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| Stanley
Milgram was born on 1933 in New York city. He
grew up during the second world war, right when
the Nazi atrocities were still fresh in the
memories of millions. Milgram's
classic experiment pitted the subject's moral
beliefs against the demands of authority. Of all
the psychology experiments I am aware of,
Milgram's produces the most startling and
disturbing. Remember when this experiment was
conducted - people were searching for
explainations for how the attrocities of World
War II had occured.
Around this time (early 1960's)
research was being conducted into the
authoritarian traits of Germans in an attempt to
explain how the attrocities of World War II could
have taken place. Milgram's study demonstrated
that these traits were not confined to Germans
and were not confined to certain types of
situations (eg war). This was a profound and
extremely thought provoking discovery.
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Obedience to
authority is a basic tenant of any human social
organisation. Virtually every society has
developed some sort of hierarchy in which some
individuals exercise a degree of authority over
others. For example, teachers have authority over
their students; police officers have authority
over members of the public. Basically, its hard to conceive of a
society that could function without this type of
arrangement. However, there are times when
private belief and compliance with those in
authority may come into conflict. The resolution
of this type of conflict represents one of the
oldest problems in philosophy and religion.
Abraham, when commanded by God to kill his son,
was torn between his love of his son and his
obedience to God. Obediance to authority is a
form of compliance and as such it has been studied
in the laboratories of social psychologists for
30 years.
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| Milgram's
experiment doesn't begin in a laboratory, but
rather a lecture theatre where a group of
psychiatrists, university students and
middle-class adults of various occupations and
ages have gathered to listen to a lecture on
obedience to authoity. During the lecture,
Milgram asks the audience to imagine the
following situation: In
response to a newspaper add offering $4.50 for
one hour's work, you turn up at Yale University
to take part in a Psychology experiment
investigating memory and learning. You are
introduced to a stern looking experimenter in a
white coat and a rather pleasent and friendly
co-subject. The experimenter explains that the
experiment will look into the role of punishment
in learning, and that one of you will be the
teacher and one will be the learner. You draw
lots to determine roles, and it is decided that
you become the teacher. The three of you then
proceed to an adjacent room, where the
"learner" is strapped into a chair. The
experimenter explains that this is to prevent
excessive movement during the experiment, but its
pretty obvious to you that the learner could not
escape from the chair if he wished. Then, an
electrode is attached to the learners arm, and
conductive gel is applied to the electrode. The
experimenter explains that this is to prevent
burning and blisters. Both you and the learner
are told that the electrode is attached to a
electric shock generator in the other room, and
that electric shocks will serve as punishment for
incorrect responses. The learner asks the
experimenter if "the shocks will hurt"
to which the experimenter replies: "although
the shocks will be painful, they cause no
permanent tissue damage".
You leave the learner in his
room and return to the other room where the
experimenter shows you the shock generator. The
generator has 30 switches, each is labelled with
a voltage ranging from 15 up to 450 volts. Each
switch also has a rating, ranging from
"slight shock" to "danger: severe
shock". The final two switches are labelled
"XXX". You are told that your role is
to teach the learner a simple paired association
task, but that you must punish him for incorrect
responses. You are told that for every incorrect
response you must increase the voltage by 15
volts (ie one more switch). The experimenter
gives you a 15 volt shock (enough to make you arm
tingle) to check that the generator is
functioning correctly. Now the experiment begins.
The learner finds the task difficult and makes
numerous errors. Each error results in a higher
voltage shock than the previous one. To begin
with the shocks are weak, but soon they become
more intense. At 75 volts you can hear the
learner "grunt" through the wall. The
same thing happens at90 and 105 volts. At 120
volts the learner says the shocks are getting
painful. You know, because you can hear him
through the wall. At 150 he cries "get me
out of here! I refuse to go on!".
His protests continue as the
voltage gets higher and higher. If at this point,
or any other point of the experiment, you
question whether you should be continuing, the
experimenter tells you to keep going, using such
reasons as "you can't stop now",
"he is getting paid to do this
experiment" or that "the experiment
depends on your continuing compliance". He
may even say "you have no choice". As
the shocks increase the learner screams out
"I can't stand the pain!" At 300 volts
he begins pounding on the wall and demands to be
let out. After 330 volts there is no longer any
noise from the learner. At this point the
experimenter tells you that the learner's failure
to respond should be interpreted as an incorrect
response and to continue increasing the shock
level. Soon either the highest shock level is
reached or the learning task is completed and the
experiment concludes.
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| Following
the lecture (described above), each audience
member is asked to privately record how he or she
would have acted. All of the audience groups
responded similarly. They all saw themselves as
disobeying the experimenter somewhere early on in
the experiment. On average, the psychologists
said they would have stopped when the voltage
level reached 120. For the university students it
was 135. Remember, this is about the level when
the learner would have first protested about the
pain. Nobody in any group said they would have
continued beyond 300 volts. When asked to explain their
disobediance, the audience members reponded that
they "didn't want to hurt anyone". In
other words, the audience saw their disobediance
as stemming from their empathy for the subject
and compassion for those in pain and a sense of
fairness. The psychologists predicted that only
4% of the teachers would progress beyond 300
volts. The students said that 0.1% would reach
the highest level on the generator. These latter
cases (who would use the highest voltage setting)
were described by the psychologists as
"pathological sadists".
The experiment described above
could have been a hypothetical situation, but in
fact the experiment described in the introduction
page actually took place! Not only that, but the
results were completely different to those
predicted by the various audience members to whom
the experiment was described.
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When
Milgram conducted the study, he found that with a
little bit of coaxing, the majority (60%) of
subjects would administer shocks right through to
450 volts. The people administering the shocks
were not "pathological sadists" as the
psychologists had described them, but normal
everyday people. At this point I think I should
point out that nobody actually received electric
shocks... the learner was a confederate of the
experimenter and was pretending to be in pain.
The only real subject in the experiment was the
"teacher". In
a post-experimental interview, Milgram asked the
subjects to rate how painful they thought the
electric shocks would have been (on a scale of 1
to 14 where 14 is the most painful). The typical
response was 14 (extremely painful). Although
most of the subjects obeyed the experimenter,
there were obvious signs on an intense internal
struggle. Many exhibited unusual reactions such
as nervous laughter, uncontrollable seizures,
trembling and groaning. One of Milgram's
observers recorded a particularly insightful and
disturbing observation (see illustration on
left).
Although no-one actually
received any electric shocks, Milgram's study
came under fire for the adverse it had on the
"teachers". Milgram's interviews with
his subjects tended to confirm the view that
ordinary everyday people can cause pain and
suffering to another person under the right set
of circumstances. Milgram recounts one interview
in particular with a devout Catholic married to a
plumber... According to Milgram she gave the
impression of complete humility. At 225 volts she
turned to the experimenter and in a tentative
voice said "I hesitate to press these".
But when the experimenter told her to continue,
she did. Later she hesitated again, but once
again, when the experimenter insisted that she
continue, she did... right up to the maximum 450
volt shock.
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| Milgram also
conducted several follow-up experiments to
determine what would mediate the liklihood of
maximum shock delivery. He repeated the
experiment described above, except that this time
he had four conditions. One condition (the verbal
condition) was exactly the same as before, ie the
"learner" was in another room but could
be heard by the "teacher". In the
second condition, the remote-feedback condition,
the only feedback on the learner's condition was
a pounding on the wall at 300 volts. In the third
condition, the proximity condition, the learner
was seated right next to the teacher. In the
fourth and final condition, the touch-proximity
condition, the teacher was required to hold the
hand of the learner on a "shock plate"
in order to give him shocks above 150 volts.
The most amazing thing to note
from this follow-up experiment is that 32% of the
subjects in the proximity-touch condition held
the hand of the learner on the shock plate while
administering shocks in excess of 400 volts! I
don't know about you, but this result both shocks
and intrigues me! Further experiments showed that
teachers were less obedient when the experimenter
communicated wih them via the telephone versus in
person, and males were just as likely to be
obedient as females, although females tended to
be more nervous.
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| Milgram's
experiment has been repeated in Australia, South
Africa and in several European countries. In one
study, over 85% of the subjects administered a
lethal electric shock to the learner! Milgram felt that his experiments helped
provide insight into behaviours such as the Nazi
war crimes and Vietnam massacres. He notes that
Nazis frequently described themselves as helpless
parts in a big machine. He also notes their
tendency to "devalue" their victims...
the European Jews were the subject of a massive
propaganda campaign designed to make them appear
as sub-human. Milgram found a tendency to devalue
the "learner" in his experiment...
utterances such as "why doesn't the dumb guy
get it right" were not uncommon. One
"teacher" even claimed the the
"learner" was "so dumb he deserved
to get shocked!".
The experiments carried out by
Milgram have given insight into human obedience.
While not giving us the complete picture, they
are certainly sobering and give us a glimpse of
one of the darker sides of human nature - a side
that we would probably want to pretend didn't
exist!
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