After reading this article you will learn about Milgram’s experiment to study obedience in a laboratory situation.
The experiments of Stanley Milgram have won acclaim for their ingenuity in developing an experimental study of obedience in a laboratory situation. As a first step through a newspaper advertisement, Milgram got together a group of 40 male volunteers between the ages of 20 and 50. The group included professionals, businessmen and unskilled workers.
The 40 subjects were randomly divided into two groups, “learner” and “teacher” by drawing lots. The subjects were told that the learner would learn a lot of words, and the teacher would help him learn, by punishing with an electric shock, whenever the learner made a mistake.
The learner is then taken to an experimental room and strapped to a chair and electrodes connected to his body. A series of switches are shown, each of which when switched on would deliver a shock, the weakest being 15 volts and the strongest 450 volts, and the difference between each successive pairs is 15 volts. The material to be learnt was -a list of paired-associate words.
The learner had to learn each pair. The pattern of response was that when the teacher called out the first word of a pair, the learner had to respond with the other member of the pair. The intensity of the shock is increased by 15 volts for every mistake. As the experiment proceeded to 75 volts of shock, the learner would shout with pain and ask to be spared. At 180 volts the learner would scream and start jumping and banging on the wall.
But at each stage, the experimenter’s answer was a firm no and an insistence that the learner has no choice but to proceed with the experiment. After a certain stage the learner stopped responding to the learning tasks. But the experimenter declared that even refusal to respond would be treated as an error and the intensity of the shock increased accordingly.
Actually no shock was delivered and the whole episode was an act as the learners were confidants of the experimenter and trained properly to put on the act.
Milgram’s experiment showed the following results:
(a) Not even one of the subjects stopped up to an intensity of a shock of 400 volts, though they protested.
(b) More than 60% of the subjects went up to the whole range of 450 volts.
(c) There were protests from both the learners and the teachers. The teacher after a certain stage protested that they would not be party to or take the responsibility if anything happens to the subject.
(d) However when the experimenter, Milgram answered that he would take the responsibility, the teachers conformed. Milgram varied the designs of the experiments, in different forms, to study what were the factors that contributed to variations in obedience. Some of the factors identified by him were as follows though in general the degree of obedience was high.
(e) One important factor was the prestige of the experimenters. When he mentioned that the studies were being carried out by the Yale University and that the experiment was on a current problem, the obedience was high. But even when the prestige factor was eliminable and when the advertisement was given in the name of a private company and the studies were carried out in some old building, though there was a drop in the degree of obedience, still 48% of the subjects continued to the maximum level of shock.
The teachers were willing to administer the maximum amount of shocks. Milgram came to the conclusion that in our society, many people are willing to cause injury .or harm to others, even if the source of authority was not particularly respected or respectable.
Another factor found was the factor of the proximity of the experimenter. If the experimenter gave telephonic instructions to proceed with the experiment, the number of persons continuing the shock up to the maximum was about 20%. The figure was higher when the experimenter personally gave the instructions and disappeared. If the proximity between the teacher and the learner increased, the obedience on the part of the teacher decreased.
In another variation, Milgram wanted to study the impact of the pressure of others Instead of one teacher, he introduced three teachers. Out of them two were confederates and the third was an actual subject. The first confederate teacher read out the word, the second confederate teacher announced the errors, and the third teacher (actual subject, not a confederate) administered the shock.
After some time when the ‘learner subjects’ protested, the first confederate teacher said that he would not participate further and inflict pain on the learner. He left the room and even when the experimenter asked him to come back he refused. Teachers 2 and 3 were instructed to carry on with the experiment. After some time even the teacher 2 the second confederate, refused.
The third teacher, the subject continued for some more time but firmly refused after sometime. The conclusions drawn by Milgram is that the presence of others who disobey brings down the degree of obedience and this was found to be the most effective factor in decreasing obedience.
No doubt, the above studies of Milgram were ingenuous and well-designed. But they have come in for a lot of criticism. Firstly, they have been criticised on ethical grounds. Secondly, it has been argued that what happens in a laboratory situation is different from real life situation.
One may even actually question whether what was being studied was obedience. How are we sure that the subjects were not making it a prestige issue. But whatever may be the defects, Milgram’s studies do bear out the truth that there are many civilized human beings willing to inflict cruelty and harm on others, in obedience to perverse and inhuman orders of a pathological authority.
If millions of people can watch “bull fighting”, brutal wrestling matches and boxing games and not only enjoy but applaud such bar-banc acts of beastly brutality, perhaps no further evidence is required to convince us of the essentially cruel side of the human being.
The latter, the millions who watch barbaric sports obey their perverse internal commands and not the external commands. One has to only imagine the “joyous scream” of the Roman audience when they saw the poor victims being torn to bits, to be ashamed of the human race.