Milgram Stanley Milgram\'s \"Behavioral Study

Milgram

Stanley Milgram's "Behavioral Study of Obedience" (cited in Aronson, 2003), provides details of a research study conducted by Milgram that sought to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal values. The underlying motive of the study was to examine wide-spread genocide that occurred during World War II where a large number of people willingly complied with orders.

A person volunteered to participate in the study conducted at Yale University by responding to a newspaper advertisement. The volunteer was introduced to another volunteer who was really an actor helping execute the experiment. An experimenter in a laboratory coat told these two that they would be assigned the role of either a teacher or a learner by drawing from two slips of paper. Both slips were actually marked teacher so that the volunteer would always be chosen for this role, but would believe the selection was at random. The volunteer was told that the experiment was to explore the effects of punishment for incorrect responses on learning behavior.

The teacher was given a reading list of two word pairs of words and was requested to administer a shock each time the learner failed to read them back correctly. Each time the learner made a mistake, the teacher was instructed to increase the electric shocks by fifteen volts, starting at fifteen volts and going all the way up to 450 volts. The switches for administering the shocks were labeled with descriptors such as "slight shock," "danger: severe shock" and the 435 and 450 voltage switches were labeled "XXX."

The learner was in a separate room from the teacher and the experimenter, but had been instructed to simulate the consequences of being shocked such as banging on the wall and, eventually, not responding at all. As the teacher questioned the need to continue to increase voltage, the experimenter encouraged the teacher to persist. For example, when the teacher questioned the experimenter about possible harm, the experimenter assumed full responsibility and reassured the teacher that the shocks were not harmful. Further, if a teacher tried to quit, the experimenter would use verbal prods to encourage continued participation; one of these was, "You have no other choice, you must go on."

This study was conducted forty times with a different male teacher each time. Of these, twenty-six out of the forty teachers continued to 450 volts. All teachers continued up to 300 volts. Only five dropped out at 300 volts and another four dropped out at 315 volts. The teachers continued even though there was clear evidence of discomfort with doing so such as sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting lips, groans, digging fingernails into their flesh, and nervous laughter. Three teachers actually had seizures