In this video I discuss what is perhaps the most famous study in social psychology; Stanley Milgram’s investigation of obedience to authority, conducted at Yale in the early 1960s. Milgram’s study involved the delivery of increasingly powerful electric shocks to another person. While psychiatrists predicted only 1% of participants would continue to the maximum voltage of 450 volts (despite protests and then eerie silence from the “learner”) Milgram found that 67% of participants were convinced to continue by the insistence of the experimenter. I discuss the associated ethical issues of the study, along with possible reinterpretations of the data, the procedure, and the meaning of the findings.
Gina Perry – Behind the Shock Machine – http://amzn.to/2FLc1ab
Milgram footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdUu3…
Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel to see future videos! Have questions or topics you’d like to see covered in a future video? Let me know by commenting or sending me an email!
Check out my full psychology guide: Master Introductory Psychology: http://amzn.to/2eTqm5s
Gina Perry – Behind the Shock Machine – http://amzn.to/2FLc1ab
Milgram footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdUu3…
Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video we looked at compliance and persuasion as forms of direct social pressure to comply with requests or to modify our attitudes or behaviors and in this video we’re going to look at even more direct social pressures in the form of obedience to authority.
This brings us to the best-known study on obedience conducted by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s at Yale and often referred to as The Milgram Study. This is perhaps the most famous study in all of social psychology, and here’s a picture of Stanley Milgram here, and what Milgram did was he had participants come into the lab in pairs and an experimenter came out to greet them and had them select from two slips of paper. One of them received a paper that said “teacher” and the other would receive a paper that said “learner” and they were told that they were going to do a study on the effects of punishment on learning. So the learner was then taken to a small room where he was strapped into a chair and connected to a shock generator and he was told that he would have to memorize pairs of words and whenever he gave an incorrect response he would receive an electric shock and that these shocks would be increased with each incorrect response.
The teacher watched the learner get strapped into his chair and connected to this machine and then was taken next door to the shock generator and the teacher was told that his job was to read pairs of words to the learner and then deliver shocks by pressing buttons on this shock generator each time the learner got an incorrect response. And each time there was an incorrect response the teacher also increased the voltage of the shock by 15 volts. The teacher was then given a sample shock of 45 volts to get a feel for what the learner would be experiencing and then the experiment would begin. What Milgram wanted to know was, who would go all the way? Who would deliver these shocks to this learner?
Here we can see a picture of a learner being strapped into the chair here and here we can see the shock generator. So each of these switches here would represent a different voltage starting at 15 volts and going all the way up to 450 volts and they have labels underneath which say things like “moderate shock” or “danger severe shock” and at the very end we see just “XXX”. So Milgram wanted to know, who would deliver these shocks to the learner despite his cries of protest as the shocks got stronger and stronger? Then he would begin to complain that his heart was bothering him and he wanted to end the experiment and then eventually the teacher would just hear silence and the learner would stop responding to the word pairs and stop responding even to the delivery of the electric shocks. If the teacher wanted to stop the experiment and asked the experimenter if they could stop, the experimenter would tell the teacher that the experiment must continue or the “experiment requires that you continue, teacher”. If they complained about the danger of the electric shocks, the experimenter would assure them that the shocks were painful but that they wouldn’t cause any permanent damage to the learner.
Milgram asked a bunch of psychiatrists, who would go all the way? What percentage of participants would go all the way to 450 volts on the machine? And they estimated that perhaps 1% of people would be willing to do this, 1% of people would go all the way to 450 volts but that most people would simply refuse to continue the experiment. What Milgram actually found was that 67% of his participants went all the way to 450 volts despite the cries of protest, despite the complaints of heart problems, and despite the eventual silence from the learner.
Now the good news is that the shocks weren’t real and the learner was an actor. So there was no real danger to the learner in the experiment and it was just to see how far would the teachers go. Now Milgram did a number of variations of the study where he varied things like the teacher’s proximity to the learner, whether they were in the same room, the presence of the experimenter in the room with the teacher or if the experimenter delivered instructions via telephone, the presence of other teachers working with other learners in the same room, or whether it was conducted in a research laboratory at Yale or in a business office in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
So it’s important to remember that the original variation that we hear about most, and that most people are familiar with, is not really an experiment because there’s no manipulation of an independent variable. It’s more of a demonstration of how people might behave in this particular situation and there’s a number of ethical issues that go along with this study. It’s very stressful for the teachers and has the potential for psychological harm. This is why it’s very difficult to replicate this study and it’s also been alleged that Milgram may not have given proper debriefings to all of his participants. So he did do what he called “de-hoaxing” at the end of the study, where the learner would emerge unscathed from the room and shake hands with the teacher and appeared to be fine. But it may not have always been the case that Milgram revealed that the shocks weren’t actually real but simply showed that the learner was okay. This is described in Gina Perry’s excellent book “Behind the Shock Machine“, which I’ll put a link to in the description.
The way that this study is often summarized, so the standard interpretation, is that most people would be willing to harm or kill a stranger just because a man in lab coat told them to. And this fit in with other views at the time such as Hannah Arendt‘s idea of the “banality of evil“. This was the idea that atrocities like the Holocaust were carried out by ordinary people who were just following orders. But this interpretation has been questioned, and it’s the, the results of this study, are still up for reinterpretation.
It’s a difficult thing to understand, really what this means. On the one hand, we might think that some of the teachers suspected it was a hoax. In fact in Milgram’s own data, according to Perry in her book, as many as 50% of the participants may have had some doubts about the veracity of these electric shocks. So we might wonder how much was this obedience and how much it was, how much was it people playing along to see where things go? They thought “maybe this isn’t real, but let’s see what happens” and in that case maybe we’re not really measuring obedience as much as we’re measuring trust in the experimenter. Trust that this is going to go somewhere interesting and and everything’s going to be fine in the end.
And we should also remember that the the entire scenario was carefully orchestrated by Milgram. He spent weeks trying to set this up in order to get the maximum level of obedience, you know. He tried to cast the ideal learner, he tried to figure out just exactly how the experimenter should coax the teacher to continue delivering the shocks, how the experimenter could deflect the protests of the teacher.
And it’s also important to note that attempts at disobedience are not captured in this data; when we say that 67% of people went all the way to 450 volts that ignores some ways that the teachers did disobey. So some of the teachers would do things like read the word pairs to the learner in a way that accentuated the correct answer, and this could be seen as a type of disobedience. They also when they would deliver these shocks they would press the button very quickly or try not to press it all the way down so that it wouldn’t actually deliver the shock. You know, it would make a buzzing noise when the button was pressed, you see, they might press it very quickly. I’ll post some links to some video from the original study that you can watch and you can see some teachers doing this. And this is a type of disobedience as well.
And in fact, the verbal disobedience that occurred quite frequently, very often the teachers said they didn’t want to continue, they wanted to end the experiment, you know, they asked the experimenter if they could stop or if they had to keep going. And we might think of this as a type of disobedience, and the fact that they were repeatedly told that they had to continue, we might think of this really as an investigation into learned helplessness; where the teachers are learning that they don’t have control over this situation and there’s nothing they can do. Their protests are not going to stop anything.
And Don Mixon also described the idea that maybe we should think of this as people obeying, not so much the man in the lab coat, but obeying the idea of the scientific process. They’re placing a great deal of faith and trust into how science works and the fact that they’re at Yale in this research laboratory. They trust that, you know, if the researchers have designed this and it’s being conducted here, then, you know, it must be for good reason and that things must actually be safe. After all, the experimenter has said that the shocks are painful but there’s no permanent damage. There’s no risk of permanent damage and so they’re really demonstrating their faith in this process.
We could also think of it as showing how people cede responsibilities when they aren’t sure; they cede responsibility to authorities who are probably better informed than they are when they’re in ambiguous situations and it’s not clear how to act. They look to people who might know more about the situation, and perhaps that is not such a terrible thing.
So when we think about this, this study and what it means, I think it’s important to consider that we should avoid sweeping generalizations. It’s easy to say “oh yes, most people would kill a stranger if told to by a man in a lab coat”. Maybe that’s a gross oversimplification of what we see going on here; it’s actually a very complex situation and so we should avoid sweeping generalizations and conclusions and comparisons.
I don’t think it’s quite right to compare this directly to the atrocities of the Holocaust, you know, this is, you know, a research investigation in a lab at Yale and that’s really not the same as the real-life atrocities that were occurring during the Holocaust and the real people that were involved. And it’s also not the case that we should think of obedience as necessarily being evil. You know, unfortunately this is sort of the go-to study when considering obedience and it paints obedience to authority in a very negative light; that if you obey you are necessarily committing evil. But that’s really not the case. Oftentimes we obey authority and that’s a good thing. We follow the instructions of our teachers, and we follow the instructions of our doctors to take certain medications, and that is not necessarily going to say that we are complicit in evil, just because we are obeying an authority figure.
Ok, so as we can see this study is controversial and also very difficult to make sense of and very complex so I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
