utterly indefensible political outlier. Despite having captured the Republican nomination with the smallest primary margin of any modern candidate, he now carries an imprimatur of legitimacy. As a major party nominee, Donald Trump offers as pure a test of Milgram’s hypotheses as one could hope to capture in the wild.

Would you be willing to torture a test subject for no reason beyond the request of an apparent authority figure? Would you be willing to hand power to a dangerous demagogue who has promised to persecute minority groups simply to maintain compliance with a party identity or tribal norm? Milgram’s work suggests we should expect only about two-thirds of Republicans to comply with partisan pressures and support an outrageously unqualified and dangerous nominee. Current polling suggests that Milgram’s results may have been too optimistic. An overwhelming majority of Republicans will press a button to unleash mayhem on racial minorities just as willingly as Milgram’s subjects turned a dial to electrocute a test subject.

An important caveat is embedded in the Milgram experiments, one that sheds a harsh light on the choices of Republican leaders and emphasizes the importance of community in our politics. When Milgram modified his experiment slightly he obtained different results. When participants were tested in groups and some refused to comply, overall participant compliance rates dropped to 10%.

If men like Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and John McCain had shown the courage to openly resist Donald Trump, they might have changed the future of the Republican Party and the country. Instead they hedged, waffled, and ultimately complied. Paul Ryan even went so far as to stand on stage at the Republican National Convention to orchestrate Trump’s nomination, crushing an effort by delegates to resist. These leaders played a special role in normalizing both Donald Trump and the toxic white nationalism of his more enthusiastic followers.

Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, Maine Senator Susan Collins, and Ohio Governor John Kasich deserve special mention for their courage in speaking out unambiguously against Trump. However, in the end, very few nationally prominent Republicans held their ground. By choosing the safety of collaboration rather than taking a stand as dissidents, they reinforced a sense of Trump’s power and legitimacy that brought millions of otherwise nervous Republicans into collaboration.

Democrats will be tempted to congratulate themselves on the results of this experiment, but that would be a mistake. This election has not tested Democrats’ susceptibility to Milgram’s thesis. They faced no pressure from authorities or peers to support Trump. While there are reasons to argue that the relative diversity of Democratic politics might insulate them from Milgram’s thesis, this election provides no proof.

Ironically, this re-run of Milgram’s experiment reminds us of the relevance of traditional conservative political philosophy. Milgram discovered that social institutions and cultural forces, like the influence of responsible leaders, play a far more powerful role in individual choices than we generally expect. Milgram’s test subjects were not bad people. They were ordinary people placed inside a broken scenario. Donald Trump, placed in the context of Milgram’s observations, is more than a test of his followers’ character. He acts as a warning about the declining health of our social capital institutions.

While liberals emphasize the importance of individual choices and the improvability of human beings, conservatives since the time of Edmund Burke have stressed the importance of community, tradition, and prudence as a check on radical excesses. Healthy institutions built on networks of community engagement are our buffer against demagogues.

In America, a dense network of open, voluntary social institutions has always acted as a break on runaway extremes. Under pressure from global capitalism, technology, and accelerating social change, those institutions are fraying. Milgram’s work demonstrated that people will comply with social norms even when those norms conflict with their conscience. Where social institutions have grown weak or corrupt, we are left to bet our future on the fragile willingness of isolated individuals to reject terrible ideas.

In my book, The Politics of Crazy: How American Lost Its Mind And What We Can Do About It , I argue that this decline in the power and influence of social capital institutions explains the rise of “crazy” in our political system. Milgram’s experiment reinforces this notion. His test subjects were responding to what they perceived as appropriate social behavior, influenced by what should have been a credible authority figure. Republicans voting for Trump are, in large part, doing the same thing.

Weakness in our network of social capital institutions lowers the barriers protecting major organizations, like political parties, from the influence of extremists. Once these organizations are subverted by demagogues, individuals are left with fewer, weaker channels through which to limit the reach of these dangerous characters. Our rising individualism threatens to create a cycle of dangerous unintended consequences, leaving us isolated and politically fragile.

When we look at terrible events through the detachment of history or cultural distance, it is easy to imagine that we, placed in that context, would have resisted. History’s Adolf Eichmanns and Bull Connors appear as monstrous anomalies, outliers swimming against a tide of human progress. We seldom recognize the power of social forces in shaping individual behavior.

Milgram’s research offers a caution. Trump may lose this year, but absent the moderating, mediating influence of healthy community and political institutions, America’s future could be at the mercy of a few voters’ bad moods in a low-turnout election. Our participation in healthy social institutions is a critical breakwater against disaster. As that involvement declines, those institutions can themselves become avenues of extremism.

The more isolated we are from community, the greater the threat of a future Trump. Milgram’s experiments demonstrate that it can happen here.

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In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale, conducted a series of experiments that became famous. Unsuspecting Americans were recruited for what purportedly was an experiment in learning. A man who pretended to be a recruit himself was wired up to a phony machine that supposedly administered shocks. He was the "learner." In some versions of the experiment he was in an adjoining room.

The unsuspecting subject of the experiment, the "teacher," read lists of words that tested the learner's memory. Each time the learner got one wrong, which he intentionally did, the teacher was instructed by a man in a white lab coat to deliver a shock. With each wrong answer the voltage went up. From the other room came recorded and convincing protests from the learner — even though no shock was actually being administered.

The results of Milgram's experiment made news and contributed a dismaying piece of wisdom to the public at large: It was reported that almost two-thirds of the subjects were capable of delivering painful, possibly lethal shocks, if told to do so. We are as obedient as Nazi functionaries.

Or are we? Gina Perry, a psychologist from Australia, has written Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments . She has been retracing Milgram's steps, interviewing his subjects decades later.

"The thought of quitting never ... occurred to me," study participant Bill Menold told Perry in an Australian radio documentary . "Just to say: 'You know what? I'm walking out of here' — which I could have done. It was like being in a situation that you never thought you would be in, not really being able to think clearly."

In his experiments, Milgram was "looking to investigate what it was that had contributed to the brainwashing of American prisoners of war by the Chinese [in the Korean war]," Perry tells NPR's Robert Siegel.

Interview Highlights

On turning from an admirer of Milgram to a critic

"That was an unexpected outcome for me, really. I regarded Stanley Milgram as a misunderstood genius who'd been penalized in some ways for revealing something troubling and profound about human nature. By the end of my research I actually had quite a very different view of the man and the research."

Watch A Video Of One Of The Milgram Obedience Experiments

On the many variations of the experiment

"Over 700 people took part in the experiments. When the news of the experiment was first reported, and the shocking statistic that 65 percent of people went to maximum voltage on the shock machine was reported, very few people, I think, realized then and even realize today that that statistic applied to 26 of 40 people. Of those other 700-odd people, obedience rates varied enormously. In fact, there were variations of the experiment where no one obeyed."

On how Milgram's study coincided with the trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann — and how the experiment reinforced what Hannah Arendt described as "the banality of evil"

"The Eichmann trial was a televised trial and it did reintroduce the whole idea of the Holocaust to a new American public. And Milgram very much, I think, believed that Hannah Arendt's view of Eichmann as a cog in a bureaucratic machine was something that was just as applicable to Americans in New Haven as it was to people in Germany."

On the ethics of working with human subjects

"Certainly for people in academia and scholars the ethical issues involved in Milgram's experiment have always been a hot issue. They were from the very beginning. And Milgram's experiment really ignited a debate particularly in social sciences about what was acceptable to put human subjects through."

Gina Perry is an Australian psychologist. She has previously written for The Age and The Australian. Chris Beck/Courtesy of The New Press hide caption

Gina Perry is an Australian psychologist. She has previously written for The Age and The Australian.

On conversations with the subjects, decades after the experiment

"[Bill Menold] doesn't sound resentful. I'd say he sounds thoughtful and he has reflected a lot on the experiment and the impact that it's had on him and what it meant at the time. I did interview someone else who had been disobedient in the experiment but still very much resented 50 years later that he'd never been de-hoaxed at the time and he found that really unacceptable."

On the problem that one of social psychology's most famous findings cannot be replicated

"I think it leaves social psychology in a difficult situation. ... it is such an iconic experiment. And I think it really leads to the question of why it is that we continue to refer to and believe in Milgram's results. I think the reason that Milgram's experiment is still so famous today is because in a way it's like a powerful parable. It's so widely known and so often quoted that it's taken on a life of its own. ... This experiment and this story about ourselves plays some role for us 50 years later."

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Social Psychology

Conformity and Obedience

Learning objectives.

• Describe the results of research on conformity, and distinguish between normative and informational social influence.
• Describe Stanley Milgram’s experiment and its implications

Solomon Asch conducted several experiments in the 1950s to determine how people are affected by the thoughts and behaviors of other people. In one study, a group of participants was shown a series of printed line segments of different lengths: a, b, and c (Figure 1). Participants were then shown a fourth line segment: x. They were asked to identify which line segment from the first group (a, b, or c) most closely resembled the fourth line segment in length.

Each group of participants had only one true, naïve subject. The remaining members of the group were confederates of the researcher. A confederate is a person who is aware of the experiment and works for the researcher. Confederates are used to manipulate social situations as part of the research design, and the true, naïve participants believe that confederates are, like them, uninformed participants in the experiment. In Asch’s study, the confederates identified a line segment that was obviously shorter than the target line—a wrong answer. The naïve participant then had to identify aloud the line segment that best matched the target line segment.

How often do you think the true participant aligned with the confederates’ response? That is, how often do you think the group influenced the participant, and the participant gave the wrong answer? Asch (1955) found that 76% of participants conformed to group pressure at least once by indicating the incorrect line. Conformity is the change in a person’s behavior to go along with the group, even if he does not agree with the group. Why would people give the wrong answer? What factors would increase or decrease someone giving in or conforming to group pressure?

The Asch effect is the influence of the group majority on an individual’s judgment.

What factors make a person more likely to yield to group pressure? Research shows that the size of the majority, the presence of another dissenter, and the public or relatively private nature of responses are key influences on conformity.

• The size of the majority: The greater the number of people in the majority, the more likely an individual will conform. There is, however, an upper limit: a point where adding more members does not increase conformity. In Asch’s study, conformity increased with the number of people in the majority—up to seven individuals. At numbers beyond seven, conformity leveled off and decreased slightly (Asch, 1955).
• The presence of another dissenter: If there is at least one dissenter, conformity rates drop to near zero (Asch, 1955).
• The public or private nature of the responses: When responses are made publicly (in front of others), conformity is more likely; however, when responses are made privately (e.g., writing down the response), conformity is less likely (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955).

The finding that conformity is more likely to occur when responses are public than when they are private is the reason government elections require voting in secret, so we are not coerced by others (Figure 2). The Asch effect can be easily seen in children when they have to publicly vote for something. For example, if the teacher asks whether the children would rather have extra recess, no homework, or candy, once a few children vote, the rest will comply and go with the majority. In a different classroom, the majority might vote differently, and most of the children would comply with that majority. When someone’s vote changes if it is made in public versus private, this is known as compliance. Compliance can be a form of conformity. Compliance is going along with a request or demand, even if you do not agree with the request. In Asch’s studies, the participants complied by giving the wrong answers, but privately did not accept that the obvious wrong answers were correct.

Now that you have learned about the Asch line experiments, why do you think the participants conformed? The correct answer to the line segment question was obvious, and it was an easy task. Researchers have categorized the motivation to conform into two types: normative social influence and informational social influence (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955).

In normative social influence , people conform to the group norm to fit in, to feel good, and to be accepted by the group. However, with informational social influence , people conform because they believe the group is competent and has the correct information, particularly when the task or situation is ambiguous. What type of social influence was operating in the Asch conformity studies? Since the line judgment task was unambiguous, participants did not need to rely on the group for information. Instead, participants complied to fit in and avoid ridicule, an instance of normative social influence.

An example of informational social influence may be what to do in an emergency situation. Imagine that you are in a movie theater watching a film and what seems to be smoke comes in the theater from under the emergency exit door. You are not certain that it is smoke—it might be a special effect for the movie, such as a fog machine. When you are uncertain you will tend to look at the behavior of others in the theater. If other people show concern and get up to leave, you are likely to do the same. However, if others seem unconcerned, you are likely to stay put and continue watching the movie (Figure 3).

How would you have behaved if you were a participant in Asch’s study? Many students say they would not conform, that the study is outdated, and that people nowadays are more independent. To some extent this may be true. Research suggests that overall rates of conformity may have reduced since the time of Asch’s research. Furthermore, efforts to replicate Asch’s study have made it clear that many factors determine how likely it is that someone will demonstrate conformity to the group. These factors include the participant’s age, gender, and socio-cultural background (Bond & Smith, 1996; Larsen, 1990; Walker & Andrade, 1996).

You can view the transcript for “The Asch Experiment” here (opens in new window) .

Stanley Milgram’s Experiment

Conformity is one effect of the influence of others on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Another form of social influence is obedience to authority. Obedience is the change of an individual’s behavior to comply with a demand by an authority figure. People often comply with the request because they are concerned about a consequence if they do not comply. To demonstrate this phenomenon, we review another classic social psychology experiment.

Stanley Milgram was a social psychology professor at Yale who was influenced by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal. Eichmann’s defense for the atrocities he committed was that he was “just following orders.” Milgram (1963) wanted to test the validity of this defense, so he designed an experiment and initially recruited 40 men for his experiment. The volunteer participants were led to believe that they were participating in a study to improve learning and memory. The participants were told that they were to teach other students (learners) correct answers to a series of test items. The participants were shown how to use a device that they were told delivered electric shocks of different intensities to the learners. The participants were told to shock the learners if they gave a wrong answer to a test item—that the shock would help them to learn. The participants gave (or believed they gave) the learners shocks, which increased in 15-volt increments, all the way up to 450 volts. The participants did not know that the learners were confederates and that the confederates did not actually receive shocks.

In response to a string of incorrect answers from the learners, the participants obediently and repeatedly shocked them. The confederate learners cried out for help, begged the participant teachers to stop, and even complained of heart trouble. Yet, when the researcher told the participant-teachers to continue the shock, 65% of the participants continued the shock to the maximum voltage and to the point that the learner became unresponsive (Figure 4). What makes someone obey authority to the point of potentially causing serious harm to another person?

Several variations of the original Milgram experiment were conducted to test the boundaries of obedience. When certain features of the situation were changed, participants were less likely to continue to deliver shocks (Milgram, 1965). For example, when the setting of the experiment was moved to an office building, the percentage of participants who delivered the highest shock dropped to 48%. When the learner was in the same room as the teacher, the highest shock rate dropped to 40%. When the teachers’ and learners’ hands were touching, the highest shock rate dropped to 30%. When the researcher gave the orders by phone, the rate dropped to 23%. These variations show that when the humanity of the person being shocked was increased, obedience decreased. Similarly, when the authority of the experimenter decreased, so did obedience.

This case is still very applicable today. What does a person do if an authority figure orders something done? What if the person believes it is incorrect, or worse, unethical? In a study by Martin and Bull (2008), midwives privately filled out a questionnaire regarding best practices and expectations in delivering a baby. Then, a more senior midwife and supervisor asked the junior midwives to do something they had previously stated they were opposed to. Most of the junior midwives were obedient to authority, going against their own beliefs.

Link to learning

Watch a modern example of the Milgram experiment here .

• Conduct a conformity study the next time you are in an elevator. After you enter the elevator, stand with your back toward the door. See if others conform to your behavior. Did your results turn out as expected?
• Most students adamantly state that they would never have turned up the voltage in the Milgram experiment. Do you think you would have refused to shock the learner? Looking at your own past behavior, what evidence suggests that you would go along with the order to increase the voltage?

CC licensed content, Shared previously

• Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience. Authored by : OpenStax College. Located at : https://openstax.org/books/psychology-2e/pages/12-4-conformity-compliance-and-obedience . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Download for free at https://openstax.org/books/psychology-2e/pages/1-introduction

All rights reserved content

• The Asch Experiment. Authored by : Question Everything. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA-gbpt7Ts8 . License : Other . License Terms : Standard YouTube License
• abc news Primetime Milgram. Authored by : EightYellowFlowers. Located at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwqNP9HRy7Y&list=PLsjOSJm46miabqNKVfh8VrzHtKZym3lQs&index=4 . License : Other . License Terms : Standard YouTube License

person who works for a researcher and is aware of the experiment, but who acts as a participant; used to manipulate social situations as part of the research design

when individuals change their behavior to go along with the group even if they do not agree with the group

group majority influences an individual’s judgment, even when that judgment is inaccurate

change of behavior to please an authority figure or to avoid aversive consequences

General Psychology Copyright © by OpenStax and Lumen Learning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Taking A Closer Look At Milgram's Shocking Obedience Study

In the early 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a controversial study in which participants were led to believe they were administering...

In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale, conducted a series of experiments that became famous. Unsuspecting Americans were recruited for what purportedly was an experiment in learning. A man who pretended to be a recruit himself was wired up to a phony machine that supposedly administered shocks. He was the "learner." In some versions of the experiment he was in an adjoining room.

The unsuspecting subject of the experiment, the "teacher," read lists of words that tested the learner's memory. Each time the learner got one wrong, which he intentionally did, the teacher was instructed by a man in a white lab coat to deliver a shock. With each wrong answer the voltage went up. From the other room came recorded and convincing protests from the learner — even though no shock was actually being administered.

The results of Milgram's experiment made news and contributed a dismaying piece of wisdom to the public at large: It was reported that almost two-thirds of the subjects were capable of delivering painful, possibly lethal shocks, if told to do so. We are as obedient as Nazi functionaries.

Or are we? Gina Perry, a psychologist from Australia, has written Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments . She has been retracing Milgram's steps, interviewing his subjects decades later.

"The thought of quitting never ... occurred to me," study participant Bill Menold told Perry in an Australian radio documentary . "Just to say: 'You know what? I'm walking out of here' — which I could have done. It was like being in a situation that you never thought you would be in, not really being able to think clearly."

In his experiments, Milgram was "looking to investigate what it was that had contributed to the brainwashing of American prisoners of war by the Chinese [in the Korean war]," Perry tells NPR's Robert Siegel.

Interview Highlights

On turning from an admirer of Milgram to a critic

"That was an unexpected outcome for me, really. I regarded Stanley Milgram as a misunderstood genius who'd been penalized in some ways for revealing something troubling and profound about human nature. By the end of my research I actually had quite a very different view of the man and the research."

On the many variations of the experiment

"Over 700 people took part in the experiments. When the news of the experiment was first reported, and the shocking statistic that 65 percent of people went to maximum voltage on the shock machine was reported, very few people, I think, realized then and even realize today that that statistic applied to 26 of 40 people. Of those other 700-odd people, obedience rates varied enormously. In fact, there were variations of the experiment where no one obeyed."

On how Milgram's study coincided with the trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann — and how the experiment reinforced what Hannah Arendt described as "the banality of evil"

"The Eichmann trial was a televised trial and it did reintroduce the whole idea of the Holocaust to a new American public. And Milgram very much, I think, believed that Hannah Arendt's view of Eichmann as a cog in a bureaucratic machine was something that was just as applicable to Americans in New Haven as it was to people in Germany."

On the ethics of working with human subjects

"Certainly for people in academia and scholars the ethical issues involved in Milgram's experiment have always been a hot issue. They were from the very beginning. And Milgram's experiment really ignited a debate particularly in social sciences about what was acceptable to put human subjects through."

On conversations with the subjects, decades after the experiment

"[Bill Menold] doesn't sound resentful. I'd say he sounds thoughtful and he has reflected a lot on the experiment and the impact that it's had on him and what it meant at the time. I did interview someone else who had been disobedient in the experiment but still very much resented 50 years later that he'd never been de-hoaxed at the time and he found that really unacceptable."

On the problem that one of social psychology's most famous findings cannot be replicated

"I think it leaves social psychology in a difficult situation. ... it is such an iconic experiment. And I think it really leads to the question of why it is that we continue to refer to and believe in Milgram's results. I think the reason that Milgram's experiment is still so famous today is because in a way it's like a powerful parable. It's so widely known and so often quoted that it's taken on a life of its own. ... This experiment and this story about ourselves plays some role for us 50 years later."

Audio transcript

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Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority.

• Stephen Gibson Stephen Gibson Heriot-Watt University, School of Social Sciences
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.511
• Published online: 30 June 2020

Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority are among the most influential and controversial social scientific studies ever conducted. They remain staples of introductory psychology courses and textbooks, yet their influence reaches far beyond psychology, with myriad other disciplines finding lessons in them. Indeed, the experiments have long since broken free of the confines of academia, occupying a place in popular culture that is unrivaled among psychological experiments. The present article begins with an overview of Milgram’s account of his experimental procedure and findings, before focussing on recent scholarship that has used materials from Milgram’s archive to challenge many of the long-held assumptions about the experiments. Three areas in which our understanding of the obedience experiments has undergone a radical shift in recent years are the subject of particular focus. First, work that has identified new ethical problems with Milgram’s studies is summarized. Second, hitherto unknown methodological variations in Milgram’s experimental procedures are considered. Third, the interactions that took place in the experimental sessions themselves are explored. This work has contributed to a shift in how we see the obedience experiments. Rather than viewing the experiments as demonstrations of people’s propensity to follow orders, it is now clear that people did not follow orders in Milgram’s experiments. The experimenter did a lot more than simply issue orders, and when he did, participants found it relatively straightforward to defy them. These arguments are discussed in relation to the definition of obedience that has typically been adopted in psychology, the need for further historical work on Milgram’s experiments, and the possibilities afforded by the development of a broader project of secondary qualitative analysis of laboratory interaction in psychology experiments.

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Rethinking One of Psychology's Most Infamous Experiments

In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram's electric-shock studies showed that people will obey even the most abhorrent of orders. But recently, researchers have begun to question his conclusions — and offer some of their own.

In 1961, Yale University psychology professor Stanley Milgram placed an advertisement in the New Haven Register . “We will pay you $4 for one hour of your time,” it read, asking for “500 New Haven men to help us complete a scientific study of memory and learning.”

Only part of that was true. Over the next two years, hundreds of people showed up at Milgram’s lab for a learning and memory study that quickly turned into something else entirely. Under the watch of the experimenter, the volunteer—dubbed “the teacher”—would read out strings of words to his partner, “the learner,” who was hooked up to an electric-shock machine in the other room. Each time the learner made a mistake in repeating the words, the teacher was to deliver a shock of increasing intensity, starting at 15 volts (labeled “slight shock” on the machine) and going all the way up to 450 volts (“Danger: severe shock”). Some people, horrified at what they were being asked to do, stopped the experiment early, defying their supervisor’s urging to go on; others continued up to 450 volts, even as the learner pled for mercy, yelled a warning about his heart condition—and then fell alarmingly silent. In the most well-known variation of the experiment, a full 65 percent of people went all the way.

Until they emerged from the lab, the participants didn’t know that the shocks weren’t real, that the cries of pain were pre-recorded, and that the learner—railroad auditor Jim McDonough —was in on the whole thing, sitting alive and unharmed in the next room. They were also unaware that they had just been used to prove the claim that would soon make Milgram famous: that ordinary people, under the direction of an authority figure, would obey just about any order they were given, even to torture. It’s a phenomenon that’s been used to explain atrocities from the Holocaust to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre to the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. “To a remarkable degree,” Peter Baker wrote in Pacific Standard in 2013, “Milgram’s early research has come to serve as a kind of all-purpose lightning rod for discussions about the human heart of darkness.”

In some ways, though, Milgram’s study is also—as promised—a study of memory, if not the one he pretended it was.

More than five decades after it was first published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963, it’s earned a place as one of the most famous experiments of the 20th century. Milgram’s research has spawned countless spinoff studies among psychologists, sociologists, and historians, even as it’s leapt from academia into the realm of pop culture. It’s inspired songs by Peter Gabriel (lyrics: “We do what we’re told/We do what we’re told/Told to do”) and Dar Williams (“When I knew it was wrong, I played it just like a game/I pressed the buzzer”); a number of books whose titles make puns out of the word “shocking”; a controversial French documentary disguised as a game show ; episodes of Law and Order and Bones ; a made-for-TV movie with William Shatner; a jewelry collection (bizarrely) from the company Enfants Perdus; and most recently, the biopic The Experimenter , starring Peter Sarsgaard as the title character—and this list is by no means exhaustive.

But as with human memory, the study—even published, archived, enshrined in psychology textbooks—is malleable. And in the past few years, a new wave of researchers have dedicated themselves to reshaping it, arguing that Milgram’s lessons on human obedience are, in fact, misremembered—that his work doesn’t prove what he claimed it does.

The problem is, no one can really agree on what it proves instead.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the experiments’ publication (or, technically, the 51st), the Journal of Social Issues released a themed edition in September 2014 dedicated to all things Milgram. “There is a compelling and timely case for reexamining Milgram’s legacy,” the editors wrote in the introduction, noting that they were in good company: In 1964, the year after the experiments were published, fewer than 10 published studies referenced Milgram’s work; in 2012, that number was more than 60.

It’s a trend that surely would have pleased Milgram, who crafted his work with an audience in mind from the beginning. “Milgram was a fantastic dramaturg. His studies are fantastic little pieces of theater. They’re beautifully scripted,” said Stephen Reicher, a professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews and a co-editor of the Journal of Social Issues ’ special edition. Capitalizing on the fame his 1963 publication earned him, Milgram went on to publish a book on his experiments in 1974 and a documentary, Obedience , with footage from the original experiments.

But for a man determined to leave a lasting legacy, Milgram also made it remarkably easy for people to pick it apart. The Yale University archives contain boxes upon boxes of papers, videos, and audio recordings, an entire career carefully documented for posterity. Though Milgram’s widow Alexandra donated the materials after his death in 1984, they remained largely untouched for years, until Yale’s library staff began to digitize all the materials in the early 2000s. Able to easily access troves of material for the first time, the researchers came flocking.

“There’s a lot of dirty laundry in those archives,” said Arthur Miller, a professor emeritus of psychology at Miami University and another co-editor of the Journal of Social Issues . “Critics of Milgram seem to want to—and do—find material in these archives that makes Milgram look bad or unethical or, in some cases, a liar.”

One of the most vocal of those critics is Australian author and psychologist Gina Perry, who documented her experience tracking down Milgram’s research participants in her 2013 book Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments . Her project began as an effort to write about the experiments from the perspective of the participants—but when she went back through the archives to confirm some of their stories, she said, she found some glaring issues with Milgram’s data. Among her accusations: that the supervisors went off script in their prods to the teachers, that some of the volunteers were aware that the setup was a hoax, and that others weren’t debriefed on the whole thing until months later. “My main issue is that methodologically, there have been so many problems with Milgram’s research that we have to start re-examining the textbook descriptions of the research,” she said.

But many psychologists argue that even with methodological holes and moral lapses, the basic finding of Milgram’s work, the rate of obedience, still holds up. Because of the ethical challenge of reproducing the study, the idea survived for decades on a mix of good faith and partial replications—one study had participants administer their shocks in a virtual-reality system, for example—until 2007, when ABC collaborated with Santa Clara University psychologist Jerry Burger to replicate Milgram’s experiment for an episode of the TV show Basic Instincts titled “ The Science of Evil ,” pegged to Abu Ghraib.

Burger’s way around an ethical breach: In the most well-known experiment, he found, 80 percent of the participants who reached a 150-volt shock continued all the way to the end. “So what I said we could do is take people up to the 150-volt point, see how they reacted, and end the study right there,” he said. The rest of the setup was nearly identical to Milgram’s lab of the early 1960s (with one notable exception: “Milgram had a gray lab coat and I couldn’t find a gray, so I got a light blue.”)

At the end of the experiment, Burger was left with an obedience rate around the same as the one Milgram had recorded—proving, he said, not only that Milgram’s numbers had been accurate, but that his work was as relevant as ever. “[The results] didn’t surprise me,” he said, “but for years I had heard from my students and from other people, ‘Well, that was back in the 60s, and somehow how we’re more aware of the problems of blind obedience, and people have changed.’”

In recent years, though, much of the attention has focused less on supporting or discrediting Milgram’s statistics, and more on rethinking his conclusions. With a paper published earlier this month in the British Journal of Social Psychology , Matthew Hollander, a sociology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, is among the most recent to question Milgram’s notion of obedience. After analyzing the conversation patterns from audio recordings of 117 study participants, Hollander found that Milgram’s original classification of his subjects—either obedient or disobedient—failed to capture the true dynamics of the situation. Rather, he argued, people in both categories tried several different forms of protest—those who successfully ended the experiment early were simply better at resisting than the ones that continued shocking.

“Research subjects may say things like ‘I can’t do this anymore’ or ‘I’m not going to do this anymore,’” he said, even those who went all the way to 450 volts. “I understand those practices to be a way of trying to stop the experiment in a relatively aggressive, direct, and explicit way.”

It’s a far cry from Milgram’s idea that the capacity for evil lies dormant in everyone, ready to be awakened with the right set of circumstances. The ability to disobey toxic orders, Hollander said, is a skill that can be taught like any other—all a person needs to learn is what to say and how to say it.

In some ways, the conclusions Milgram drew were as much a product of their time as they were a product of his research. At the time he began his studies, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major architects of the Holocaust, was already in full swing. In 1963, the same year that Milgram published his studies, writer Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Eichmann in her book on the trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem .

Milgram, who was born in New York City in 1933 to Jewish immigrant parents, came to view his studies as a validation of Arendt’s idea—but the Holocaust had been at the forefront of his mind for years before either of them published their work. “I should have been born into the German-speaking Jewish community of Prague in 1922 and died in a gas chamber some 20 years later,” he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1958. “How I came to be born in the Bronx Hospital, I’ll never quite understand.”

And in the introduction of his 1963 paper, he invoked the Nazis within the first few paragraphs: “Obedience, as a determinant of behavior, is of particular relevance to our time,” he wrote. “Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded; daily quotas of corpses were produced … 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 persons obeyed orders.”

Though the term didn’t exist at the time, Milgram was a proponent of what today’s social psychologists call situationism: the idea that people’s behavior is determined largely by what’s happening around them. “They’re not psychopaths, and they’re not hostile, and they’re not aggressive or deranged. They’re just people, like you and me,” Miller said. “If you put us in certain situations, we’re more likely to be racist or sexist, or we may lie, or we may cheat. There are studies that show this, thousands and thousands of studies that document the many unsavory aspects of most people.”

But continued to its logical extreme, situationism “has an exonerating effect,” he said. “In the minds of a lot of people, it tends to excuse the bad behavior … it’s not the person’s fault for doing the bad thing, it’s the situation they were put in.” Milgram’s studies were famous because their implications were also devastating: If the Nazis were just following orders, then he had proved that anyone at all could be a Nazi. If the guards at Abu Ghraib were just following orders, then anyone was capable of torture.

The latter, Reicher said, is part of why interest in Milgram’s work has seen a resurgence in recent years. “If you look at acts of human atrocity, they’ve hardly diminished over time,” he said, and news of the abuse at Abu Ghraib was surfacing around the same time that Yale’s archival material was digitized, a perfect storm of encouragement for scholars to turn their attention once again to the question of what causes evil.

He and his colleague Alex Haslam, the third co-editor of The Journal of Social Issues ’ Milgram edition and a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland, have come up with a different answer. “The notion that we somehow automatically obey authority, that we are somehow programmed, doesn’t account for the variability [in rates of obedience] across conditions,” he said; in some iterations of Milgram’s study, the rate of compliance was close to 100 percent, while in others it was closer to zero. “We need an account that can explain the variability—when we obey, when we don’t.”

“We argue that the answer to that question is a matter of identification,” he continued. “Do they identify more with the cause of science, and listen to the experimenter as a legitimate representative of science, or do they identify more with the learner as an ordinary person? … You’re torn between these different voices. Who do you listen to?”

The question, he conceded, applies as much to the study of Milgram today as it does to what went on in his lab. “Trying to get a consensus among academics is like herding cats,” Reicher said, but “if there is a consensus, it’s that we need a new explanation. I think nearly everybody accepts the fact that Milgram discovered a remarkable phenomenon, but he didn’t provide a very compelling explanation of that phenomenon.”

What he provided instead was a difficult and deeply uncomfortable set of questions—and his research, flawed as it is, endures not because it clarifies the causes of human atrocities, but because it confuses more than it answers.

Or, as Miller put it: “The whole thing exists in terms of its controversy, how it’s excited some and infuriated others. People have tried to knock it down, and it always comes up standing.”

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How The Milgram Experiment Showed That Anyone Could Be A Monster

The milgram experiment tested its subjects' willingness to harm other people for the sake of obeying authority — and it ended with truly shocking results..

Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Participants in one of Stanley Milgram’s experiments that examined obedience to authority.

In April 1961, former Nazi official and SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann went on trial for crimes against humanity in an Israeli courtroom.

Throughout his trial, which ended with a conviction and death sentence, Eichmann had tried to defend himself on the grounds that he was “only following orders.” He asserted that he was not a “responsible actor,” but merely a servant of those who were, and so he should be held morally blameless for just doing his duties, even if they included organizing the logistics of shipping people to the Nazi camps during the war.

This defense didn’t work in court and he was convicted on all counts. However, the idea of an unwilling-but-obedient participant in mass murder captured the interest of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who wanted to know how easily morally normal people could be convinced to commit heinous crimes after an authority figure ordered them to do so.

To examine the matter, Milgram polled dozens of people for their opinions. Without exception, every group he asked for predictions thought it would be difficult to get people to commit serious crimes just by ordering them to.

Only three percent of the Yale students Milgram polled said that they thought an average person would willingly kill a stranger just because an authority figure pressured them into it. A poll of colleagues on the staff of a medical school showed similar results, with only around four percent of faculty psychologists guessing test subjects would knowingly kill a person if they were coerced into it by someone who looked like they were in charge.

In July 1961, Milgram set out to discover the truth for himself by devising an experiment, the results of which are still controversial to this day.

What Was The Milgram Experiment?

Wikimedia Commons An advertisement to participate in the Milgram experiment in 1961.

The experiment Milgram set up required three people. One person, the test subject, would be told he was participating in a memorization experiment, and that his role would be to administer a series of electric shocks to a stranger whenever he failed to correctly answer a question.

In front of the subject was a longboard with 30 switches labeled with increasing voltage levels, up to 450 volts. The last three switches had high-voltage warnings pasted on them and appeared to be very dangerous.

The second participant was an actor and confederate, who would chat with the test subject before moving to an adjacent room and connecting a tape recorder to the electrical switches so that they could play recorded shouts and screams — which sounded like their reaction to getting “shocked.”

The third participant was a man in a white lab coat, who sat behind the test subject and pretended to administer the test to the actor in the next room.

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What Happened When The “Test-Takers” Failed Their Tests?

Wikimedia Commons Illustration of the setup of the Milgram experiment. The experimenter (E) convinces the subject (“Teacher” T) to give what he believes are painful electric shocks to another subject, who is actually an actor (“Learner” L).

At the beginning of the experiment, the test subject would be given a quick shock from the apparatus on its lowest power level. Milgram included this to ensure that the subject knew how painful the shocks were and to make the pain of the shocks “real” to the subject before proceeding.

As the experiment got underway, the administrator would give the unseen confederate a series of memorization problems requiring an answer. When the actor gave the wrong answer, the administrator would instruct the subject to flip the next switch in the sequence so that they were seemingly delivering progressively higher-voltage shocks to the confederate.

When the switch was thrown, the tape recorder would play a yelp or a scream, and at higher levels, the confederate would start pounding on the wall and demanding to be set free. The actor was also given scripted lines about having a heart condition to make the situation seem very urgent.

After the seventh shock, he would go completely silent to give the impression that he had either passed out or died. When this happened, the administrator would continue on with his questions.

Getting no response from the “unconscious” confederate, the administrator told the subject to apply higher and higher shocks, up to the last, 450-volt switch, which was colored red and labeled as potentially lethal.

The Results Of The Milgram Experiment

Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Participants in the Milgram experiment.

The groups that Milgram polled before the experiments began had predicted that just three or four percent of test subjects could be convinced to deliver a potentially fatal electric shock to an unwilling participant.

But results showed that 26 of the 40 subjects — 65 percent — went all the way up to 450 volts during the experiment. Furthermore, all of them had been willing to deliver 300 volts to a screaming and protesting subject.

All of the subjects had raised some kind of objection during the test. However, Milgram was astounded to find out that, apparently, almost two-thirds of normal people would be willing to kill a person with electricity if a man in a lab coat told them, “It is imperative that you continue.”

Accordingly, after the initial experiment was over, Milgram organized more tests with some variables controlled to see what importance different factors had in affecting people’s resistance to authority.

He found that people are vastly more likely to carry out atrocious acts if they feel like they have permission from some recognized authority (such as a scientist in a lab coat or a senior officer in the SS) and that participants’ willingness to shock increases as they are made to feel that the authority has taken moral responsibility for the actions they commit.

Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Most participants in the Milgram experiment apparently believed they were delivering electric shocks to strangers.

Here are some other findings from the Milgram experiment:

• When instructions to shock are given by phone, rather than having the authority figure physically present in the room, compliance dropped to 20.5 percent, and many “compliant” subjects were actually cheating; they would skip shocks and pretend to have thrown the switch when they hadn’t.
• When the subjects were made to press the victim’s hand down onto a shock plate, thus eliminating the distance of throwing an impersonal switch, compliance dropped to 30 percent.
• When the subjects were put in the position of ordering other people — confederates who were part of the experiment staff — to throw the switches, compliance increased to 95 percent. Putting one person between the subject and the victim made it so that 9.5 out of 10 people went all the way up to the presumed-fatal shock.
• When subjects were given “role models” to set an example of resistance, in this case, confederates who raised objections and refused to participate, compliance plunged to only 10 percent. It’s as if the subjects really wanted to stop, but needed leadership to grant moral permission to disobey an authority figure.
• When the administrator participated without the lab coat, that is, without a uniform indicating authority, compliance fell to 20 percent.
• Experiments held at locations separate from the prestigious Yale campus yielded less compliance, only 47.5 percent as if the perceived status of the surroundings had some conforming influence on the subjects.

The Legacy Of The Milgram Experiment

Yale University Manuscripts and Archives Some believed that Stanley Milgram’s experiment was unethical, and others thought that his results said more about the types of people who participated in psychology experiments at Yale than people in general.

They say nothing in the social sciences is ever proven, and the disturbing results of Milgram’s experiment are no exception. Milgram’s work with his subjects faced criticism from other experts in the psychology community almost as soon as his results were published.

One of the more serious charges leveled against Milgram’s paper was the original sin of social science research: sample bias.

It was convincingly argued that even though the 40 local men Milgram had recruited for his research varied in backgrounds and professions, they represented a special case and that such a small group of white males may not be the most representative sample of humanity. Therefore, Milgram’s work had limited value in understanding human psychology.

In fact, critics argued, Milgram may have discovered something alarming about the kind of person who participates in psychology experiments at Yale, but such people would be expected to be more conformist and eager to please authority figures than a truly representative sample of the populace.

This critique was lent some weight when later researchers had trouble reproducing Milgram’s findings. Other investigators, using less-biased samples drawn from other groups in the population, found significantly less compliance with the administrators’ requests. Many reported meeting stiff resistance from non-college-educated and working-class people.

Yale University Manuscripts and Archives The Milgram experiment is still considered one of history’s most controversial psychology experiments.

The results seemed to plot a curve of compliant behavior, from the very top of society (wealthy, white, upper-class overachievers) to the lowest (unemployed, racially diverse school dropouts).

Those who had risen the highest seemed more eager to shock strangers to death when a man in a lab coat asked them to. It was theorized that others who may have had negative experiences with authorities were generally willing to argue and quit the experiment before things went too far.

Though some continue to muse about the results of the Milgram experiment and others have performed different versions of it in recent years, it’s unlikely anyone will ever completely replicate it again in its original form.

The intense psychic stress that test subjects have to be put through, as they are led to believe they’re committing what amounts to murder, violates many of the ethical restrictions now in place for human research. Another problem is the notoriety of the experiment — too many people know about the experiment now to ensure honest performance from the test group.

Whatever the Milgram experiment’s faults, and however hard it might be in the future to make sense of its findings, the fact that so many seemingly normal men felt compelled to violate their own conscience to obey authority is enough to send chills up the spines of many people even today.

After learning about the Milgram experiment, read about Unit 731 , Japan’s sickening human experiments program during World War II. Then, learn about the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment .

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Psychological research, obedience and ethics

Introduction

One of the best known studies in the history of psychology is the research on obedience carried out by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. In his research Milgram demonstrated the lengths to which people are willing to go just because someone in authority tells them to do something. The studies Milgram conducted also raised the issue of ethics in research, as some critics argued that he failed to take sufficient precautions to protect the integrity and wellbeing of his participants. At the same time, more than any other study in psychology, the findings of Milgram’s research demonstrate why ethics are important.

As well as reading about Milgram's work and ethics, you will engage in an online activity to learn about the code of ethics concerning the psychological research that is conducted with human participants. You will also gain an understanding of the guidelines that govern the use of non-human animals in psychological research in a second online activity, and why psychologists conduct such research. You will have the opportunity of viewing two short films which will introduce you to the research of Alex Thornton who studies meerkats, and of Tetsuro Matsuzawa who works with chimpanzees.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course DE100 Investigating psychology 1 .

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

describe the research of Stanley Milgram on obedience

recognise the main ethics principles governing psychological research

understand the ethics issues concerning research involving non-human animals

appreciate the value of conducting research with animals.

1 Milgram’s obedience study

Milgram was one of the most innovative and productive social psychologists of his generation, who undertook a variety of studies that explored social psychological aspects of everyday life. However, he is largely remembered for one dramatic piece of work – the obedience studies. The best way to get inside this study is to imagine that you are one of the participants taking part in Milgram’s experiment. So read on with that in mind.

1.1 The set-up

It’s 1961 and you are arriving at the doors of the Psychology Department of the prestigious Yale University in the USA. The reason you are here is that you replied to an advert in the local paper asking for volunteers to take part in a study on memory. The advert (see Figure 1) offered a fee plus expenses and said that you would be paid on arrival at the laboratory.

This is an image of the advertisement Milgram placed in a local paper to recruit members of the public to participate in his study. The only information provided about the study is that it involves a scientific investigation of memory and learning. The advert highlighted that participants would be paid four dollars for one hour of their time, and also that they don't need any special training, education or experience. Wanted were five hundred New Haven men: factory workers, city employees, labourers, barbers, businessmen, clerks, profession people, telephone workers, construction workers, salespeople, white-collar workers and others, aged between twenty and fifty. The announcement also specifically states that high school and college students could not be used.

As you walk through the doors you are met by a serious-looking man in a laboratory coat who turns out to be the experimenter. He introduces you to a genial middle-aged man who is described as a fellow volunteer. The experimenter explains that the study will involve one of the volunteers taking on the role of a ‘teacher’ and the other taking on the role of a ‘learner’. As part of the experiment, the ‘teacher’ will engage the ‘learner’ in a simple memory task. The ‘learner’ and the ‘teacher’ will be in different rooms and will communicate through microphones (see Figure 2). The experimenter reveals that the study is designed to investigate the effect of punishment on learning. The ‘teacher’ will be asked to administer an electric shock to the ‘learner’ every time the latter makes an incorrect response on the memory task.

This shows a diagram of the experimental set-up. The experimenter is shown as seated in the same room, but behind the 'teacher'. The 'learner' is shown as seated in an adjacent room on his own. The wiring attached to the 'learner' passes through the wall and into the apparatus, the shock generator, placed on a table in front of the participant.

To select who will be the ‘teacher’ and who will be the ‘learner’, you draw slips of paper. You pick out the ‘teacher’ slip. You then watch as the ‘learner’ is strapped into a chair, and you hear the experimenter tell him that ‘although the shocks can be extremely painful, they cause no permanent tissue damage’. The experimenter now gives you a sample shock of 45 volts to show you what the ‘learner’ will experience during the study. The shock is unpleasant, but short of being painful.

The experimenter then takes you into the adjacent room and sits you down in front of an impressive-looking apparatus that will be used to administer the shocks (see Figure 3).

This figure shows the apparatus - the shock generator - used in the study which is described next in the text.

The shock generator consists of a row of switches that run in 15 volt increments from 15 volts through to 450 volts. Under the label for each switch are some descriptive words, such as ‘slight shock’ (15 volts), ‘moderate shock’ (75 volts), ‘strong shock’ (135 volts), ‘very strong shock’ (195 volts), ‘intense shock’ (225 volts), ‘extremely intense shock’ (315 volts), ‘danger: severe shock’ (375 volts) and finally ‘XXX’ (435 volts). Suddenly, this looks quite serious and you probably hope that you don’t have to go very far up the scale. This is especially so given that you received the 45-volt shock, and you know that this was unpleasant enough. The last switch on the shock generator administers an electric impulse ten times as strong!

In the first phase of the experiment, the experimenter asks you, the ‘teacher’, to read a series of word pairs to the ‘learner’ who is expected to memorise them (for instance, ‘green-grass’ , ‘blue-sky’, ‘nice-day’). In the second phase, the test phase, you are asked to read out the first word of the pairs (e.g. ‘green’), followed by four possible responses (‘grass, hat, ink, apple’). If the ‘learner’ identifies the paired word correctly, you are to move on to the next word pair on the list. If the answer is wrong you have to tell the ‘learner’ the correct answer, indicate the level of punishment you are going to give them (starting with 15 volts), and flick the appropriate switch on the shock generator. For every subsequent incorrect answer, you are told to move one switch up the scale of shocks.

The experiment starts. To begin with everything is fine and the ‘learner’ gets most of the answers right. You have only used the shock generator a couple of times, and at this stage the shocks are mild. Then the ‘learner’ starts to get the answers wrong and you are moving up the shock scale into the ‘strong shock’ range. Although you cannot see the ‘learner’ you can hear him and as the shocks increase he starts to shout out. You have heard him grunt at the low voltage but now he is starting to ask to be let out. At 120 volts you hear him shout out in an agitated tone, complaining that he is in pain, and at 150 volts he asks to be released.

Suddenly, you feel uncomfortable and you decide to stop. The experimenter, the man in the grey coat, objects and asks you to carry on, in spite of the ‘learner’s’ protestations.

What do you think you would do in this situation? At what point would you stop? 200 volts? 150 volts? Would you respond to the cries of your fellow volunteer or would you complete the job you agreed to do and carry out the instructions of the experimenter?

How many people do you think would continue to follow the orders? At what point do you think people would stop?

Before Milgram carried out the study, he posed the same questions as in Question 1 to different groups of people, including ordinary members of the public, college students, psychologists and psychiatrists. He asked them to speculate on how far they thought most people would go if asked to administer shocks. Most ordinary people said that participants would generally refuse to administer shock, or at least not go very far beyond the point where the ‘learner’ experienced pain. Also, most said that participants should rebel, and that they should not continue beyond around 150 volts. Among the professional groups, there was widespread agreement that nobody taking part in the study go all the way.

You will be relieved to know that in the actual study carried out by Milgram, no person was hurt during the procedure, and the only actual shock administered was the 45-volt ‘tester’ given to the ‘teacher’. In fact, the whole situation was staged. The role of ‘experimenter’ was played by a 31-year-old biology teacher. The ‘learner’, presented as a ‘fellow volunteer’, was in on the deception and was merely playing the part. In reality, he was a 47-year-old accountant, who was chosen for the role because he appeared mild-mannered and likeable. He was not the sort of person one would want to see hurt. The drawing of slips of paper was fixed to ensure that the ‘naive participant’ was always cast in the role of the ‘teacher’, and the ‘shock generator’ was simply a simulator. The sounds (the moans and cries) that the participants heard were a recording played from the adjacent room. Importantly, however, the deception was so good that participants believed that they were actually administering shocks. So the study presented an ingenious way of discovering how far people would be willing to go, just because a psychological experiment on ‘the effects of punishment on learning’ demanded it. Most people like to think that they (and people around them) would not go very far. But what happened when Milgram actually placed people in that position?

1.2 The results

In the first instance Milgram conducted the study on a sample of forty participants, all of them male. Each played the role of ‘teacher’ in the situation described in Section 1.1. Each participant went through the identical experimental procedure: all forty heard the same instructions, encountered the same ‘experimenter’ and ‘learner’, heard identical (pre-recorded) cries from the next room. The ‘experimenter’ in the grey lab coat offered the same words of encouragement. The sessions were filmed (Figure 4) and notes were taken by observers looking through an observation mirror.

This figure comprises three photos taken during the Milgram study. The first is of the experimenter instructing the participant on how to use the shock generator. The second is of the participant getting seated at the table in front of the shock generator. The third is of the ‘learner’ being strapped to the apparatus.

Milgram found that, of the forty participants who took part in the study, all obeyed up to 300 volts, the twentieth switch on the shock generator. This is the point at which the ‘learner’ was heard screaming: ‘I absolutely refuse to answer any more. Get me out of here. You can’t hold me here. Get me out. Get me out of here.’ However, only five of the forty participants refused to continue beyond this point. Four gave only one more shock before breaking off, with an additional five stopping between 315 volts and 435 volts. But as many as twenty-six continued to the end of the scale and administered the maximum 450 volts. This is despite the fact that, at 330 volts, they had already heard intense and prolonged screaming: ‘Let me out of here. Let me out of here. … Let me out of here. You have no right to hold me here. Let me out! Let me out!’ Shocks beyond 330 volts were accompanied by eerie silence. Nevertheless, twenty-six ordinary members of the public from Connecticut administered the maximum shock and continued to do so until the experimenter called a halt to the proceedings.

As well as counting the number of participants who went all the way on the shock generator, Milgram also observed their reactions. Participants who took part in the study generally displayed signs of nervousness and tension. Many were visibly uncomfortable and probably would not have continued had they not heard the experimenter say things like ‘Please continue’, ‘Please carry on’, ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue’ or ‘You have no choice; you must go on’. At the end of the study, many of the obedient participants heaved sighs of relief or shook their heads in apparent regret. Some even had laughing fits during the experiment, probably brought on by anxiety. Milgram (1963, p. 375) wrote that ‘full-blown, uncontrollable seizures were observed for 3 subjects. On one occasion we observed a seizure so violently convulsive that it was necessary to call a halt to the experiment’. (You may have noticed that in this quote Milgram refers to people who took part in his study as ‘subjects’. This was common practice in psychology in the 1960s. Today the word ‘participant’ is used instead as the word ‘subject’ is considered demeaning, and lacking in respect towards volunteers on whose participation much of psychological research ultimately depends.)

Do Milgram’s findings seem plausible to you? Ordinary members of the public were prepared to administer electric shocks to another person on the mere (albeit persistent) request of a man in a laboratory coat. They did so despite the protests from the ‘victim’ and continued even after the supposed recipient of the shocks went quiet. Before the study, when Milgram asked his fellow professionals to predict how many participants would refuse to go all the way, they said that all of them would do so. In reality only 35 per cent did. In Milgram’s study, the average voltage at which participants stopped shocking the ‘learner’ was 368 volts. Members of the public predicted that people would stop at around 140 volts. This is a remarkable discrepancy. It is therefore not surprising that Milgram’s research went on to provoke considerable debate.

Box 1 Why do it this way?

Milgram’s obedience work is remarkable, not only because of the important questions it sought to explore, but also because it is a fine example of good experimental procedure in social psychology.

The most important feature of any laboratory experiment is its controlled nature. Note that every person who took part in Milgram’s research underwent an identical experience. All participants received the same instructions, encountered the same individuals (the ‘experimenter’ and the fellow ‘volunteer’) and heard identical cries and protestations from the ‘learner’. To ensure consistency in the experimental procedure, Milgram even recorded the anguished cries in advance, and played them to participants from a tape.

This equivalence of experience across the forty participants was essential if meaningful comparisons were to be made. It ensured that any difference in behaviour observed in the study could not be attributed, for instance, to the fact that some participants heard louder or more desperate cries than others. For similar reasons, Milgram used the same ‘learner’ and ‘experimenter’ with each participant. He wanted to ensure that none of the results could be accounted for by differences in the personality or the demeanour of the confederates.

Another interesting aspect of Milgram’s research is that he recruited participants from the general public, using a newspaper advert. At the time (and still now in many psychology departments) participants tended to be recruited mainly from among the student population. However, Milgram was interested in exploring the level of obedience to scientific authority among people with no direct link to the university or research environment, so he recruited from the general public.

Finally, in Milgram’s original study, all forty participants were male. Why do you think this was the case? This was not because Milgram wanted to exclude women from his research. He later conducted further studies in which he explored gender differences in obedience. In the initial study, however, he decided to control for the potential effects of gender on the findings by limiting the sample to men.

1.3 The variations

The findings of Milgram’s original study highlighted the phenomenon of obedience, but it could not reveal what it is about the situation that made participants administer potentially lethal shocks to a fellow human being. To address this question Milgram carried out further research in which he introduced subtle variations to the original procedure. By examining the effects of these variations on levels of obedience, he was able to isolate specific aspects of the situation that might influence whether participants obey or not.

By the time Milgram completed his research in 1962 he had processed 800 people through nineteen variations of the original design. For instance, in one variation, Milgram introduced into the proceedings a dialogue about a heart attack. He wanted to see whether alerting the participants to the impact of the shocks on the ‘learner’s’ health might reduce obedience. Note that all other aspects of the original study were preserved. Interestingly, the conversation about the heart attack made no real difference. Twenty six out of the forty participants still continued to 450 volts, although those who stopped did so at a lower voltage with five stopping as soon as the ‘learner’ asked to be let out. So, the reference to the heart attack made those who disobeyed do so earlier, but it did not prevent the more obedient participants from going all the way.

Milgram also varied the proximity of the ‘learner’ and ‘teacher’. In one variation he put them in the same room, while in another he required the ‘teacher’ to hold the ‘learner’s’ arm down on a plate to receive the electric shock. This manipulation had a clear effect. Milgram found that the closer you place the ‘teacher’ to the ‘learner’, the fewer shocks the ‘teacher’ is likely to administer. Equally, the further you place the ‘learner’ away from the ‘teacher’, the less the impact their pleas are likely to have.

Equally crucial was the presence of the authority figure. In one variation, the ‘experimenter’ in the grey coat pretended to have to leave the experiment owing to some emergency and was replaced by a person in plain clothes, who was not a scientist. Only 20 per cent of participants went all the way and gave the ‘learner’ 450-volt shocks. Similar results were obtained when orders were given by phone. The physical presence of an authority figure was therefore crucial.

In another variation Milgram placed two ‘experimenters’ in the room. One told the participants to continue (as in the original study), while the other told them to stop. In this variation, all the participants stopped giving the shocks very early on. This showed that an absence of a clear authority figure reduces obedience.

Milgram also conducted a version of the experiment in which he placed a second ‘teacher’ in the room, although this one was a stooge instructed to obey until the end. In this variation all the participants went along with the confederate and shocked up to 450 volts! So the mere presence of another obedient ‘volunteer’ made all the participants go all the way.

One of the main conclusions of Milgram’s work was that under certain conditions involving the presence of authority, people suspend their capacity to make informed moral judgments and defer responsibility for their actions to those in authority. When people are in this particular frame of mind, the nature of the task that they are asked to perform becomes largely irrelevant, and the main determinant of their actions is the commands of the authority figure.

1.4 Summary

• Milgram found that most people would administer potentially lethal levels of shock to another human being, just because they were told to do so by an authority figure.
• The use of a controlled experimental procedure enabled Milgram to explore different aspects of the situation that influence the extent to which people will obey authority.
• Two key factors in obedience are the presence of a clear authority figure, and the distance between the person administering the shock and the ‘victim’.

2 Milgram’s study and ethics

At the beginning of Section 1 you were asked to put yourself in the shoes of one of the participants in Milgram’s research. How do you think being a participant in the study felt? As you already read, many of the participants were visibly uncomfortable during the procedure. This is one of the reasons why the study created a storm, starting with a hostile review of the research in a newspaper, the St . Louis Post-Dispatch . The newspaper criticised Milgram and Yale University for putting the participants in such a stressful situation. It claimed that Milgram violated the rules of ethics which guide psychological research. The charge was repeated in academic circles, and led to Milgram’s application to join the American Psychological Association being put on hold for a year. Milgram made a robust rebuttal of the charges and the debate about the issues led to the introduction of new codes of good practice for psychologists.

Before we look at the arguments that swirled around the obedience study we need to consider what we mean by ethics . It all starts with morals , which are rules to guide our behaviour. These rules are based on a number of socially agreed principles which are used to develop clear and logical guidelines to direct behaviour. They also contain ideas about what is good and desirable in human behaviour. Ethics , in the context of psychological research, refers to a moral framework that governs what psychologists can and cannot do.

The first generally accepted code of ethics for research on humans was devised in 1947 as a response to the very events that provoked Milgram’s research. During the Second World War (1939–45), under the Nazi regime, research was carried out on human beings that led to many deaths, deformities and long-term injuries. Revelations about this research were as great a shock for the post-war world as the death camps, because these acts of brutality and murder were conducted by doctors and scientists.

After the war the victors held a series of trials, in the German city of Nuremberg, of people who had taken part in the worst excesses of the horrors that had swept across Europe. Among them were twenty-three doctors involved in the brutal experiments. Sixteen of them were found guilty, of whom seven were sentenced to death. Significantly, the judgement included a statement about how scientists should behave when experimenting on other humans. This is referred to as the Nuremberg Code (see Table 1) and it became the basis for future ethical codes in medicine and psychology.

Four key principles emerged from the Nuremberg Code. First, participants must be able to give informed consent to the procedure. Second, they must retain the right to withdraw from the study whenever they want. Third, the welfare of the participant must be protected wherever possible. The fourth principle is the most difficult to interpret because it concerns the costs and benefits of the study. It says that any risks to the participants must be greatly outweighed by the possible benefits for the greater good.

2.2 The case against Milgram

Before you go on to read about the criticism of Milgram’s obedience studies, try to think through all the issues relating to ethics that are raised by this work.

In what way were the participants deceived, or harmed? Did they have the right to withdraw? Do you think that in Milgram’s case the ends justify the means? Do the benefits of the study justify the costs? Do you think that the results of the study are worth the pain and discomfort caused to the participants?

Among those who were highly critical of Milgram’s study was fellow psychologist Diana Baumrind. She started her critique by noting the dilemma that all research psychologists face: ‘Certain problems in psychological research require the experimenter to balance his career and scientific interests against the interests of his prospective subjects’ (Baumrind, 1964, p. 421).

Baumrind challenged Milgram on whether he had properly protected the welfare of the participants . She used direct quotes from Milgram’s original report to illustrate the lack of regard she said was shown to the participants. In particular, she noted the detached manner in which Milgram described the emotional turmoil experienced by the volunteers. For example:

In a large number of cases the degree of tension [in the participants] reached extremes that are rarely seen in sociopsychological laboratory studies. Subjects were observed to sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan, and dig their fingernails into their flesh. These were characteristic rather than exceptional responses to the experiment.

In Baumrind’s view, and in the view of numerous others, the levels of anxiety experienced by participants were enough to warrant halting the experiment. What is more, just because someone volunteers to take part in the study (i.e. gives informed consent at the start of the study), it does not mean that the researcher no longer has responsibilities towards them and their wellbeing. On the principle of cost – benefit , Baumrind challenged the view that the scientific worth of the study balanced out the distress caused to the participants. She acknowledged that some harm to participants might be a necessary part of some research – for example, when testing out new medical procedures – as in those cases results cannot be achieved in any other way. Social psychology, however, is not in the same game as medicine and is unlikely to produce life-saving results. The strength of the conclusions does not, therefore, justify harming participants. Milgram related his study to the behaviour of people who worked in the Nazi death camps and suggested that his study illuminated the way that ordinary people living ordinary lives are capable of playing a part in destructive and cruel acts. Baumrind dismissed this justification for the study and suggested there are few, if any, parallels between the behaviour in the study and the behaviour in the death camps.

Baumrind went on to make a further criticism by considering the effect of this work on the public image of psychology, and suggested that it would be damaged because the general public would judge that the participants were not protected or respected.

A further potential problem with Milgram’s experiment concerns the participants’ right to withdraw . Do you think that this principle, embedded in the Nuremberg Code, was sufficiently observed in Milgram’s research? Recall that one of the key aspects of the experimental procedure was that whenever a participant demonstrated a reluctance to carry on with administering the shocks, they were told by the ‘experimenter’ in the grey coat ‘you must go on’, or ‘you have no choice; you must go on’. It might be argued that telling a participant that they ‘have no choice’ but to continue with the experiment contravenes the right to withdraw, which is enshrined in the ethics code. To be fair, fourteen of the forty participants in the original study did withdraw, in spite of being told that they had no choice, so it could be argued that, ultimately, the participants did have a choice. It is just that making that choice was made more difficult by the presence of the ‘experimenter’ and by his prods. After all, the study was about obedience, and the instructions from the ‘experimenter’ were essential to the investigation. Exercising or not exercising the right to withdraw is what the study was about.

2.3 The case for the defence

Milgram made a series of robust defences for the study, starting with a response to the newspaper article that first raised concerns. He dismissed the accusation that participants were severely traumatised by the experience. He argued that ‘relatively few subjects experienced greater tension than a nail-biting patron at a good Hitchcock thriller’ (quoted in Blass, 2007). This was rather disingenuous, given his other descriptions of their reactions (see above). However, Milgram made a more measured response to the academic arguments. He pointed out, for instance, that he could not have known the outcome of the research before he started. As you already read, before embarking on the study he asked fellow professionals how they expected people to behave, and they predicted that participants would not continue to obey and administer severe shocks to the ‘learner’.

More importantly, Milgram was not oblivious to the psychological needs of his participants and was aware of the potential harm caused by the study. Immediately after the study, its true purpose was revealed to the participants. They were interviewed and given questionnaires to check they were all right. A friendly reconciliation was also arranged with the ‘victim’ whom they thought they had shocked. This procedure, known as debriefing , is commonplace today, but this was not the case in the 1960s. So, in this respect at least, Milgram was ahead of the game in terms of ethics procedures (Blass, 2004).

Milgram also conducted a follow-up survey of the participants one year after the study, to ensure that there was no long-term harm (Colman, 1987). The results showed that 84 per cent said they were ‘glad to have been in the experiment’, and only 1.3 per cent said they were very sorry to have taken part. Milgram also described how the participants had been examined by a psychiatrist who was unable to find a single participant who showed signs of long-term harm. Morris Braverman, a 39-year-old social worker, was one of the participants in Milgram’s experiment who continued to give shocks until the maximum was reached. He claimed, when interviewed a year after the experiment, that he had learned something of personal importance as a result of being in the experiment. His wife said, with reference to his willingness to obey orders, ‘You can call yourself an Eichmann’ (Milgram, 1974, p. 54).

Milgram’s basic defence was that the harm to the participants was not as great as it might appear, and for some of them the change in their understanding of their own behaviour and the behaviour of others was a positive event. He makes a further defence that we have to treat all people with respect and that this involves allowing them to make choices even if those choices are not always for the best. In direct response to Baumrind’s criticisms he wrote:

I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior.

2.4 The judgement

So what do you think should be the final judgement on the ethics of Milgram’s study? As you can see from the debate between Milgram and Baumrind, ethics is something that psychologists debate and often disagree on. Ethics principles, like all rules, are subject to interpretation and disagreement.

And yet, while individuals might have their personal view about whether a piece of research is ethical or not, what really matters is the judgment of institutions that regulate the profession. In the USA the regulatory body is the American Psychological Association. Its equivalent in the UK is the British Psychological Society. These institutions have ethics committees which issue guidelines and codes of conduct related to ethics in research and can reprimand researchers who can be shown to have violated the rules. At the time of Milgram’s study, his research was investigated by the ethics committee of the American Psychological Association, who eventually came to the conclusion that it was ethically acceptable. Notably, however, Milgram’s studies could not be carried out today, as the ethics guidelines have become more restrictive since the 1960s.

Finally, one further issue regarding Milgram’s study is worth pointing out. Although the ethics of Milgram’s research have been questioned, it could be argued that the obedience study, more than any other study in psychology, demonstrated why ethics are important. Recall that what Milgram’s study showed was that ordinary people were willing to harm another human being just because they were told to do so by a person they believed was a psychologist, and because doing so was supposedly ‘required by the experiment’. This shows that people generally are ready to give scientists the benefit of the doubt and go along with what they are doing, even when it involves harming individuals. This in itself illustrates how important it is to have some moderation of scientific activity, and have limits imposed on what scientists can and cannot do.

2.5 Summary

• Psychologists have a duty of care towards participants and must ensure that their wellbeing is preserved throughout a study.
• Participants must be asked to give informed consent before taking part in research and have a right to withdraw at any point.
• Milgram’s obedience studies kick-started an ethics debate in psychology and highlighted the need for the development of more stringent guidelines for the conduct of research psychologists.
• Although Milgram’s obedience study was judged to be ethical at the time of publication, it would be in violation of the strict ethics guidelines in place today.

Activity 1: Ethics in psychological research

This activity introduces you to the idea of ethics in psychological research. When conducting research, psychologists cannot do what they like – they must abide by a code of conduct. Above all, the aim of this is to protect the welfare of the people participating in the research. It is important that you grasp the main ethics principles and their importance, as you will be returning to them throughout this course. At the end of this activity, you will find a handout summarising the main teaching points. You should download this and add it to your files.

Research ethics

When a psychologist is working out how to undertake a particular study, it is important that they consider whether what they are doing and how they are doing it is going to be ethical. All universities and research organisations have panels that judge whether research is ethical or not, and in the UK psychological research also needs to meet the requirements of the British Psychological Society (BPS), who specify a code of ethics and conduct, which includes:

• Research should not include risks to the psychological wellbeing, physical health, personal values or dignity of participants.
• Participants should give informed consent before taking part in research.
• Participants should be able to stop participating in the research at any point.

The principles cover a number of other very important points, such as confidentiality, debriefing and protection. This activity is going to focus on the three principles above and you are going to have a go at applying them to a specific research project.

Task: Is it ethical?

On the following pages you will find a brief description of a psychological research study. Your task is to imagine you are on a research ethics panel that has been asked to consider the research being proposed. In each case, read the description and decide whether you think the study described is ethical in terms of the three principles described in the introduction:

• Research should not threaten the psychological wellbeing, health, values or dignity of participants.

The ethics panel received the following proposal:

This study is designed to discover what effect peer pressure might have on people’s voting behaviour. Phase one of the study will involve adding a question stating ‘which party did you vote for at the last election?’ to the end of an in-class exam being taken by twenty undergraduate students. Phase two will take place a week later in a scheduled seminar, and consist of asking the same students, one after another, to tell the group as a whole whom they had voted for.

Think about the three ethics principles and how you might expect a psychological study to meet each one, and then decide whether you think this study meets each ethics principle.

Ethics principle 1 - study 1.

Wellbeing, health, values and dignity

The correct answer is b.

This study threatened both the values and the dignity of the participants. UK law protects the right for voting to be secret for a good reason, so asking students how they voted in an exam and also to state this publicly contravenes the values attached to keeping how you voted a confidential matter. Putting students in a position where they might feel obliged either to state how they voted or indeed to lie about this as a result of peer pressure is also likely to have a negative effect on their dignity.

Ethics principle 2 - Study 1

Informed consent

At no point were the students told they were taking part in a research study, so they did not give their consent to participate.

Ethics principle 3 - Study 3

Right to withdraw

At no point were the students told they were taking part in a research study, so they did not realise there was any research to withdraw from.

Would you give this study ethical approval?

To be approved a study would need to meet all criteria. If it fails to meet just one, it should not gain approval.

As is stated in this course, applying ethical principles is never that straightforward and there are often cases where people have differing opinions. Don't worry if you had different answers; instead concentrate on which aspects of the study we have linked to each of the three ethical principles.

The ethics panel that considered Study 1 did not give approval. Following their feedback the psychologist revised the design of the study and resubmitted it.

The revised study is to involve recruiting participants through a poster that will ask for volunteers to take part in a study on political communication. Volunteers will be informed that they have the right to withdraw from the study at any point and will be first asked to complete a ‘consent to participate’ form and then a questionnaire asking them about their background, likes and dislikes, and also whom they voted for in the last election. They will then attend a session that evening where the study will take place. The session will involve watching a party political broadcast and then answering questions in a group on how well the speaker communicated their ideas. At the end of the broadcast the researcher will apologise to the participants saying their questionnaires have all been accidentally lost, and ask them to state in front of the whole group of participants whom they voted for in the last election. By comparing how the participants said they had voted in the questionnaire and in front of the group, it will be possible to see if any had changed their mind as a result of being part of a group.

Ethics principle 1 - Study 2

The revised study still involves the participants’ being required to say how they voted publicly in front of a group of people; that they are still being asked the question at all can be seen as not respecting their values, and they are also still being put in a position where they might feel obliged to state how they voted, or indeed to lie about this as a result of peer pressure, and this is likely to have a negative effect on their dignity.

Ethics principle 2 - Study 2

Although the study now asks for volunteers and asks them to complete a consent form, this cannot be considered ‘informed’ consent because the researcher has not told them what the study is really about. Instead, the participants are being deceived about the real purpose of the study. A degree of deception is sometimes necessary in some forms of psychological research, but the degree of deception involved here is unethical as the participants are not being told in advance that they will be asked publicly about a confidential matter (voting behaviour).

Ethics principle 3 - Study 2

The correct answer is a.

Participants in this study would be aware that they were taking part in research, and were also told explicitly that they could withdraw from the study at any point. One view could be that as they did not know the true nature of the study, they were not able to withdraw from it, but this issue is dealt with under ‘informed consent’. Note that a study should not be given approval if it fails to meet any of the ethical principles.

To be approved a study would need to meet all criteria. If it fails to meet just one, it should not receive approval.

The ethics panel were still not convinced and did not give approval to Study 2 either. Undeterred, the researcher revised the design of the study and resubmitted it yet again.

The new study will involve recruiting participants through a poster placed on a college noticeboard, which will ask for volunteers to take part in a study on ‘social pressures and voting behaviour’. Volunteers will be provided with an accurate summary of the proposed study which will also explain that they have the right to withdraw at any point, and should feel free to do so. After having read the summary they will be asked to sign a consent form. The study will involve providing participants with transcripts of fictitious election speeches from three candidates for Student Union President of a fictitious college. The participants will read the speeches and indicate on a form whom they would vote for. Following this, they will be told that an overwhelming number of students are voting for one of the other candidates and again asked to indicate on a form whom they would vote for.

Ethics principle 1 - Study 3

Participants in this study are not being asked to reveal how they voted in a real election and are also not having to reveal any shift in their voting behaviour to a group. This study is therefore very unlikely to have any negative effect on the participants' psychological wellbeing, health, values or dignity.

Ethics principle 2 - Study 3

The study now tells potential participants what is involved before asking for their consent. It is possible that telling the participants what the study is exploring will affect how they respond and is therefore unlikely to provide any useful results. However, judging the ethics of research is a different matter from judging whether the design of the study will produce useful results.

Participants in this study would be aware that they were taking part in research, and were also told explicitly that they could withdraw from the study at any point.

As the study met all of the criteria, it should be approved.

In the end this research was approved by the ethics committee. One thing that is important to bear in mind is that obtaining approval involves a dialogue between the researcher(s) and the relevant ethics committee. This dialogue invariably involves an interpretation of the principles and a negotiation of what can be regarded as acceptable research conduct.

This activity focused on three key ethics principles, namely the right to withdraw, informed consent and the wellbeing of participants. However, ethics panels evaluating real research need to take into consideration a more complex set of issues.

Here is a PDF summary of the activity to print or save in your files.

Activity 2: Researching animals and humans

This activity explores the ethics of animal research and the guidelines that govern the use of animals (although, as you will see, not all animals) in psychological research.

Psychology is often thought to be just about human beings. However, there are important areas of psychological research that involve non-human animals.

Research with non-human animals poses two important questions:

• How relevant are studies of non-human animals to human psychology? Aren’t human beings unique and different from other animals?
• Is it acceptable to carry out experiments on non-human animals in the interests of science?

The tasks in this online activity give you the opportunity to consider these questions for yourself and clarify your own opinions and understanding of the issues they raise. The activity will help you to recognise why psychologists carry out research with non-human animals and identify the ethical issues involved in such research.

Why carry out research with animals?

You have been introduced to a number of ethics principles that apply to research on human participants. But why might psychologists want to do research with animals other than humans?

Here are some reasons. Select ‘Reveal comment’ to read a more detailed explanation:

To find out about the evolution of psychological functions .

By studying how different species adapt their behaviour to their environments, and trying to identify innate factors in adaptation, it is hoped that the interactions of genes, environments and learning can be understood better, thus shedding light on how evolution may have shaped human psychological processes.

To better understand psychological principles that apply across different species .

If similar processes are found in a range of species, this helps researchers to describe and (they hope) explain the basic principles of behaviour and other processes, such as attachment and learning.

To do experiments that would be unethical with humans .

Arguably, as you will learn later in this activity, it can be seen as less problematic to use non-human animals in experiments that involve potentially harmful conditions such as deprivation, pain or confinement, or for example, to explore the effects of punishment.

To better understand what is special about humans .

A substantial amount of research with non-human animals is carried out to identify psychological functions such as language and empathy, which other animals may not possess. Attempts to teach language to chimpanzees, for example, have met with only limited success, clarifying the specialised language abilities of humans.

The ethics of animal research

In this course you were introduced to a number of ethics principles that apply to research on human participants. These include informed consent from participants, ensuring their right to withdraw, protecting their welfare and evaluating the costs and benefits of the study.

Which of these do not apply to animals?

Of course, animals cannot give informed consent, and, given that most are kept in captivity anyway, the ‘right to withdraw’ does not really apply.

However, there are separate ethical guidelines for work with animals, which are also issued by the British Psychological Society.

They include provisions such as:

• The ‘smallest number of animals sufficient to accomplish the research goals’ should be used in any study.
• The costs and benefits of any study must be carefully evaluated.
• The welfare of the animal must be taken into account and researchers must ‘seek to minimise any pain, suffering or distress that might arise’ from any experiment.
• Researchers should use alternatives to animal research whenever possible, including data collected by other researchers, lower species (leeches, cell cultures, etc.) or, increasingly, computer simulations.

What emerges from these studies are the ‘3 Rs’ of animal research. These are to:

• refine procedures to minimise suffering
• reduce the number of individual animals used
• replace animals with other alternatives.

These guidelines are interpreted and applied by ethics committees of research institutions and other bodies (including the Home Office) that grant special licences for keeping animals and using them in research.

Task 1: Evaluating the ethics of research

• Use alternatives to animal research whenever possible, including data collected by other researchers, lower species (leeches, cell cultures, etc.) or increasingly, computer simulations.

Based on the guidelines on animal research, do you think an ethics committee would approve each of the following studies?

1. A researcher at a UK university is applying for a licence to replicate Harlow’s studies of deprivation. Infant monkeys would be raised in isolation with different types of ‘surrogate mother’ (inanimate objects that were either cloth-covered or made of wire with a milk bottle attached).

Do you think an ethics committee would give this study approval?

An ethics committee, and the Home Office, would probably not give approval for this study to be carried out. Not only does it raise issues about animal welfare and deprivation, but Harlow has already carried out this research, and it is highly unlikely that simply repeating the study would be considered a benefit great enough to outweigh the cost to the animals involved.

2. A researcher in a UK animal research laboratory is interested in addiction. He is proposing a study in which a small radio receiver would be implanted into the brains of seventy-five rhesus monkeys. These receivers would allow the researcher to activate areas of the brain thought to be associated with ‘pleasure’. The study would help shed light on brain mechanisms involved in addiction.

Several issues would need to be considered here. One is the number of monkeys involved. Ethics committees must ensure that the smallest number needed is actually used in the study. It is unlikely that as many as seventy-five monkeys would be absolutely necessary, so the researcher would probably be asked to make a very strong case, or reduce the number. Also, the ethics committee would want to hear what would happen to the monkeys after the experiment. Would they be able to live normally after the experiment is over?

3. A laboratory has been contracted by the Ministry of Defence to evaluate whether pigeons could be used in a guided missile to direct it towards an enemy aircraft in order to destroy it. The research would involve three pigeons being trained in a Skinner box to peck at targets on a radar screen.

Believe it or not, a study such as this, which drew on the ideas of B.F. Skinner, was carried out in the USA during the Second World War, as part of the so-called ‘Project Orcon’ or ‘Pigeon Project’. In this study there are no obvious ethical concerns (except for the more general issues of animal welfare), given that the pigeons’ ability to guide a missile is simply being evaluated, and a standard Skinner-box procedure is being proposed. So the project would probably receive ethical clearance, as the committee are likely to consider it to involve a discrimination learning task using specific stimuli (target on a radar screen), and there are no obvious animal welfare issues involved. (The pigeons would not actually be used in the attacks, or at least that is not what this project is about.)

4. A researcher has applied for permission to carry out an observational study in the Kalahari Desert of communication among pied babblers (wild birds) and with other species. The study would involve two researchers wearing camouflage hiding in the bushes, observing the behaviour of the pied babblers and recording their mating calls.

Research such as this is being done regularly around the world. While most of the ethical guidance that you have learned about so far in this activity has referred to laboratory work, the BPS also regulates observational work in the animals’ natural habitats. Researchers would be asked by the committee to follow careful protocols to ensure that disruption to animals’ lives is kept to a minimum. Disruption might have a detrimental effect not only on the birds’ lives, but might also impact on the inferences that can be drawn from the study. This is because the observed behaviour might be a reaction to intrusion by researchers, rather than something that occurs naturally, in the wild.

Different animals, different guidelines

Although human beings are animals, for most people there is a strong conceptual division between human and non-human animals. Humans – or homo sapiens – are seen as being fundamentally different even from pan paniscus (the bonobo chimpanzee (Figure 9) – genetically our closest relative in the animal world).

It is this widespread belief that humans occupy a special place in nature that underpins the whole notion that it might be appropriate to carry out some types of research with non-human animals, where human research ethics would not permit such research to be done with humans.

As you have seen, it’s not that there are no ethical considerations in research with other species, but rather that different, and less stringent, considerations apply.

There is, however, a further issue here. It is not just that humans are believed to be different from non-human animals. There are also differences between animals. In fact, what is meant by the word ‘animal’? While there are many people who believe that the animal world ends with the bonobo chimpanzee, we rarely think about where it begins.

The final task in this activity encourages you to explore this question, to examine your own views and to critically consider the issues involved.

Task 2: Reflecting on different species

Have a look at the list below and consider the following:

• Which one would you consider to be an ‘animal’?
• Which ones you would permit animal research on (with BPS guidance in mind)?

For each answer try to think of reasons why you referred to some of these species as ‘animals’ but not others, or why you think that research on some might be more appropriate than others. Once you have indicated your responses, go to the next page, where you will find the current legal status of research on these species and read about some of the issues involved in determining which animals can and cannot be used in research.

Animal research and the law

Only one of the organisms included in the list is not an animal: the E. coli bacterium. At least, that is the straightforward scientific answer. However, you may be surprised to learn that in many countries the law regulates what is, and what is not, an animal – at least where research is concerned. Such definitions determine which species are covered by the guidelines for psychologists working with animals. According to the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, which legislates for research in the UK, only species that are vertebrates (possess a spinal column) and one single invertebrate, the octopus ( octopus vulgaris ), are legally defined as ‘animals’ when it comes to research. The same category of living things is also protected by the Animal Welfare Act 2006. Under this definition, the only ‘animals’ in the list are the rat, cat, dog, horse, dolphin and gorilla: the coral, woodlouse, crab, mosquito and scorpion are not legally ‘animals’. As for the second question, there are really no right or wrong answers. You were asked ‘which ones you would permit animal research on’ and that is a matter of personal ethics. However, you now know which of the species listed are protected by law (at least in the UK).

So there are many animals, or should we say ‘organisms’, that are not covered by any legislation, and for research purposes do not count as ‘animals’. There is no law protecting lobsters, spiders or mosquitoes (and especially not the E. coli bacteria) from being used in any way whatsoever in research. The British Psychological Society (BPS) does recommend that the ethics standards of work with protected species should also be maintained with organisms not covered by the relevant legislation, but this is just a recommendation.

Even among the vertebrates, further distinctions are made. Can you guess which animals receive extra protection? It is horses, cats, dogs and primates. In the case of primates, the reason is undoubtedly their genetic proximity to humans and the frequency with which they are used in research, but what about cats, dogs and horses?

The reason is that these animals are regarded by many humans as occupying a special place in the animal world, given that they are kept as pets. However, humans don’t always agree on which animals are pets. Whereas most people in the UK would not consider eating a dog, in parts of Asia dogs are considered a delicacy. Horses, donkeys and a host of other animals that people in some countries treat as companions adorn many a menu in other countries. So, some animals are a ‘man’s (or a woman’s) best friend’ whilst others are ‘vermin’ or ‘food’. In the same way, some species are regarded as ‘beautiful’, ‘cute’ or ‘intelligent’, while others are treated as less so. What all of this suggests is that differentiation within the animal world is not always based on strict scientific criteria, but rather on cultural sensitivities.

In this activity you were given an opportunity to consider a number of questions relevant to psychological research on animals. These included why psychologists study animals, how the rights of the animals used in research are protected, and how the appropriateness of animals for research is determined.

However, the controversy surrounding this research, especially the study on the effects of deprivation, had a different kind of impact on psychology. It made researchers more aware of the need to regulate research on animals and treat them more humanely. It was therefore in the aftermath of Harlow’s study that rules guiding psychological research on animals began to be tightened.

Activity 3: Researching animals

You have just learned about the ethics of animal research; now you have the opportunity of hearing from two psychologists working with animals in two films, Researching Animals ..

Reading about research that psychologists have conducted with animals is often fascinating, but seeing how the research is conducted is even better. Film A (8 minutes) introduces the work of Alex Thornton with meerkats; in Film B (17 minutes) you will learn about Tetsuro Matsuzawa’s work with chimpanzees.

First, watch the two films without interruption. After doing so, read ‘Issues to consider’ below, then watch them again, keeping these issues in mind. Make sure that you take some notes.

Transcript: Film A: Researching Animals (meerkats)

Transcript: film b: researching animals (chimpanzees), issues to consider.

• Alex Thornton has looked at how meerkats teach their young to catch scorpions. To what extent is this process similar to or different from that which human parents use?
• Tetsuro Matsuzawa found that, when it comes to completing the photographic memory task, chimpanzees are superior to humans. What explanation does he give for this finding? Can the performance of the chimpanzees be explained by conditioning?
• Think about the location where the two researchers conduct their studies. What are the advantages and disadvantages of researching animals in their natural habitat compared to captivity?
• Compare the reasons why Alex Thornton and Tetsuro Matsuzawa study animals. Which of them is interested in animal behaviour not just for its own sake, but also as a way of learning about human capacities?

This free course provided an introduction to studying sociology. It took you through a series of exercises designed to develop your approach to study and learning at a distance and helped to improve your confidence as an independent learner.

Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources.

Philip Banyard

Course image: Phil Dolby in Flickr made available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Licence .

Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4: Milgram, S (1974) Obedience to Authority, Harper & Row. Copyright © 1974 by Stanley Milgram

Figure 5: Copyright © Andresr/iStock

Figure 6: Copyright © Michael Flippo/iStock

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Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University.

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Stanley Milgram

In 1954 Harvard’s Department of Social Relations took the unusual step of admitting a bright young student who had not taken a single psychology course.  Fortunately Stanley Milgram was soon up to speed in social psychology, and in the course of his doctoral work at Harvard he conducted an innovative cross-cultural comparison of conformity in Norway and France under the guidance of Gordon Allport. 

Obtaining his Ph.D. in 1960, Milgram was ready to expand his work on conformity with a series of experiments on obedience to authority that he conducted as an assistant professor at Yale from 1960 to 1963. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s report on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem, Milgram wondered whether her claims about “the banality of evil” – that evil acts can come from ordinary people following orders as they do their jobs – could be demonstrated in the lab. Milgram staged meticulously designed sham experiments in which subjects were ordered to administer dangerous shocks to fellow volunteers (in reality, the other volunteers were confederates and the shocks were fake). Contradicting the predictions of every expert he polled , Milgram found that more than seventy percent of the subjects administered what they thought might be fatal shocks to an innocent stranger. Collectively known as The Milgram Experiment, this groundbreaking work demonstrated the human tendency to obey commands issued by an authority figure, and more generally, the tendency for behavior to be controlled more by the demands of the situation than by idiosyncratic traits of the person.

The Milgram Experiment is one of the best-known social psychology studies of the 20th century. With this remarkable accomplishment under his belt, young Dr. Milgram returned to Harvard in 1963 to take a position as Assistant Professor of Social Psychology.

During this time at Harvard, Milgram undertook a new, equally innovative line of research, known as the Small World Experiment.  Milgram asked a sample of people to trace out a chain of personal connections to a designated stranger living thousands of miles away. His finding that most people could do this successfully with a chain of six or fewer links yielded the familiar expression “Six Degrees of Separation,” which later became the name of a play and a movie,  a source for the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” and a major theme of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 bestseller,  The Tipping Point . The internet has made it easier to study social networks, and several decades after its discovery, the phenomenon has become a subject of intense new research.

Stanley Milgram left Harvard in 1967 to return to his hometown, New York City, accepting a position as head of the social psychology program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  Tragically, he died of a heart attack at the age of 51. Milgram is listed as number 46 on the American Psychological Association’s list of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century.

Blass, T. (2002).  The man who shocked the world.  Psychology Today, Mar/Apr2002, 35(2), p. 68.

Eminent psychologists of the 20th century.  (July/August, 2002). Monitor on Psychology, 33(7), p.29.

Milgram, S. (1977).  The individual in a social world.  Reading, MA:  Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.

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Why (almost) everything you know about Milgram is wrong

Ella Rhodes reports from a Stephen Reicher keynote at the Society's Annual Conference in Nottingham.

15 May 2018

Standing in front of a keen psychology audience, Stephen Reicher (University of St Andrews) said he felt like he was at a primary school to tell children why Santa wasn't real. But, in fact, his and Alexander Haslam's extensive research on the 60s researcher Stanley Milgram has only made the man, and his electric shock box, ever-more interesting.

Milgram's 1961 experiments into obedience set out to answer a question that we've been asking for centuries – what makes normal individuals do monstrous things? Milgram's participants were told the experiments were a study of punishment and its effects on learning – they acted as 'teachers' giving electric shocks to 'learners' when they misremembered the second word from a list of word pairs.

Participants were in a separate room to the learners – who, in reality, were confederates of Milgram and received no shocks – but could overhear their shouts of pain as the shocks increased in power. These sessions were overseen by a white-coated experimenter who would coax any struggling participants to continue with the experiment.

Prior to this work Milgram asked colleagues how many people would give a shock of 300 volts or more, and many said only true psychopaths would do so. But in his first baseline study of 40 people, 26 went all the way to 450 volts and beyond – in other words two out of three people would kill someone for making an error in a learning experiment.

From this work Milgram developed a theory that, during obedience, people adopt an agentic state seeing themselves as instruments to carry out the will of another and feel little or no responsibility for their actions. However – and it's a rather big however – there are some key elements from Milgram's studies which undermine the theories he developed from them.

First, while his baseline study would back up the agentic state theory he actually did around 30 studies and obedience varied between 0 and 100 per cent… overall 58 per cent of people actually disobeyed the pushy experimenter. How can we understand this variability, Reicher asked, if the agentic state is true?

Second, when we consider the goings-on during the actual experiment and look at the experimenter's four prods to encourage participants to continue, they reveal that people really do not like following orders. The four prods used were: 'please continue', 'the experiment requires you to continue', 'It's essential you continue' and 'you have no other choice – you must go on'. Reicher pointed out that only the final one of these phrases is a direct order, and in fact none of Milgram's participants continued with the study after hearing this order. As Reicher said – Milgram's own research here is emphatically not showing that people have a tendency to obey orders.

Finally, Milgram's work did not account for the role of participants hearing the learner's voice shouting in pain. While agentic state theory would suggest we are bound into the voice of the experimenter, deferentially following orders, this is not revealed in Milgram's own archived materials – Reicher and Haslam found 40 per cent of participants dropped out when the learner spoke for the first time and mentioned the pain he was in.

All of this flies in the face of the overriding narrative Milgram established after his experiments of obedient people in agentic states blindly following orders. While his findings are in no way artificial, Reicher said, he could have reached the conclusion that people aren't programmed to take orders but rather make choices over which 'voice' to listen to in a given situation, which can vary depending on an individual's relative identification. 

Find much more about Milgram and his studies in our archive , including this from Reicher and Haslam, and an exploration of rhetoric and resistance in the studies.

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What Would YOU Have Done in Milgram’s Experiment?

Enhanced self-perceptions and obedience to authority.

Posted September 2, 2015

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Most regular people are capable of obeying an authority figure’s commands to the point of killing an innocent other.

This is the bottom line of Stanley Milgram’s (1963) famous research into the nature of human obedience. Milgram’s work, arguably the most highly cited and most important research in the history of the social sciences, involved having groups of normal adults in Connecticut take on the role of “teacher” in a laboratory experiment. In this experiment (which included much in the way of deception about the true purpose of the study), the “teacher” was told to administer electric shocks to a “learner” who was (ostensibly) also a participant in the study. The shocks were to increase each time the “learner” made a mistake – and the machine used to administer these shocks (which were actually fake) was labeled with such terms as “DANGER” and “XXX.” Further, the experimenter, a tall, serious guy in a lab coat, told the “teacher” that he must continue increasing the voltage. And the “learner” starts screaming and complains of a heart condition – and then, after the voltages are extremely high, the “learner” stops responding in any capacity at all.

In short, this drama, created by master social psychologist Stanley Milgram, was designed to get the real participant (the “teacher”) to think that he had just killed a man – only because the participant didn’t have the guts to disobey the experimenter. That’s got to smart.

Teaching about Milgram’s research is certainly a high point in the semester of any social psychology professor. The lessons learned, the power of the study itself, etc., combine for a deep and important lesson on the nature of human behavior.

What Would YOU Do?

Students who learn about Milgram’s research have several standard responses. They are partly outraged. They are partly surprised. Interestingly, a common theme that also tends to emerge is this: Students often comment that “they themselves wouldn’t have obeyed the experimenter.” They come up with all kinds of reasons on this point.

My wife Kathy, also a social psychologist, and I were curious about this particular point. Of course, in our discussion, I stated that I would not have obeyed the experimenter. Similarly, she maintained that SHE would not have obeyed the commands – but that she thought I would have. Ha!

So being experimental social psychologists ourselves, we designed a study to explore this issue. Along with two great students, Sara Hubbard Hall and Jared Legare, we studied perceptions of what people think they would do in Milgram’s experiment ( Geher et al., 2002 ).

In this research, we briefly described the methodology of Milgram’s study and asked participants to indicate on a scale of 0 to 450 volts the point at which they thought that they would disobey the experimenter. The truth is that more than 60% of the participants in Milgram’s research “shocked all the way” (to 450 volts). We also asked our participants to indicate the highest shock level that they would predict that a “typical other person of their same age and gender ” would go up until before disobeying the experimenter.

The results? Shocking! On average, people indicated that they would stop at about 140 volts, whereas they predicted that “typical others” would stop obeying at about 210 volts. That is a difference of 35%. In other words, on average, people think that they are about 35% more likely to “do the right thing” compared with “typical others.” People seem to be biased to think of themselves as somehow better than average (see McFarland & Miller (1990)) – and our results pretty clearly tell such a tale.

Further, the “self” ratings and “other” ratings in our study were from “statistically non-overlapping distributions.” This is a fancy way of saying that not a single person in the study (with over 100 adult participants) indicated that they would obey the authority figure more than would the “typical other” – everyone – every single person in this study – reported that they would be better than “the typical other.” Interesting, right?

Bottom Line

Hey, we’re all human. Milgram showed that it’s in our nature to be highly influenced by social situations – and it’s often in our nature to obey authority even when doing so is clearly the wrong thing to do.

Our research on perceptions of what people would do in Milgram’s study provides an interesting corollary to Milgram’s findings. We tend to think that we personally are above all that – humans like you and I are highly motivated to think that we would do the right thing. In fact, we tend to think that we’re about 35% more likely to do the right thing than the “typical other.”

In combination, these findings paint a complex picture of human nature. On one hand, we are highly influenced by situational factors – often more so than we should be. On the other hand, we seem to be highly motivated to not see how powerful situational forces are in shaping our own behavior. Taken together, these findings speak very much to the turmoil and inner conflict that so often underly the nature of human social behavior.

Can you tell I’m excited for the Hollywood production of Milgram’s research to hit the big screen in October? Experimenter comes out October 16. If you are a social psychology nerd like me, then admit it, you're excited for this one too!

References and Related Information

Geher, G., Bauman, K.P., Hubbard, S.E.K., & Legare, J. (2002). Self and other obedience estimates: Biases and moderators. The Journal of Social Psychology, 142, 677-689.

Mcfarland, C., & Miller, D. T. (1990). Judgments of Self-Other Similarity Just Like Other People, Only more So. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 16, 475-484.

Milgram, Stanley (1963). "Behavioral Study of Obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (4): 371–8.

Experimenter (2015) . Directed by Michael Almereyda.

Glenn Geher, Ph.D. , is professor of psychology at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is founding director of the campus’ Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program.

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MILGRAM is an interactive music project created by DECO*27 and Yamanaka Takuya.

The story takes place in a mysterious prison with 10 prisoners. You experience MILGRAM through the eyes of the amnesiac prison guard Es , guided by the talking rabbit Jackalope . You will have to uncover the truth behind the prisoners' crimes, and vote whether or not they should be forgiven.

There are 3 trials in MILGRAM; each trial with a song for every prisoner, which contain hints regarding their crimes. Voting for the prisoners can be done once a day via the official website or the MILGRAM Portal app following the release of the prisoners' songs. Depending on your vote, it may change the songs and placement of the prisoners in the next trial.

MILGRAM Portal [ ]

MILGRAM Portal is the official app for MILGRAM. Alongside announcements and TImeline conversations of the prisoners, there is also exclusive extra content and perks for members. Voting can also be done through the app.

Es wakes up in a strange place, with a rabbit on their lap and no recollection of where or who they are. The rabbit introduces himself as Jackalope, and goes on to explain; Es is a prison guard, tasked with the job of managing the 10 prisoners incarcerated in the prison. Jackalope warns Es that despite what they seem, all the prisoners in MILGRAM are murderers.

Es must find out what the prisoners' crimes and motivations are, and then choose whether to vote them guilty (not forgiven) or innocent (forgiven). MILGRAM extracts a song and music video from the minds of the prisoners, from which Es can then make their judgement.

The voting is carried out through a 3 trial system. You, as the audience, can decide what judgement Es will make in the trials through your votes. The votes may change the songs and placements of the prisoners in the next trial.

Characters [ ]

There are 12 characters in total: 2 guards, and 10 prisoners.

Prisoners (in order of prisoner number):

• Sakurai Haruka
• Kashiki Yuno
• Kajiyama Fuuta
• Kusunoki Muu
• Kirisaki Shidou
• Shiina Mahiru
• Mukuhara Kazui
• Momose Amane
• Kayano Mikoto
• Yuzuriha Kotoko

Voting System [ ]

Screen when voting for Shidou

After a prisoner's song is released, it will be possible to vote for that prisoner once a day.

Ways to vote [ ]

• From the official website: https://milgram.jp/judge
• From the app MILGRAM Portal (only available on Japanese app stores)
• 2 Kayano Mikoto
• 3 Sakurai Haruka

What's on your mind?

Analyzing psychological studies of the 20th & 21st century, the milgram shock experiment.

In 1961, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment to test the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Milgram’s goal was to examine justifications for acts of genocide during World War II and whether obedience to superiors played a role in allowing people to act against their morals.

The teacher and learner were taken into an adjacent room by the experimenter and the learner was strapped to a chair with electrodes that appeared to connect back to an electroshock generator in the other room. The teacher and learner were then separated so they could still communicate, but not see one another. The teacher was then instructed to ask the learner multiple-choice questions and the learner would press a button to indicate their response. If the answer was incorrect, then the teacher would administer a shock increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. The maximum shock possible would be after 30 incorrect answers at 450 volts which was labeled “Danger: Severe Shock”.

Milgram found that 65% of participants continued to the highest voltage level of 450 volts and every participant continued to at least 300 volts. However, every participant paused to question the experiment at least once and were uncomfortable continuing.

This study showed that ordinary people are likely to follow orders given to them by authority, even to the extent of killing an innocent person. Personally, I have always been skeptical of those in authority. When voting, I feel the need to be aware of the influence a candidate could potentially have over their constituents, such as myself, and I try to choose a candidate with good character and morals that align with my own. I believe this study shows the importance of aspects of democracy such as voting, checks and balances, and the balance of power between branches of government. With authority divided into many different sections and layers, it eliminates the ability for a dishonest or immoral official to have enough influence to have their constituents act against their morals. As shown in the study, people will obey authority. So, as Americans, we are lucky to have a democracy that prevents overwhelming influence from one particular branch or person.

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December 1, 2011

16 min read

Which Nations Conform Most?

An account of Stanley Milgram's experiments from 1962, in which Norwegians and Frenchmen were separately subjected to synthetic group pressure

By Stanley Milgram

Editor's Note: This article was originally published in Volume 205, Number 6 of Scientific American in December 1961.

People who travel abroad seem to enjoy sending back reports on what people are like in various countries they visit. A variety of national stereotypes is part and parcel of popular knowledge. Italians are said to be "volatile," Germans "hard-working," the Dutch "clean," the Swiss "neat," the English "reserved," and so on. The habit of making generalizations about national groups is not a modern invention. Byzantine war manuals contain careful notes on the deportment of foreign populations, and Americans still recognize themselves in the brilliant national portrait drawn by Alexis de Tocqueville more than 100 years ago.

And yet the skeptical student must always come back to the question: "How do I know that what is said about a foreign group is true?" Prejudice and personal bias may color such accounts, and in the absence of objective evidence it is not easy to distinguish between fact and fiction. Thus the problem faced by the modern investigator who wishes to go beyond literary description is how to make an objective analysis of behavioral differences among national groups. By this he means simply an analysis that is not based on subjective judgments and that can be verified by any competent investigator who follows the same methods.

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It is easy to show objectively that people in different countries often speak different languages, eat different foods and observe different social customs. But can one go further and show national differences in "character" or "personality"? When we turn to the more subtle dimensions of behavior, there is very little evidence to make a case for national differences. It is not that such differences are to be denied out of hand; it is just that we lack sufficient reliable information to make a clear judgement.

Before reporting the results of my own study let me refer briefly to some earlier efforts to achieve objectivity in studying this elusive problem. One approach has been to examine the literature and other cultural products of a nation in the hope of identifying underlying psychological characteristics. For example, Donald V. McGranahan of Harvard University studied successful stage plays performed in Germany and the U.S. and concluded that German stage characters were more devoted to principles and ideological notions, whereas the Americans were more concerned with the attainment of purely personal satisfactions. The obvious limitation of such a study is that the behavior and attitudes under examination are the synthetic ones of the stage and may bear little or no resemblance to those of real life.

Another indirect approach has relied on the tools of clinical psychology. This method was pioneered by anthropologists in the study of small, primitive societies and has only recently been applied to modern urban nations. These studies rely heavily on such tests as the Rorschach ink-blot test and the thematic apperception test (T.A.T.). In the latter the subject is shown a drawing of a situation that can be variously interpreted and is asked to make up a story about it. The major difficulty here is that the tests themselves have not been adequately validated and are basically impressionistic.

Finally, sample surveys of the type developed by Elmo Roper and George Gallup in this country have been applied to the problem. Geoffrey Gorer, an English social scientist, based his study Exploring English Character on a questionnaire distributed to 11,000 of his compatriots. The questions dealt with varied aspects of English life, such as courtship patterns, experiences in school and practices in the home. Unfortunately there are many reasons why an individual's answer may not correspond to the facts. He may deliberately distort his answers to produce a good impression, or he may have genuine misconceptions of his own behavior, attributable either to faulty memory or to the blindness people often exhibit toward their own actions and motivations.

These methods should not be dismissed as unimportant in the study of national characteristics: Yet in principle if one wants to know whether the people of one nation behave differently from those of another, it would seem only reasonable to examine the relevant behavior directly, and to do so under conditions of controlled observations in order to reduce the effects of personal bias and to make measurement more precise.

An important step in this direction was reported in 1954 by an international team of psychologists who worked together as the Organization for Comparative Social Research. This team studied reactions to threat and rejection among school children in seven European nations, using hypotheses advanced by Stanley Schachter of Columbia University. The inquiry was not specifically designed to study national characteristics but chiefly to see if certain concepts regarding threat and rejection would hold up when tested in different countries. In the course of the study certain differences between countries did turn up, but the investigators felt they were not necessarily genuine. Conceivably they were due to defects in the experiment or to inadequacies in the theory behind it. Although its focus was on theory validation, this study is a landmark in cross-national research. Unfortunately the Organization for Comparative Social Research halted its research program when the study was completed.

My own investigation was begun in 1957. My objective was to see if experimental techniques could be applied to the study of national characteristics, and in particular to see if one could measure conformity in two European countries: Norway and France. Conformity was chosen for several reasons. First, a national culture can be said to exist only if men adhere, or conform, to common standards of behavior; this is the psychological mechanism underlying all cultural behavior. Second, conformity has become a burning issue in much of current social criticism; critics have argued that people have become too sensitive to the opinions of others, and that this represents an unhealthy development in modern society. Finally, good experimental methods have been developed for measuring conformity.

The chief tool of investigation was a modified form of the group-pressure experiment used by Solomon E. Asch and other social psychologists [see "Opinions and Social Pressure," by Solomon E. Asch, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, November, 1955]. In Asch's original experiment a group of half a dozen subjects was shown a line of a certain length and asked to say which of three other lines matched it. All but one of the subjects had been secretly instructed beforehand to select one of the "wrong" lines on each trial or in a certain percentage of the trials. The naive subject was so placed that he heard the answers of most of the group before he had to announce his own decision. Asch found that under this form of social pressure a large fraction of subjects went along with the group rather than accept the unmistakable evidence of their own eyes.

Our experiment is conducted with acoustic tones rather than with lines drawn on cards. Five of the subjects are confederates of the experimenter and conspire to put social pressure on the sixth subject. The subjects listen to two tones and are asked to say which is the longer. The five confederates answer first and their decisions are heard by the subject, who answers last. The confederates have been instructed to announce wrong answers on 16 of the 30 trials that constitute one experiment.

We elected to use tones rather than lines because they are better suited to an experimental method using "synthetic groups." Two psychologists working at Yale University, Robert Blake and Jack W. Brehm, had discovered that grouppressure experiments can be conducted without requiring the actual presence of confederates. It is sufficient if the subject thinks they are present and hears their voices through headphones. With tape recordings it is easy to create synthetic groups. Tapes do not have to be paid by the hour and they are always available.

When the test subject entered our laboratory, he saw several coats on hangers and immediately got the impression that others were present. He was taken to one of six closed booths, where he was provided with headphones and a microphone. As he listened to the instructions through the headphones he overheard the voices of the other "subjects" and assumed that all the booths were occupied. During the actual experiment he would hear five taped answers before he was asked to give his own.

Except when we made a technical slip the subject never caught on to the trick. Most subjects became deeply involved in the situation, and strong tensions were generated when they realized they must stand alone against five unanimous opponents. This situation created a genuine and deeply felt conflict that had to be resolved either through independence or conformity.

Once we had refined our techniques at Harvard University we were ready to experiment abroad with Norwegian and French subjects. In which of the two national environments would people go along with the group more and in which would there be greater independence?

Most of the subjects used in the Norwegian study were students attending the University of Oslo. Because this is the only full-fledged university in Norway, a good geographic representation was obtained. Our test sample included students from beyond the Arctic Circle, from the fiord country of western Norway and from Trondheim, the former Viking capital.

When the study moved to Paris, French students were selected who matched the Norwegians in age, level of education, fields of study, sex, marital status and-so far as possible-social class. Once again a good geographic distribution was obtained, because students from all parts of France came to study in Paris. A few of the French subjects came from French North African cities. Those used in the experiment were culturally as French as people living on the mainland; they were of French parentage and had been educated in French lycees.

In Norway the entire experiment was conducted by a native Norwegian and all the recorded voices were those of natives. In France the experiments were conducted by native Frenchmen. Much effort was made to match the tone and quality of the Norwegian and French groups. We made many recordings until people who were sensitive to the nuances of both languages were satisfied that equivalent group atmospheres had been achieved.

Twenty Norwegian subjects and the same number of French subjects were studied in the first set of experiments. The Norwegian subjects conformed to the group on 62 per cent of the critical trials (that is, trials in which the group deliberately voted wrong); the French subjects conformed to the group on 50 per cent of the critical trials.

After each subject had taken part in the experiment he was told its true character and was asked to give his reactions. Almost all participants in both countries had accepted the experiment at face value and admitted feeling the strong pressure of the group. A Norwegian student from a farm in Nordland, above the Arctic Circle, said: "I think the experiment had a very ingenious arrangement. I had no idea about the setup until it was explained to me. Of course, it was a little embarrassing to be exposed in such a way." A self-critical student from Oslo remarked: "It was a real trick and I was stupid to have fallen into the trap....It must be fun to study psychology." Similar reactions were obtained in France, where students were impressed with the idea of psychological experimentation. (In neither country is psychological research as widespread or as intensive as it is in the U.S., so that subjects are relatively unsophisticated about psychological deceptions.)

It would have been superficial, of course, to conduct just one experiment in Norway, another in France and then draw conclusions. In a second experiment we undertook to change the subject's attitude toward the importance of the experiment itself to see if this might alter the original findings. In this new series of trials (and in all subsequent ones) the subjects were told that the results of the experiments would be applied to the design of aircraft safety signals. In this way their performance was linked to a life-and-death issue. As one might have predicted, the subjects this time showed somewhat greater independence of the group, but once again the level of conformity was higher in Norway (56 per cent) than it was in France (48 per cent).

One possibility that had to be considered at the outset was that Norwegians and Frenchmen differ in their capacity for discriminating tonal lengths and that this led to the greater number of errors made by Norwegians in the group situation. We were able to show, however, by giving each subject a tone-discrimination test, that there was no difference in the level of discrimination of students in the two countries.

In both of the first two conformity experiments the subjects were required to do more than decide an issue in the face of unanimous opposition: they were also required to announce that decision openly for all to hear (or so the subject thought). Thus the act had the character of a public statement. We all recognize that the most obvious forms of conformity are the public ones. For example, when prevailing standards of dress or conduct are breached, the reaction is usually immediate and critical. So we decided we had better see if the Norwegians conformed more only under public conditions, when they had to declare their answers aloud. Accordingly, we undertook an experiment in both countries in which the subject was allowed to record his answers on paper rather than announce them to the group. The experiments were performed with a new group of 20 Norwegian and 20 French students.

When the requirement of a public response was eliminated, the amount of conformity dropped considerably in both countries. But for the third time the French subjects were more independent than the Norwegians. In Paris students went along with the group on 34 per cent of the critical trials. In Oslo the figure was close to 50 per cent. Therefore elimination of the requirement of a public response reduced conformity 14 percentage points in France but only 6 percentage points in Norway.

It is very puzzling that the Norwegians so often voted with the group, even when given a secret ballot. One possible interpretation is that the average Norwegian, for whatever reason, believes that his private action will ultimately become known to others. Interviews conducted among the Norwegians offer some indirect evidence for this conjecture. In spite of the assurances that the responses would be privately analyzed, one subject said he feared that because he had disagreed too often the experimenter would assemble the group and discuss the disagreements with them.

Another Norwegian subject, who had agreed with the group 12 out of 16 times, offered this explanation: "In the world now, you have to be not too much in opposition. In high school I was more independent than now. It's the modern way of life that you have to agree a little more. If you go around opposing, you might be looked upon as bad. Maybe this had an influence." He was then asked, "Even though you were answering in private?" and he replied, "Yes. I tried to put myself in a public situation, even though I was sitting in the booth in private."

A fourth experiment was designed to test the sensitivity of Norwegian and French subjects to a further aspect of group opinion. What would happen if subjects were exposed to overt and audible criticism from the conspiratorial group? It seemed reasonable to expect a higher degree of conformity under these conditions. On the other hand, active criticism might conceivably lead to a greater show of independence. Moreover, the Norwegians might react one way and the French another. Some of my associates speculated that audible criticism would merely serve to annoy the French subjects and make them stubborn and more resistant to the influence of the group.

To test these notions we recorded a number of appropriate reactions that we could switch on whenever the subject gave a response that contradicted the majority. The first sanction, in both Norway and France, was merely a slight snicker by a member of the majority. The other sanctions were more severe. In Norway they were based on the sentence "Skal du stikke deg ut?" which may be translated: "Are you trying to show off?" Roughly equivalent sentences were used with the French group. In Paris, when the subject opposed the group, he might hear through his headphones: "Voulez-vous vous faire remarquer?" ("Trying to be conspicuous?")

In both Norway and France this overt social criticism Significantly increased conformity. In France subjects now went along with the majority on 59 per cent of the critical trials. In Norway the percentage rose to 75 per cent. But the reactions of subjects in the two countries was even more striking. In Norway subjects accepted the criticism impassively. In France, however, more than half the subjects made some retaliatory response of their own when the group criticized them. Two French students, one from the Vosges mountain district and the other from the Department of Eure-et-Loire, became so enraged they directed a stream of abusive language at their taunters.

Even after we explained in the interview session that the entire experimental procedure had been recorded on tape, many of the subjects did not believe us. They could not understand how we could interject comments with such verisimilitude, particularly since we could not predict how they would respond at any given moment. This was achieved by making use of two tape recorders. One played the standard tape containing tones and the group judgments, with "dead" time for the subject; the other contained only the set of "criticisms " from members of the group. The two instruments could be controlled independently, allowing us to inject a remark whenever the subject's responses made it appropriate. The remarks followed the subject's independent responses immediately, creating a highly spontaneous effect.

Another series of experiments was designed to aid in the interpretation of the earlier findings. For example, many Norwegian subjects rationalized their behavior by stating in the interview that they went along with the others because they doubted their own judgment, and that if they had been given a chance to dispel this doubt they would have been more independent. An experiment was therefore carried out to test this notion. The subject was given a chance to reexamine the stimulus materials before giving his final judgment. He did this by sounding a bell in his booth whenever he wished to hear a pair of tones again. As before, the subject was openly censured by the group if he failed to conform, but he was not censured merely for asking to hear the tones repeated. It turned out that even the relatively simple act of requesting a repetition must be construed as an act of considerable independence. Only five of the Norwegians asked for a repetition of a tone on any trial, whereas 14 of the French subjects were "bold" enough to do so. And again the French showed more independence over-all, voting with the group on 58 per cent of the critical trials, compared with 69 per cent for the Norwegians.

The study next moved out of the university and into the factory. When we tested 40 Norwegian industrial workers, we found that their level of conformity was about the same as that of the Norwegian students. There was, however, one important difference. Students were often tense and agitated during the experiment. The industrial workers took it all with good humor and frequently were amused when the true nature of the experiment was explained. We have not yet managed to study a comparable group of industrial workers in France.

No matter how the data are examined they point to greater independence among the French than among the Norwegians. Twelve per cent of the Norwegian students conformed to the group on every one of the 16 critical trials, while only 1 per cent of the French conformed on every occasion. Forty-one per cent of the French students but only 25 per cent of the Norwegians displayed strong independence. And in every one of the five experiments performed in both countries the French showed themselves to be the more resistant to group pressure.

These findings are by no means conclusive. Rather they must be regarded as the beginning of an inquiry that one would like to see extended. But incomplete as the findings are, they are likely to be far more reliable than armchair speculation on national character.

It is useful, nevertheless, to see if the experimental results are compatible with a nation's culture as one can observe it in daily life. If there were a conflict between the experimental findings and one's general impressions, further experiments and analysis would be called for until the conflict had been resolved. Conceivably the discrepancy might be due to viewing the culture through a screen of stereotypes and prejudices rather than seeing it with a clear eye. In any case, in our study experiment and observation seem to be in reasonable agreement. For whatever the evidence may be worth, I will offer my own impressions of the two countries under examination.

I found Norwegian society highly cohesive. Norwegians have a deep feeling of group identification, and they are strongly attuned to the needs and interests of those around them. Their sense of social responsibility finds expression in formidable institutions for the care and protection of Norwegian citizens. The heavy taxation required to support broad programs of social welfare is borne willingly. It would not be surprising to find that social cohesiveness of this sort goes hand in hand with a high degree of Conformity.

Compared with the Norwegians, the French show far less consensus in both social and political life. The Norwegians have made do with a single constitution, drafted in 1814, while the French have not been able to achieve political stability within the framework of four republics. Though I hardly propose this as a general rule of social psychology, it seems true that the extreme diversity of opinion found in French national life asserts itself also on a more intimate scale. There is a tradition of dissent and critical argument that seeps down to the local bistro. The high value placed on critical judgment often seems to go beyond reasonable bounds; this in itself could account for the comparatively low degree of conformity we found in the French experiments. Furthermore, as Stanley Schachter has shown, the chronic existence of a wide range of opinion helps to free the individual from social pressure. Much the same point is made in recent studies of U.S. voting behavior. They reveal that the more a person is exposed to diverse viewpoints, the more likely he is to break away from the voting pattern of his native group. All these factors would help to explain the relatively independent judgments shown by French students.

The experiments demonstrate, in any case, that social conformity is not exclusively a U.S. phenomenon, as some critics would have us believe. Some amount of conformity would seem necessary to the functioning of any social system. The problem is to strike the right balance between individual initiative and social authority.

One may ask whether or not national borders really provide legitimate boundaries for the study of behavioral differences. My feeling is that boundaries are useful only to the extent to which they coincide with cultural, environmental or biological divisions. In many cases boundaries are themselves a historical recognition of common cultural practice. Furthermore, once boundaries are established they tend to set limits of their own on social communication.

For all this, a comparison of national cultures should not obscure the enormous variations in behavior within a single nation. Both the Norwegians and the French displayed a full range of behavior from complete independence to complete conformity. Probably there is no significant national comparison in which the extent of overlap does not approach or match the extent of differences. This should not prevent us, however, from trying to establish norms and statistically valid generalizations on behavior in different nations.

We are now planning further research in national characteristics. In a recent seminar at Yale University students were given the task of trying to identify behavioral characteristics that might help to illuminate the Nazi epoch in German history. The principal suggestions were that Germans might be found to be more aggressive than Americans, to submit more readily to authority and to display greater discipline. Whether these assumptions will hold up under experimental inquiry is an open question. A team of German and American investigators is planning a series of experiments designed to provide a comparative measure of behavior in the two countries.

The Republican Milgram Experiment

Gop leaders are administering dangerous shocks to the heart of u.s. democracy, and they can't stop themselves..

Donald Trump’s increasingly grotesque behavior is not just the defining aspect of his presidential campaign, it’s an ongoing test of character for the elected Republicans who have endorsed him.

The stakes of that test reached a new plateau when Trump attacked the family of a Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq, after his parents’ appearance at the Democratic convention. Khizr Khan’s Thursday speech has, somewhat unexpectedly, become the most iconic moment of either convention, his searing indictment of Trump—“you have sacrificed nothing, and no one”—compared to the immortal words that helped unravel McCarthyism: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Trump’s response was an offensive non-sequitur intended to degrade and dismiss his victims and enemies. In interviews with The New York Times and ABC News , he mocked Khan’s faith with the suggestion that Khan had forbidden his wife, who stood silently by his side on the stage, from speaking in public. This was horrifying enough, but the thing that made it vintage Trump was that it was premised on a lie. After the convention, but before Trump had gone on the attack, Ghazala Khan had spoken freely, through incredible grief, in an interview with MSNBC . “I told him, ‘don’t be a hero, go safely and come back as my son.’ He came back as a hero.”

The reaction from Trump’s GOP enablers tracked their statements about nearly every Trump controversy. As usual, electorally vulnerable Republicans condemned Trump unequivocally , while party leaders like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan contradicted his words only , as if they’d been uttered by a disembodied voice, rather than by the standard bearer of their party. None of them revised their view that Trump should be the next president.

This weak-kneed response surprises and disappoints all manner of opinion makers and anti-Trump Republicans. But the real surprise will come if, in the midst of a closely contested election, Trump’s chief party backers ever experience an epiphany and rescind their endorsements. As stipulated above, this is a test, but it’s one we’ve seen before, and the results are a disaster for those hoping Ryan and McConnell will begin to exhibit daring leadership.

In the early 1960s, the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram set about to understand why German enablers of Adolf Hitler were so bendable to orders from figures of authority. Each run of Milgram’s famous experiment involved three participants: an administrator, a subject, and an actor portraying another subject. The real subjects were intentionally misled into believing they weren’t subjects at all, but mere functionaries, testing the actors’ capacity to learn and whether the penalty of painful electric shocks would help jog memories. In reality, the point was to determine if people who believe themselves to be functionaries will participate in acts of evil, and how willingly.

The Milgram experiment may be the most famous social-science experiment ever conducted. But despite its pervasiveness, its findings remain startling. When an actor’s memory “failed,” the subject was instructed to administer a shock; each successive shock was 15 volts stronger than the previous one, topping out at 450 volts. Along the way, the subject would hear the actors wailing in agony from an adjacent room. Eventually the screaming would stop, as if the person on the receiving end of the shock had lost consciousness or died.

Nearly every subject at some point expressed concern for the actor’s well-being, and reservations about continuing the experiment. When they did, the administrator would admonish them to continue—and reiterate that they would not be held responsible.

About two-thirds of the subjects heeded the orders all the way up to the potentially fatal maximum voltage. There was nothing unique about Germans, it turned out, that made them unusually susceptible to fascism; most people will figure out ways to justify things they believe are required of them, even if they know those things to be wrong.

Republicans like McConnell and Ryan, and the vast majority of elected members of the party, are the unknowing subjects of their own Milgram experiment in 2016—except in this instance there are real victims, including vital civic norms, and innocent people whose only sin is finding themselves in Trump’s way.

In this metaphor, Trump himself is an increasingly dangerous electrical current, and Republican leaders are allowing it to flow by continuing to support his campaign, making his depredations seem acceptable. The administrator isn’t an individual, per se, as in the Milgram experiment, but the mixture of incentives that impel party actors to do what they believe is necessary to win. No single person is telling Republicans they must enable Trump; lust for power and aversion to loss are motivating them, and in this case, these forces make a toxic brew.

Trump’s attack on the Khans represents another incremental uptick in voltage. In June, when Trump claimed an Indiana-born federal judge overseeing a fraud case against Trump University couldn’t be impartial because he’s “Mexican,” it was a shock, but the response was relatively muted, because the judge, Gonzalo Curiel, was unable to respond himself. In this case, the pain is expressed widely, but most hauntingly by Ghazala Khan herself. “My husband asked me if I wanted to speak, but I told him I could not,” she wrote . “Walking onto the convention stage, with a huge picture of my son behind me, I could hardly control myself. What mother could? Donald Trump has children whom he loves. Does he really need to wonder why I did not speak?”

Ryan’s response to the controversy omitted the word “Trump” and paid lip service to the Khan family, saying Captain Khan’s “sacrifice—and that of Khizr and Ghazala Khan—should always be honored. Period.” But honoring their sacrifice, in Ryan’s mind, is fully compatible with walking into a booth 100 days from now and casting a vote for someone the Khans are pleading with him to disavow; someone who wants to ban Muslims like them from entering the country.

Neither Ryan nor McConnell responded to Khizr Khan’s direct appeal to their sense of duty to country over party , but as it happens, Ryan has addressed the point in the past. At a regular Capitol press briefing one month ago, after Ryan had decided to endorse Trump, Todd Zwillich, of The Takeaway public radio show asked him , “have you ever thought about whether someone in your position needs to reject [this] for the health of the country, and not party or election?” Ryan responded by explaining why he feels it’s appropriate for him to follow partisan orders.

“If I lead a schism in our party, then I am guaranteeing that a liberal progressive becomes president, and continues these policies, which I think are extremely detrimental to the country. I think losing the Supreme Court for a generation is detrimental. And I’ve said all along, we want to see the campaign improve; we want to see the campaign improve in tone, in approach, in every respect. … When I see and hear things that I don’t agree with, that I think are contrary to our principles as conservatives, as Americans, I’m going to speak out on those things—I’m going to be really clear. You know that. But at the same time, the last thing I want to do is help Hillary Clinton become president of the United States.”

He’ll admit to being worried about the stranger begging for his life in the next room , in other words, but he won’t do anything to stop the current from flowing.

Viewed from the outside, this tepid response strikes Trump’s opponents, and anti-Trump conservatives in particular, as a remarkable demonstration of moral cowardice—the kind of thing people watching imagine they’d never do. But if anything is truly surprising about it, it’s just how neatly it all conforms to what theory tells us about how people who see themselves as functionaries view themselves and one another.

“To disobey would bring no material loss to the subject,” Milgram wrote in the concluding discussion of his findings. “No punishment would ensue. It is clear from the remarks and outward behavior of many participants that in punishing the victim they are often acting against their own values. Subjects often expressed deep disapproval of shocking a man in the face of his objections; and others denounced it as stupid and senseless. Yet the majority complied with the experimental commands.”

One of the seminal findings of the Milgram experiment is that spectators, like Ryan and McConnell’s critics, consistently overestimate the moral firmness of their fellow man. The results were “unexpected to persons who observed the experiment in progress, through one-way mirrors,” Milgram continued. “Observers often uttered expressions of disbelief upon seeing a subject administer more powerful shocks to the victim. These persons had a full acquaintance with the details of the situation, and yet systematically underestimated the amount of obedience that subjects would display.”

Republican leaders are cogs because most people are cogs. We can interpret their actions as evidence of their humanity, rather than evidence of pure cynicism or villainy. But that doesn’t mean they ought to be forgiven. Most humans don’t seek to become leaders of major political parties—and political parties that elevate cogs, rather than leaders, into positions of power deserve our condemnation.

By failing to repudiate Trump, Ryan and McConnell have revealed themselves to be pliant men—figureheads rather than stewards of their party. As such, the surprise would be if they finally did reach a breaking point and took a definitive stand against Trump. That is only likely to happen, though, if Trump’s antics damage him so badly that supporting him becomes more harmful to the GOP’s interests than opposing him. But about 40 percent of the country, and nearly 90 percent of self-identified Republicans, want Trump to win the presidency. Trump’s offenses to decency and democratic norms will eventually reach the equivalent of a 450-volt shock, and elected Republicans will find a way to justify directing it right at the heart of American democracy.

Brian Beutler is a senior editor at The New Republic . He hosts Primary Concerns , a podcast about politics.