What was stanley milgram experiment

Gregorio Billikopf Encina University of California. Why is it so many people obey when they feel coerced? Social psychologist Stanley Milgram researched the effect of authority on obedience. He concluded people obey either out of fear or out of a desire to appear cooperative--even when acting against their own better judgment and desires.

It is my opinion that Milgram's book should be required reading see References below for anyone in supervisory or management positions. Milgram recruited subjects for his experiments from various walks in life. Respondents were told the experiment would study the effects of punishment on learning ability. They were offered a token cash award for participating.

Although respondents thought they had an equal chance of playing the role of a student or of a teacher, the process was rigged so all respondents ended up playing the teacher. The learner was an actor working as a cohort of the experimenter. In reality, the only electric shocks delivered in the experiment were single volt shock samples given to each teacher.

This was done to give teachers a feeling for the jolts they thought they would be discharging. Shock levels were labeled from 15 to volts. Besides the numerical scale, verbal anchors added to the frightful appearance of the instrument. Beginning from the lower end, jolt levels were labeled: "slight shock," "moderate shock," "strong shock," "very strong shock," "intense shock," and "extreme intensity shock. In response to the supposed jolts, the "learner" actor would begin to grunt at 75 volts; complain at volts; ask to be released at volts; plead with increasing vigor, next; and let out agonized screams at volts.

A replication conducted by Dariusz Dolinski and colleagues in generated levels of obedience higher than the original Milgram experiment , although the study may be criticized because it employed lower levels of shock.

Assuming that the same would be true of subjects today, Burger determined how many were willing to deliver shocks beyond the volt level, at which point the experiment was discontinued. Given social support, most subjects refused to continue to administer shocks, suggesting that social solidarity serves as a kind of a defense against destructive obedience to authority. About 70 percent were willing to continue the experiment at this point, suggesting that subjects remain just as compliant in the 21st century.

Subjects today might be willing to go a bit beyond volts, but perhaps not to the far end of the scale after learners demand that the experiment be discontinued etc. In fact, this assumption begs the critical question at issue. However, French television came to the rescue. In fact, the replication suggests a darker picture. One of optimistic findings of the original Milgram experiment was his condition 7, in which there were three teachers, two of whom both confederates of the experimenter defied the experimenter.

Given this social support, most subjects refused to continue to administer shocks, suggesting that social solidarity serves as a kind of a defense against destructive obedience to authority.

Unfortunately, this did not occur in the French replication, in which the production assistant protested about the immorality of the procedure with virtually no effect on levels of obedience. And unfortunately, not in the Burger study either: Burger found that the intervention of an accomplice who refused to continue had no effect on the levels of obedience.

A dark thought for our dark times. 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.

Tragically, he died of a heart attack at the age of Blass, T. The man who shocked the world. Eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Participants were not in fact delivering electrical shocks, the learner in the Milgram experiment was actually an actor following a rehearsed script.

The learner was kept out of sight of the participants so they came to their own assumptions about the pain they were causing. They were, however, left in little doubt that towards the end of the experiment the shocks were extremely painful and the learner might well have been rendered unconscious.

When the participant baulked at giving the electrical shocks, the experimenter — an authority figure dressed in a white lab coat — ordered them to continue. Before I explain the results, try to imagine yourself as the participant in the Milgram experiment. How far would you go giving what you thought were electrical shocks to another human being simply for a study about memory?

Fully 63 percent of the participants continued right until the end — they administered all the shocks even with the learner screaming in agony, begging to stop and eventually falling silent.

The Milgram experiment set off a small industry of follow-up studies carried out in labs all around the world.