Milgram Experiment
THE PURPOSE
Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities for example, Germans in WWII.
EXPERIMENT
Volunteers were recruited for a lab experiment investigating “learning”. Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional, from the New Haven area.
At the beginning of the experiment they were introduced to another participant, who was actually a confederate (actor) of Milgram. They drew straws to determine their roles – leaner or teacher – although this was fixed and the confederate always ended to the learner. This was to give the illusion to the test subject (the teacher) that the experiment was not a deception. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a grey lab coat, played by another actor of Milgram.
Two rooms in the Yale Interaction Laboratory were used - one for the learner (with an electric chair) and another for the teacher and experimenter with an electric shock generator. The “learner” was strapped to the electric chair with electrodes. After he has learned a list of word pairs given him to learn, the "teacher" tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.
The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).
The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose) and for each of these the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock and turned to the experimenter for guidance, he was given the standard instruction /order (consisting of 4 prods):
Prod 1: please continue.
Prod 2: the experiment requires you to continue.
Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Prod 4: you have no other choice but to continue.
RESULTS
The level of shock that the participant was willing to deliver was used as the measure of obedience. When Milgram posed the question "How far do you think that most participants were willing to go?" to a group of Yale University students, it was predicted that no more than 3 out of 100 participants would deliver the maximum shock. In reality, 65% of the participants in Milgram’s study delivered the maximum shocks.
Of the 40 participants in the study, 26 delivered the maximum shocks while 14 stopped before reaching the highest levels. It is important to note that many of the subjects became extremely agitated, distraught and angry at the experimenter. Yet they continued to follow orders all the way to the end.
Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities for example, Germans in WWII.
EXPERIMENT
Volunteers were recruited for a lab experiment investigating “learning”. Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional, from the New Haven area.
At the beginning of the experiment they were introduced to another participant, who was actually a confederate (actor) of Milgram. They drew straws to determine their roles – leaner or teacher – although this was fixed and the confederate always ended to the learner. This was to give the illusion to the test subject (the teacher) that the experiment was not a deception. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a grey lab coat, played by another actor of Milgram.
Two rooms in the Yale Interaction Laboratory were used - one for the learner (with an electric chair) and another for the teacher and experimenter with an electric shock generator. The “learner” was strapped to the electric chair with electrodes. After he has learned a list of word pairs given him to learn, the "teacher" tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.
The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).
The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose) and for each of these the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock and turned to the experimenter for guidance, he was given the standard instruction /order (consisting of 4 prods):
Prod 1: please continue.
Prod 2: the experiment requires you to continue.
Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Prod 4: you have no other choice but to continue.
RESULTS
The level of shock that the participant was willing to deliver was used as the measure of obedience. When Milgram posed the question "How far do you think that most participants were willing to go?" to a group of Yale University students, it was predicted that no more than 3 out of 100 participants would deliver the maximum shock. In reality, 65% of the participants in Milgram’s study delivered the maximum shocks.
Of the 40 participants in the study, 26 delivered the maximum shocks while 14 stopped before reaching the highest levels. It is important to note that many of the subjects became extremely agitated, distraught and angry at the experimenter. Yet they continued to follow orders all the way to the end.