A VISUALIZATION OF MILGRAM’S EXPERIMENT
1. Each participant “teacher”
is paired with one of the
accomplice “students.” The teacher watches as the student is
strapped to a chair and has electrodes attached to him by
laboratory assistants.
2. Following this, the teacher is then brought into a separate
room, where he can still communicate with the student, but
they cannot see each other. The teacher is placed in front of
a “shock generator” that starts at 30 volts and increases—in
increments of 15 volts—all the way to 450 volts. The
switches are labeled “Moderate,” which is 75–120 volts;
“Strong,” which is 135–180 volts; “Danger:
Severe Shock,”
which is 375–420 volts; and the two highest levels are
labeled “XXX.” The “shock generator” does not produce
actual shocks, but rather makes a noise when switches are
pressed.
3. The teacher is told that he
will teach word pairs to the
student and that if the student makes a mistake, the teacher
will punish the student by administering a shock. For every
mistake made, the teacher must administer a shock 15 volts
higher than the last. To show that the experiment is real, the
teacher is given a 15 volt shock. This is the only real shock
administered in the entire test.
4. The word pairings begin, and the student will eventually
begin to make planned errors. At each error,
the teacher
increases the voltage of the shock that he gives to the
student. When the fake shocks reach 75 volts, the “student”
will grunt. At 120 volts, the student will complain that the
shocks are painful. At 150 volts, the student will scream that
he wants to be released. The student will then plead more
and more as the shocks are “administered” and complain
that he suffers from a heart condition.
5. If at any time the
teacher questions the process, the
experimenter will tell him things like “please continue,” “it is
absolutely essential that you continue,” “the experiment
requires that you continue,” or “you
have no other choice,
you must go on.”
6. At 300 volts, the student pounds on the walls and exclaims
that he can’t stand the pain. At 330 volts, the student
remains quiet. The experimenter informs the teacher that a
lack of response is a wrong answer, and that he has to shock
the student.
7. The experiment ends when the highest level on the shock
generator is reached.
MILGRAM’S FINDINGS
Milgram asked a group of Yale students to predict how many people
they thought would administer the maximum shock level, and they
estimated three out of 100 people would do it. Surprisingly, Milgram
found that 65 percent of the participants in his study administered
shock levels of 450 volts! While people did show signs of internal
struggle through groaning, nervous laughter, and trembling, most of
them obeyed the experimenter’s
request to continue with the
experiment. When interviewed after the experiment, Milgram asked
the participants to rate how painful they believed the shocks
actually were, and “extremely painful” was the typical answer.
Milgram even found that the participants—in an effort to justify
their behavior—devalued the student during the experiment, saying
the student was so dumb that he actually deserved the shock.
Milgram was able to successfully show that under certain
circumstances, everyday people who are considered “normal” have
the capability to cause intense pain and suffering. Milgram was able
to explain such high levels of obedience in the following ways:
Compliance was increased because of the physical presence of
an authority figure (the experimenter)
Many participants believed the experiment was safe because
it was sponsored by Yale
The selection process of who would be teacher and who would
be student seemed random
It was assumed that the experimenter was a competent expert
The participants were told the
shocks were painful but not
dangerous
Ethical Concerns
Milgram’s obedience study drew fierce criticism regarding its
ethical procedure. The subjects involved in the study were led to
believe that they were causing pain to another person when, in
reality, they were being duped by an actor pretending to be in
pain. The experiment caused great stress to the subjects, and the
fact that they believed they were hurting a complete stranger
could have traumatized them.
SMALL WORLD EXPERIMENT
Despite being most famous for his obedience study, Milgram also
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