milgram essay psychology

Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment: Summary, Results, & Ethics

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, carried out one of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology.

He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.

Milgram (1963) examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on “ obedience ” – that they were just following orders from their superiors.

The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question:

Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974).

Milgram (1963) wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures, as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.

Milgram selected participants for his experiment by newspaper advertising for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University.

The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher.’  The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s confederates (pretending to be a real participant).

The learner (a confederate called Mr. Wallace) was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arms, and the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX).

The shocks in Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments were not real. The “learners” were actors who were part of the experiment and did not actually receive any shocks.

However, the “teachers” (the real participants of the study) believed the shocks were real, which was crucial for the experiment to measure obedience to authority figures even when it involved causing harm to others.

Milgram’s Experiment (1963)

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.

Volunteers were recruited for a controlled experiment investigating “learning” (re: ethics: deception). 

Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional, from the New Haven area. They were paid $4.50 for just turning up.

At the beginning of the experiment, they were introduced to another participant, a confederate of the experimenter (Milgram).

They drew straws to determine their roles – learner or teacher – although this was fixed, and the confederate was always the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a gray lab coat, played by an actor (not 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” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped to a chair with electrodes.

After he has learned a list of word pairs given to 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, the experimenter was to give a series of orders/prods to ensure they continued.

There were four prods, and if one was not obeyed, then the experimenter (Mr. Williams) read out the next prod, and so on.

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.

These prods were to be used in order, and begun afresh for each new attempt at defiance (Milgram, 1974, p. 21). The experimenter also had two special prods available. These could be used as required by the situation:

• Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on’ (ibid.)
• ‘Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on’ (ibid., p. 22).

65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.

Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations of his study.  All he did was alter the situation (IV) to see how this affected obedience (DV).

Conclusion 

The individual explanation for the behavior of the participants would be that it was something about them as people that caused them to obey, but a more realistic explanation is that the situation they were in influenced them and caused them to behave in the way that they did.

Some aspects of the situation that may have influenced their behavior include the formality of the location, the behavior of the experimenter, and the fact that it was an experiment for which they had volunteered and been paid.

Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being.  Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.

People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and/or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in the family, school, and workplace.

Milgram summed up in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), writing:

“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”

Milgram’s Agency Theory

Milgram (1974) explained the behavior of his participants by suggesting that people have two states of behavior when they are in a social situation:

• The autonomous state – people direct their own actions, and they take responsibility for the results of those actions.
• The agentic state – people allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving the orders. In other words, they act as agents for another person’s will.

Milgram suggested that two things must be in place for a person to enter the agentic state:

• The person giving the orders is perceived as being qualified to direct other people’s behavior. That is, they are seen as legitimate.
• The person being ordered about is able to believe that the authority will accept responsibility for what happens.

According to Milgram, when in this agentic state, the participant in the obedience studies “defines himself in a social situation in a manner that renders him open to regulation by a person of higher status. In this condition the individual no longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others” (Milgram, 1974, p. 134).

Agency theory says that people will obey an authority when they believe that the authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This is supported by some aspects of Milgram’s evidence.

For example, when participants were reminded that they had responsibility for their own actions, almost none of them were prepared to obey.

In contrast, many participants who were refusing to go on did so if the experimenter said that he would take responsibility.

According to Milgram (1974, p. 188):

“The behavior revealed in the experiments reported here is normal human behavior but revealed under conditions that show with particular clarity the danger to human survival inherent in our make-up.

And what is it we have seen? Not aggression, for there is no anger, vindictiveness, or hatred in those who shocked the victim….

Something far more dangerous is revealed: the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.”

Milgram Experiment Variations

The Milgram experiment was carried out many times whereby Milgram (1965) varied the basic procedure (changed the IV).  By doing this Milgram could identify which factors affected obedience (the DV).

Obedience was measured by how many participants shocked to the maximum 450 volts (65% in the original study). Stanley Milgram conducted a total of 23 variations (also called conditions or experiments) of his original obedience study:

In total, 636 participants were tested in 18 variation studies conducted between 1961 and 1962 at Yale University.

In the original baseline study – the experimenter wore a gray lab coat to symbolize his authority (a kind of uniform).

The lab coat worn by the experimenter in the original study served as a crucial symbol of scientific authority that increased obedience. The lab coat conveyed expertise and legitimacy, making participants see the experimenter as more credible and trustworthy.

Milgram carried out a variation in which the experimenter was called away because of a phone call right at the start of the procedure.

The role of the experimenter was then taken over by an ‘ordinary member of the public’ ( a confederate) in everyday clothes rather than a lab coat. The obedience level dropped to 20%.

Change of Location:  The Mountain View Facility Study (1963, unpublished)

Milgram conducted this variation in a set of offices in a rundown building, claiming it was associated with “Research Associates of Bridgeport” rather than Yale.

The lab’s ordinary appearance was designed to test if Yale’s prestige encouraged obedience. Participants were led to believe that a private research firm experimented.

In this non-university setting, obedience rates dropped to 47.5% compared to 65% in the original Yale experiments. This suggests that the status of location affects obedience.

Private research firms are viewed as less prestigious than certain universities, which affects behavior. It is easier under these conditions to abandon the belief in the experimenter’s essential decency.

The impressive university setting reinforced the experimenter’s authority and conveyed an implicit approval of the research.

Milgram filmed this variation for his documentary Obedience , but did not publish the results in his academic papers. The study only came to wider light when archival materials, including his notes, films, and data, were studied by later researchers like Perry (2013) in the decades after Milgram’s death.

Two Teacher Condition

When participants could instruct an assistant (confederate) to press the switches, 92.5% shocked to the maximum of 450 volts.

Allowing the participant to instruct an assistant to press the shock switches diffused personal responsibility and likely reduced perceptions of causing direct harm.

By attributing the actions to the assistant rather than themselves, participants could more easily justify shocking to the maximum 450 volts, reflected in the 92.5% obedience rate.

When there is less personal responsibility, obedience increases. This relates to Milgram’s Agency Theory.

Touch Proximity Condition

The teacher had to force the learner’s hand down onto a shock plate when the learner refused to participate after 150 volts. Obedience fell to 30%.

Forcing the learner’s hand onto the shock plate after 150 volts physically connected the teacher to the consequences of their actions. This direct tactile feedback increased the teacher’s personal responsibility.

No longer shielded from the learner’s reactions, the proximity enabled participants to more clearly perceive the harm they were causing, reducing obedience to 30%. Physical distance and indirect actions in the original setup made it easier to rationalize obeying the experimenter.

The participant is no longer buffered/protected from seeing the consequences of their actions.

Social Support Condition

When the two confederates set an example of defiance by refusing to continue the shocks, especially early on at 150 volts, it permitted the real participant also to resist authority.

Two other participants (confederates) were also teachers but refused to obey. Confederate 1 stopped at 150 volts, and Confederate 2 stopped at 210 volts.

Their disobedience provided social proof that it was acceptable to disobey. This modeling of defiance lowered obedience to only 10% compared to 65% without such social support. It demonstrated that social modeling can validate challenging authority.

The presence of others who are seen to disobey the authority figure reduces the level of obedience to 10%.

Absent Experimenter Condition 

It is easier to resist the orders from an authority figure if they are not close by. When the experimenter instructed and prompted the teacher by telephone from another room, obedience fell to 20.5%.

Many participants cheated and missed out on shocks or gave less voltage than ordered by the experimenter. The proximity of authority figures affects obedience.

The physical absence of the authority figure enabled participants to act more freely on their own moral inclinations rather than the experimenter’s commands. This highlighted the role of an authority’s direct presence in influencing behavior.

A key reason the obedience studies fascinate people is Milgram presented them as a scientific experiment, contrasting himself as an “empirically grounded scientist” compared to philosophers. He claimed he systematically varied factors to alter obedience rates.

However, recent scholarship using archival records shows Milgram’s account of standardizing the procedure was misleading. For example, he published a list of standardized prods the experimenter used when participants questioned continuing. Milgram said these were delivered uniformly in a firm but polite tone.

Analyzing audiotapes, Gibson (2013) found considerable variation from the published protocol – the prods differed across trials. The point is not that Milgram did poor science, but that the archival materials reveal the limitations of the textbook account of his “standardized” procedure.

The qualitative data like participant feedback, Milgram’s notes, and researchers’ actions provide a fuller, messier picture than the obedience studies’ “official” story. For psychology students, this shows how scientific reporting can polish findings in a way that strays from the less tidy reality.

Critical Evaluation

Inaccurate description of the prod methodology:.

A key reason the obedience studies fascinate people is Milgram (1974) presented them as a scientific experiment, contrasting himself as an “empirically grounded scientist” compared to philosophers. He claimed he systematically varied factors to alter obedience rates.

However, recent scholarship using archival records shows Milgram’s account of standardizing the procedure was misleading. For example, he published a list of standardized prods the experimenter used when participants questioned continuing. Milgram said these were delivered uniformly in a firm but polite tone (Gibson, 2013; Perry, 2013; Russell, 2010).

Perry’s (2013) archival research revealed another discrepancy between Milgram’s published account and the actual events. Milgram claimed standardized prods were used when participants resisted, but Perry’s audiotape analysis showed the experimenter often improvised more coercive prods beyond the supposed script.

This off-script prodding varied between experiments and participants, and was especially prevalent with female participants where no gender obedience difference was found – suggesting the improvisation influenced results. Gibson (2013) and Russell (2009) corroborated the experimenter’s departures from the supposed fixed prods. 

Prods were often combined or modified rather than used verbatim as published.

Russell speculated the improvisation aimed to achieve outcomes the experimenter believed Milgram wanted. Milgram seemed to tacitly approve of the deviations by not correcting them when observing.

This raises significant issues around experimenter bias influencing results, lack of standardization compromising validity, and ethical problems with Milgram misrepresenting procedures.

Milgram’s experiment lacked external validity:

The Milgram studies were conducted in laboratory-type conditions, and we must ask if this tells us much about real-life situations.

We obey in a variety of real-life situations that are far more subtle than instructions to give people electric shocks, and it would be interesting to see what factors operate in everyday obedience. The sort of situation Milgram investigated would be more suited to a military context.

Orne and Holland (1968) accused Milgram’s study of lacking ‘experimental realism,”’ i.e.,” participants might not have believed the experimental set-up they found themselves in and knew the learner wasn’t receiving electric shocks.

“It’s more truthful to say that only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real, and of those two-thirds disobeyed the experimenter,” observes Perry (p. 139).

Milgram’s sample was biased:

• The participants in Milgram’s study were all male. Do the findings transfer to females?
• Milgram’s study cannot be seen as representative of the American population as his sample was self-selected. This is because they became participants only by electing to respond to a newspaper advertisement (selecting themselves).
• They may also have a typical “volunteer personality” – not all the newspaper readers responded so perhaps it takes this personality type to do so.

Yet a total of 636 participants were tested in 18 separate experiments across the New Haven area, which was seen as being reasonably representative of a typical American town.

Milgram’s findings have been replicated in a variety of cultures and most lead to the same conclusions as Milgram’s original study and in some cases see higher obedience rates.

However, Smith and Bond (1998) point out that with the exception of Jordan (Shanab & Yahya, 1978), the majority of these studies have been conducted in industrialized Western cultures, and we should be cautious before we conclude that a universal trait of social behavior has been identified.

Selective reporting of experimental findings:

Perry (2013) found Milgram omitted findings from some obedience experiments he conducted, reporting only results supporting his conclusions. A key omission was the Relationship condition (conducted in 1962 but unpublished), where participant pairs were relatives or close acquaintances.

When the learner protested being shocked, most teachers disobeyed, contradicting Milgram’s emphasis on obedience to authority.

Perry argued Milgram likely did not publish this 85% disobedience rate because it undermined his narrative and would be difficult to defend ethically since the teacher and learner knew each other closely.

Milgram’s selective reporting biased interpretations of his findings. His failure to publish all his experiments raises issues around researchers’ ethical obligation to completely and responsibly report their results, not just those fitting their expectations.

Unreported analysis of participants’ skepticism and its impact on their behavior:

Perry (2013) found archival evidence that many participants expressed doubt about the experiment’s setup, impacting their behavior. This supports Orne and Holland’s (1968) criticism that Milgram overlooked participants’ perceptions.

Incongruities like apparent danger, but an unconcerned experimenter likely cued participants that no real harm would occur. Trust in Yale’s ethics reinforced this. Yet Milgram did not publish his assistant’s analysis showing participant skepticism correlated with disobedience rates and varied by condition.

Obedient participants were more skeptical that the learner was harmed. This selective reporting biased interpretations. Additional unreported findings further challenge Milgram’s conclusions.

This highlights issues around thoroughly and responsibly reporting all results, not just those fitting expectations. It shows how archival evidence makes Milgram’s study a contentious classic with questionable methods and conclusions.

Ethical Issues

What are the potential ethical concerns associated with Milgram’s research on obedience?

While not a “contribution to psychology” in the traditional sense, Milgram’s obedience experiments sparked significant debate about the ethics of psychological research.

Baumrind (1964) criticized the ethics of Milgram’s research as participants were prevented from giving their informed consent to take part in the study. 

Participants assumed the experiment was benign and expected to be treated with dignity.

As a result of studies like Milgram’s, the APA and BPS now require researchers to give participants more information before they agree to take part in a study.

The participants actually believed they were shocking a real person and were unaware the learner was a confederate of Milgram’s.

However, Milgram argued that “illusion is used when necessary in order to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at-truths.”

Milgram also interviewed participants afterward to find out the effect of the deception. Apparently, 83.7% said that they were “glad to be in the experiment,” and 1.3% said that they wished they had not been involved.

Protection of participants 

Participants were exposed to extremely stressful situations that may have the potential to cause psychological harm. Many of the participants were visibly distressed (Baumrind, 1964).

Signs of tension included trembling, sweating, stuttering, laughing nervously, biting lips and digging fingernails into palms of hands. Three participants had uncontrollable seizures, and many pleaded to be allowed to stop the experiment.

Milgram described a businessman reduced to a “twitching stuttering wreck” (1963, p. 377),

In his defense, Milgram argued that these effects were only short-term. Once the participants were debriefed (and could see the confederate was OK), their stress levels decreased.

“At no point,” Milgram (1964) stated, “were subjects exposed to danger and at no point did they run the risk of injurious effects resulting from participation” (p. 849).

To defend himself against criticisms about the ethics of his obedience research, Milgram cited follow-up survey data showing that 84% of participants said they were glad they had taken part in the study.

Milgram used this to claim that the study caused no serious or lasting harm, since most participants retrospectively did not regret their involvement.

Yet archival accounts show many participants endured lasting distress, even trauma, refuting Milgram’s insistence the study caused only fleeting “excitement.” By not debriefing all, Milgram misled participants about the true risks involved (Perry, 2013).

However, Milgram did debrief the participants fully after the experiment and also followed up after a period of time to ensure that they came to no harm.

Milgram debriefed all his participants straight after the experiment and disclosed the true nature of the experiment.

Participants were assured that their behavior was common, and Milgram also followed the sample up a year later and found no signs of any long-term psychological harm.

The majority of the participants (83.7%) said that they were pleased that they had participated, and 74% had learned something of personal importance.

Perry’s (2013) archival research found Milgram misrepresented debriefing – around 600 participants were not properly debriefed soon after the study, contrary to his claims. Many only learned no real shocks occurred when reading a mailed study report months later, which some may have not received.

Milgram likely misreported debriefing details to protect his credibility and enable future obedience research. This raises issues around properly informing and debriefing participants that connect to APA ethics codes developed partly in response to Milgram’s study.

Right to Withdrawal 

The BPS states that researchers should make it plain to participants that they are free to withdraw at any time (regardless of payment).

When expressing doubts, the experimenter assured them all was well. Trusting Yale scientists, many took the experimenter at his word that “no permanent tissue damage” would occur, and continued administering shocks despite reservations.

Did Milgram give participants an opportunity to withdraw? The experimenter gave four verbal prods which mostly discouraged withdrawal from the experiment:

• Please continue.
• The experiment requires that you continue.
• It is absolutely essential that you continue.
• You have no other choice, you must go on.

Milgram argued that they were justified as the study was about obedience, so orders were necessary.

Milgram pointed out that although the right to withdraw was made partially difficult, it was possible as 35% of participants had chosen to withdraw.

Replications

Direct replications have not been possible due to current ethical standards . However, several researchers have conducted partial replications and variations that aim to reproduce some aspects of Milgram’s methods ethically.

One important replication was conducted by Jerry Burger in 2009. Burger’s partial replication included several safeguards to protect participant welfare, such as screening out high-risk individuals, repeatedly reminding participants they could withdraw, and stopping at the 150-volt shock level. This was the point where Milgram’s participants first heard the learner’s protests.

As 79% of Milgram’s participants who went past 150 volts continued to the maximum 450 volts, Burger (2009) argued that 150 volts provided a reasonable estimate for obedience levels. He found 70% of participants continued to 150 volts, compared to 82.5% in Milgram’s comparable condition.

Another replication by Thomas Blass (1999) examined whether obedience rates had declined over time due to greater public awareness of the experiments. Blass correlated obedience rates from replication studies between 1963 and 1985 and found no relationship between year and obedience level. He concluded that obedience rates have not systematically changed, providing evidence against the idea of “enlightenment effects”.

Some variations have explored the role of gender. Milgram found equal rates of obedience for male and female participants. Reviews have found most replications also show no gender difference, with a couple of exceptions (Blass, 1999). For example, Kilham and Mann (1974) found lower obedience in female participants.

Partial replications have also examined situational factors. Having another person model defiance reduced obedience compared to a solo participant in one study, but did not eliminate it (Burger, 2009). The authority figure’s perceived expertise seems to be an influential factor (Blass, 1999). Replications have supported Milgram’s observation that stepwise increases in demands promote obedience.

Personality factors have been studied as well. Traits like high empathy and desire for control correlate with some minor early hesitation, but do not greatly impact eventual obedience levels (Burger, 2009). Authoritarian tendencies may contribute to obedience (Elms, 2009).

In sum, the partial replications confirm Milgram’s degree of obedience. Though ethical constraints prevent full reproductions, the key elements of his procedure seem to consistently elicit high levels of compliance across studies, samples, and eras. The replications continue to highlight the power of situational pressures to yield obedience.

Milgram (1963) Audio Clips

Below you can also hear some of the audio clips taken from the video that was made of the experiment. Just click on the clips below.

Why was the Milgram experiment so controversial?

The Milgram experiment was controversial because it revealed people’s willingness to obey authority figures even when causing harm to others, raising ethical concerns about the psychological distress inflicted upon participants and the deception involved in the study.

Would Milgram’s experiment be allowed today?

Milgram’s experiment would likely not be allowed today in its original form, as it violates modern ethical guidelines for research involving human participants, particularly regarding informed consent, deception, and protection from psychological harm.

Did anyone refuse the Milgram experiment?

Yes, in the Milgram experiment, some participants refused to continue administering shocks, demonstrating individual variation in obedience to authority figures. In the original Milgram experiment, approximately 35% of participants refused to administer the highest shock level of 450 volts, while 65% obeyed and delivered the 450-volt shock.

How can Milgram’s study be applied to real life?

Milgram’s study can be applied to real life by demonstrating the potential for ordinary individuals to obey authority figures even when it involves causing harm, emphasizing the importance of questioning authority, ethical decision-making, and fostering critical thinking in societal contexts.

Were all participants in Milgram’s experiments male?

Yes, in the original Milgram experiment conducted in 1961, all participants were male, limiting the generalizability of the findings to women and diverse populations.

Why was the Milgram experiment unethical?

The Milgram experiment was considered unethical because participants were deceived about the true nature of the study and subjected to severe emotional distress. They believed they were causing harm to another person under the instruction of authority.

Additionally, participants were not given the right to withdraw freely and were subjected to intense pressure to continue. The psychological harm and lack of informed consent violates modern ethical guidelines for research.

Baumrind, D. (1964). Some thoughts on ethics of research: After reading Milgram’s” Behavioral study of obedience.”.  American Psychologist ,  19 (6), 421.

Blass, T. (1999). The Milgram paradigm after 35 years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority 1.  Journal of Applied Social Psychology ,  29 (5), 955-978.

Brannigan, A., Nicholson, I., & Cherry, F. (2015). Introduction to the special issue: Unplugging the Milgram machine.  Theory & Psychology ,  25 (5), 551-563.

Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist, 64 , 1–11.

Elms, A. C. (2009). Obedience lite. American Psychologist, 64 (1), 32–36.

Gibson, S. (2013). Milgram’s obedience experiments: A rhetorical analysis. British Journal of Social Psychology, 52, 290–309.

Gibson, S. (2017). Developing psychology’s archival sensibilities: Revisiting Milgram’s obedience’ experiments.  Qualitative Psychology ,  4 (1), 73.

Griggs, R. A., Blyler, J., & Jackson, S. L. (2020). Using research ethics as a springboard for teaching Milgram’s obedience study as a contentious classic.  Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology ,  6 (4), 350.

Haslam, S. A., & Reicher, S. D. (2018). A truth that does not always speak its name: How Hollander and Turowetz’s findings confirm and extend the engaged followership analysis of harm-doing in the Milgram paradigm. British Journal of Social Psychology, 57, 292–300.

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Birney, M. E. (2016). Questioning authority: New perspectives on Milgram’s ‘obedience’ research and its implications for intergroup relations. Current Opinion in Psychology, 11 , 6–9.

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., Birney, M. E., Millard, K., & McDonald, R. (2015). ‘Happy to have been of service’: The Yale archive as a window into the engaged followership of participants in Milgram’s ‘obedience’ experiment. British Journal of Social Psychology, 54 , 55–83.

Kaplan, D. E. (1996). The Stanley Milgram papers: A case study on appraisal of and access to confidential data files. American Archivist, 59 , 288–297.

Kaposi, D. (2022). The second wave of critical engagement with Stanley Milgram’s ‘obedience to authority’experiments: What did we learn?.  Social and Personality Psychology Compass ,  16 (6), e12667.

Kilham, W., & Mann, L. (1974). Level of destructive obedience as a function of transmitter and executant roles in the Milgram obedience paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29 (5), 696–702.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience . Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67, 371-378.

Milgram, S. (1964). Issues in the study of obedience: A reply to Baumrind. American Psychologist, 19 , 848–852.

Milgram, S. (1965). Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority . Human Relations, 18(1) , 57-76.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view . Harpercollins.

Miller, A. G. (2009). Reflections on” Replicating Milgram”(Burger, 2009), American Psychologis t, 64 (1):20-27

Nicholson, I. (2011). “Torture at Yale”: Experimental subjects, laboratory torment and the “rehabilitation” of Milgram’s “obedience to authority”. Theory & Psychology, 21 , 737–761.

Nicholson, I. (2015). The normalization of torment: Producing and managing anguish in Milgram’s “obedience” laboratory. Theory & Psychology, 25 , 639–656.

Orne, M. T., & Holland, C. H. (1968). On the ecological validity of laboratory deceptions. International Journal of Psychiatry, 6 (4), 282-293.

Orne, M. T., & Holland, C. C. (1968). Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority. On the ecological validity of laboratory deceptions. International Journal of Psychiatry, 6 , 282–293.

Perry, G. (2013). Behind the shock machine: The untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments . New York, NY: The New Press.

Reicher, S., Haslam, A., & Miller, A. (Eds.). (2014). Milgram at 50: Exploring the enduring relevance of psychology’s most famous studies [Special issue]. Journal of Social Issues, 70 (3), 393–602

Russell, N. (2014). Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority “relationship condition”: Some methodological and theoretical implications. Social Sciences, 3, 194–214

Shanab, M. E., & Yahya, K. A. (1978). A cross-cultural study of obedience. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society .

Smith, P. B., & Bond, M. H. (1998). Social psychology across cultures (2nd Edition) . Prentice Hall.

Further Reading

• The power of the situation: The impact of Milgram’s obedience studies on personality and social psychology
• Seeing is believing: The role of the film Obedience in shaping perceptions of Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Experiments
• Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today?

Learning Check

Which is true regarding the Milgram obedience study?

• The aim was to see how obedient people would be in a situation where following orders would mean causing harm to another person.
• Participants were under the impression they were part of a learning and memory experiment.
• The “learners” in the study were actual participants who volunteered to be shocked as part of the experiment.
• The “learner” was an actor who was in on the experiment and never actually received any real shocks.
• Although the participant could not see the “learner”, he was able to hear him clearly through the wall
• The study was directly influenced by Milgram’s observations of obedience patterns in post-war Europe.
• The experiment was designed to understand the psychological mechanisms behind war crimes committed during World War II.
• The Milgram study was universally accepted in the psychological community, and no ethical concerns were raised about its methodology.
• When Milgram’s experiment was repeated in a rundown office building in Bridgeport, the percentage of the participants who fully complied with the commands of the experimenter remained unchanged.
• The experimenter (authority figure) delivered verbal prods to encourage the teacher to continue, such as ‘Please continue’ or ‘Please go on’.
• Over 80% of participants went on to deliver the maximum level of shock.
• Milgram sent participants questionnaires after the study to assess the effects and found that most felt no remorse or guilt, so it was ethical.
• The aftermath of the study led to stricter ethical guidelines in psychological research.
• The study emphasized the role of situational factors over personality traits in determining obedience.

Answers : Items 3, 8, 9, and 11 are the false statements.

Short Answer Questions

• Briefly explain the results of the original Milgram experiments. What did these results prove?
• List one scenario on how an authority figure can abuse obedience principles.
• List one scenario on how an individual could use these principles to defend their fellow peers.
• In a hospital, you are very likely to obey a nurse. However, if you meet her outside the hospital, for example in a shop, you are much less likely to obey. Using your knowledge of how people resist pressure to obey, explain why you are less likely to obey the nurse outside the hospital.
• Describe the shock instructions the participant (teacher) was told to follow when the victim (learner) gave an incorrect answer.
• State the lowest voltage shock that was labeled on the shock generator.
• What would likely happen if Milgram’s experiment included a condition in which the participant (teacher) had to give a high-level electric shock for the first wrong answer?

Group Activity

Gather in groups of three or four to discuss answers to the short answer questions above.

For question 2, review the different scenarios you each came up with. Then brainstorm on how these situations could be flipped.

For question 2, discuss how an authority figure could instead empower those below them in the examples your groupmates provide.

For question 3, discuss how a peer could do harm by using the obedience principles in the scenarios your groupmates provide.

Essay Topic

• What’s the most important lesson of Milgram’s Obedience Experiments? Fully explain and defend your answer.
• Milgram selectively edited his film of the obedience experiments to emphasize obedient behavior and minimize footage of disobedience. What are the ethical implications of a researcher selectively presenting findings in a way that fits their expected conclusions?

Stanley Milgram papers

• PDF Finding Aid
• Ask a Question
• Collection Overview
• Finding Aid View
• Digital Materials
• Container List

Scope and Contents

The Stanley Milgram Papers consist of correspondence, research files, writings files, and teaching files, which document Milgram's work as an innovative researcher and teacher in the field of social psychology. Files concerning his experiments cover the entire span of his career and highlight his work on obedience to authority, television violence, urban psychology, and communication patterns within society. While all phases of Milgram's teaching career are represented in the papers, the bulk of the teaching files date from Milgram's years at CUNY. The Stanley Milgram Papers date from 1927-1986, though the bulk of the papers date after 1960. They are arranged in five series. The arrangement reflects, for the most part, Milgram's filing order. No general attempt has been made to rearrange material into series by topic or format. The dates given for individual files are the dates of the material in the files. Since there are printed materials in the files which Milgram used for background information, some files bear dates prior to Milgram's active professional career. Similarly, files for audio tapes and films which have recently been copied to allow research access on current equipment bear the date of the reformatting. The original copies of these materials, however, are in files dating from the time Milgram created them. Series I, GENERAL FILES, is arranged in two sections: Chronological and Alphabetical. The Chronological section is composed almost entirely of correspondence arranged in very rough chronological order. The Alphabetical section includes: correspondence with selected individuals, which is filed by correspondent name; subject files, which incorporate correspondence, background material, and notes concerning a wide variety of topics, and files of personal material arranged by record type such as drawings and poems. The files in this section are arranged in alphabetical order. The topics covered by the subject files in this series do not duplicate or overlap with those of files found in Series II through V. The Chronological section contains both incoming letters and copies of outgoing copies of Milgram's letters from 1954-1985. Some incoming letters are attached to Milgram's outgoing response, though there is no consistent pattern for filing by either the first or last date. Correspondents include personal friends, former students, and professional colleagues, such as Howard Leventhal, Andre Modigliani, Jeff Travers, Charles Korte, Robert L. Shotland, Phil Zimbardo, Elinor Mannucci, Roger Brown, Irving Janis, Judith Waters, Jerome Singer, Zick Rubin, Henri Tajfel, John Sabini, and Harold Takooshian. There is also correspondence with publishers, agents, co-authors like Hans Toch, organizations requesting Milgram to speak, persons requesting reprints, and members of the general public writing to comment on Milgram's work. Included in these files are also Milgram's critiques of manuscripts by others and reviews of grant proposals. The exchanges include some discussions of teaching and administrative duties at Yale and Harvard. There is a much larger quantity of this type of correspondence during Milgram's tenure at CUNY, which includes exchanges with Mina Rees, Irwin Katz, Harold Proshansky, and Mort Bard. The Alphabetical section also includes correspondence with personal friends, former teachers, former students, and professional colleagues, such as Stuart Albert, Gordon Allport, Elliot Aronson, Solomon Asch, Alan Elms, Roy Feldman, Robert Frager, Harry Fromm, Paul Hollander, Sparks Lunney, Leon Mann, Serge Moscovici, and Maury Silver. There are also voluminous files on administrative matters at CUNY. The Milgram papers have only a small quantity of personal memorabilia, most of which is filed in this section. These files are composed of audio tapes, drawings, films, notes taken by Milgram in classes at Harvard, photographs, poems, and writings about Milgram and his work. Series II, STUDIES, contains materials such as correspondence, notes, financial records, sample forms and instructions, writings of others concerning the subject of the experiment which serve as background for the study and as comment on the results of the study, and analyses of data for experiments designed and conducted by Milgram. (Data generated in the course of these studies is arranged in Series V. Files from experiments conducted as part of a course are filed in Series IV with other teaching materials about that course.) Each study is identified in the listing by a shortened descriptive title which is underlined. These titles appear in the listing in alphabetical order. For some of the fourteen studies there may be as little as one folder of such material, but there are extensive files for Cyranic, New York-Paris, Obedience, Small world, and TV violence. Milgram kept detailed notes about the structuring of his experiments and the complex variations he undertook. The researcher will find it helpful to refer to study notebooks for Obedience (Series II, folder 163) and TV violence (Series II, folders 222-224) before trying to utilize the other material available for these studies. These notebooks outline the multiple conditions in each of these experiments. Grant applications, where available, are another useful source for understanding Milgram's research and interpreting the relevance of other material to a study. Series III, WRITINGS, includes materials relating to Milgram's numerous books and articles, speeches, films, and one exhibition. The series reflects the themes explored in Milgram's studies but also includes Milgram's letters to the editor, reviews, and commentary on other areas of interest to him. The series includes files for published works, complete but unpublished works, and works never completed. For any given title, the series may contain correspondence with publishers, producers, reviewers, or persons making arrangements for a speaking engagement. There may also be notes, financial records, drafts, illustrations, printed copies, promotional materials, itineraries, and copies of reviews. (More general comments about Milgram's writings may be found in Series I under the heading "Writings on Milgram or his work." For the films there are also production materials such as outtakes and audio and video tapes. Series IV, TEACHING FILES, includes course materials from Milgram's teaching assignments at Yale University, Harvard University, and the City University of New York. The series includes Milgram's notes, audio tapes of some class lectures and discussions, class rosters, syllabi, examination questions, and student papers and other assignments. The most extensive files are those for courses in experimental psychology. These files include the apparatus of studies carried out by the class as well as some data and data analysis generated by the study and records of expenditures. Some of these class studies relate to work Milgram developed in his own later studies, such as the lost letter technique and the cyranoid study. Milgram's interests in photography, film, and video are also reflected in these files. Series V, DATA FILES, is composed of data collected by Milgram in the course of eleven of his studies; Milgram generated the bulk of the data in the Cyranic, New York-Paris, Obedience, Small world, and TV violence studies. The accumulated data includes lists of subjects, correspondence with subjects, questionnaires and other forms completed by subjects, audio and video tapes of experiments, and transcripts of interviews. (Some examples of questionnaire forms are included in Series II.) Motion picture film footage of actual experimental situations, made at the end of the obedience to authority study, was used in the production of Milgram's film Obedience . This data is arranged with other material pertaining to the film in Series III. anonymized copies of the film have been transferred to a video tape (box 85), which is open to research. Oversize materials from all series and anonymized copies of data files in Series V are filed at the end of the papers. The listing includes cross-references to all materials which have been arranged with the oversize or anonymized data. The reader should note from these descriptions that there is no one place to look for all material on a particular topic or of a particular document type. In searching a subject, Milgram's work on obedience or on his cyranic studies for example, relevant material might be found in: the Chronological section of GENERAL FILES around the time of the experiment or in exchanges with selected correspondents in the Alphabetical section; in STUDIES under the name of the experiment; in the WRITINGS series, since Milgram often wrote or spoke about his experimental work; in TEACHING FILES since Milgram often used his studies as the basis for class assignments and discussion; and in DATA FILES which contain the raw data from an experiment. Similarly, there is no one series for all of Milgram's correspondence, audio tapes, photographs or any other document type. One can find correspondence, for example, in the GENERAL FILES in either the chronological or alphabetical sections; in the files for any particular experiment in STUDIES; in the WRITINGS concerning a publication or speaking engagement; or with subjects in the DATA FILES. The folder listing highlights files of audio tapes, video tapes, and films. Photographs are also noted, though individual photographs attached as enclosures in a letter are not listed separately.

• Milgram, Stanley, 1933-1984

Conditions Governing Access

Recommendations in boxes 19 and 20 are restricted until 2060. Materials in Series V, Data Files, are restricted for seventy-five years from the date of the conclusion of the experiment (2035-2060). Original audiovisual materials, as well as preservation and duplicating masters, may not be played. Researchers must consult use copies, or if none exist must pay for a use copy, which is retained by the repository. Researchers wishing to obtain an additional copy for their personal use should consult Copying Services information on the Manuscripts and Archives web site.

Conditions Governing Use

Copyright and other associated proprietary rights are retained by the estate of Alexandra Milgram for materials authored or otherwise produced by Stanley Milgram. Copyright status for other collection materials is unknown. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by U.S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S.C.) beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owners. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Gift of Alexandra Milgram, 1985, 1992, 1993, 1998, 2007, 2008, and 2016.

Arrangement

The materials are arranged in five series and four additions: I. General Files, 1954-1985; II. Studies, 1927-1984; III. Writings, 1954-1993; IV. Teaching Files, 1960-1984; V. Data files, 1960-1984.

293.85 Linear Feet (614 boxes)

Language of Materials

Catalog record.

A record for this collection is available in Orbis, the Yale University Library catalog

Persistent URL

https://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/mssa.ms.1406

Additional Description

The papers consist of correspondence, research and data files, writings, audiovisual material, and course material, documenting Stanley Milgram's work as an innovative researcher and teacher in the field of social psychology. The papers highlight Milgram's work on obedience to authority, television violence, urban psychology, and communication patterns within society.

Biographical / Historical

Stanley Milgram was born in New York City, on August 15, 1933. He attended James Monroe High School in the Bronx, graduating in 1950. After receiving an A.B. degree from Queens College in 1954, he entered Harvard University's Department of Social Relations as a Ford Foundation fellow in the behavioral sciences. At Harvard, Milgram studied with Gordon W. Allport and Solomon E. Asch. Milgram served as Asch's teaching assistant at Harvard and later worked as his research assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. From 1957 to 1959 Milgram conducted field research leading to his 1960 Ph.D. dissertation "Conformity in Norway and France." Milgram continued to examine conformity and the effects of group pressure in later experiments at Yale University. From 1960 to 1963 Milgram was an assistant professor of psychology at Yale. During this time he conducted his innovative and controversial experiments on obedience to authority. Milgram's experiment was designed to examine how far one individual will go in hurting another at the behest of a recognized authority figure. Employing more than twenty variations of the experimental situation, Milgram examined the relation of gender, setting, education, and other factors on an individual's willingness to comply with the experimenter's orders to give electric shocks to another person. The experiments also provoked controversy relating to the ethics of experimenting on human subjects. Milgram's findings appeared in numerous articles. He later described his work in the book Obedience to Authority: an Experimental View (1974). From 1963 through 1967 Milgram taught psychology at Harvard University and served as the executive director of the Comparative International Program in the Department of Social Research. During this period he investigated communications systems. Using his lost letter technique Milgram developed a method for gauging community attitudes toward political groups and other institutions. By deliberately losing stamped envelopes addressed to various organizations and individuals and comparing the proportions of letters found and mailed to each target, Milgram was able to gauge the prevailing attitude toward the various organizations. In his small world research, Milgram sought a method to determine how many intermediate acquaintance links are needed to connect any two people in the world. Milgram accepted a professorship in psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1967, on whose faculty he would remain until the end of his life. He received a Guggenheim fellowship to study in Paris during the academic year 1972-1973. In 1980 he was made Distinguished Professor of Psychology. Early in his tenure at CUNY, Milgram designed an experiment to examine the influence of violence in television programming on individual behavior. Milgram was able to get CBS to produce a particular episode of its dramatic series Medical Center with three different endings and he used these three versions in a series of field experiments in which resulting anti-social acts could be observed. At CUNY Milgram also expanded his interest in the field of urban psychology, studying such concepts as groups and crowds, overload, social intrusion, the familiar stranger, and cognitive maps. In the latter study Milgram analyzed and compared the ability of New Yorkers and Parisians to identify photographs of various locations throughout their cities and to represent their city on a hand-drawn map. While at CUNY Milgram also studied the sociological and psychological effects of the camera and photography as a human activity. At the very end of his life, Milgram was engaged in a set of experiments in which subjects interviewed an individual who appeared to be conversing normally but who in fact was delivering the responses and comments of a third person. The third person would communicate to him through a tiny radio receiver in the ear. Milgram called this technique "cyranic speech." In addition to his books and numerous papers, Milgram was an accomplished documentary filmmaker. His films included Obedience , Invitation to Social Psychology , Independence and Conformity , Nonverbal Communication , and Human Aggression . He won a silver medal at the International Film and Television Festival in 1972 for his work on The City and the Self . His films were distributed widely for use in teaching about social psychology. Milgram was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died on December 20, 1984.

• Albert, Stuart, 1941-
• Allport, Gordon W. (Gordon Willard), 1897-1967
• Aronson, Elliot, 1932-
• Asch, Solomon E. (Solomon Elliott), 1907-1996
• City University of New York -- Faculty
• Environmental psychology
• Frager, Robert, 1940-
• Geographical perception
• Harvard University (Faculty)
• Hollander, Paul, 1932-
• Human experimentation in psychology
• Influence (Psychology)
• Moscovici, Serge, 1925-2014
• New York (N.Y.) -- Description and travel
• Paris (France) -- Description and travel
• Psychologists
• Silver, Maury, 1944-
• Social networks
• Social psychology
• Television -- Social aspects
• Video tapes in psychology
• Violence on television
• Yale University -- Faculty

Finding Aid & Administrative Information

Revision statements.

• April 2017: accession added

Repository Details

Part of the Manuscripts and Archives Repository

Sterling Memorial Library Room 147 120 High Street New Haven, CT 06511

Opening Hours

Navigate the collection.

Stanley Milgram Papers (MS 1406). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

Cite Item Description

Stanley Milgram Papers (MS 1406). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/4865 Accessed April 01, 2024.

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Author Interviews

Taking a closer look at milgram's shocking obedience study.

Behind the Shock Machine

Buy featured book.

Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How?

• Independent Bookstores

In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale, conducted a series of experiments that became famous. Unsuspecting Americans were recruited for what purportedly was an experiment in learning. A man who pretended to be a recruit himself was wired up to a phony machine that supposedly administered shocks. He was the "learner." In some versions of the experiment he was in an adjoining room.

The unsuspecting subject of the experiment, the "teacher," read lists of words that tested the learner's memory. Each time the learner got one wrong, which he intentionally did, the teacher was instructed by a man in a white lab coat to deliver a shock. With each wrong answer the voltage went up. From the other room came recorded and convincing protests from the learner — even though no shock was actually being administered.

The results of Milgram's experiment made news and contributed a dismaying piece of wisdom to the public at large: It was reported that almost two-thirds of the subjects were capable of delivering painful, possibly lethal shocks, if told to do so. We are as obedient as Nazi functionaries.

Or are we? Gina Perry, a psychologist from Australia, has written Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments . She has been retracing Milgram's steps, interviewing his subjects decades later.

"The thought of quitting never ... occurred to me," study participant Bill Menold told Perry in an Australian radio documentary . "Just to say: 'You know what? I'm walking out of here' — which I could have done. It was like being in a situation that you never thought you would be in, not really being able to think clearly."

In his experiments, Milgram was "looking to investigate what it was that had contributed to the brainwashing of American prisoners of war by the Chinese [in the Korean war]," Perry tells NPR's Robert Siegel.

Interview Highlights

On turning from an admirer of Milgram to a critic

"That was an unexpected outcome for me, really. I regarded Stanley Milgram as a misunderstood genius who'd been penalized in some ways for revealing something troubling and profound about human nature. By the end of my research I actually had quite a very different view of the man and the research."

Watch A Video Of One Of The Milgram Obedience Experiments

On the many variations of the experiment

"Over 700 people took part in the experiments. When the news of the experiment was first reported, and the shocking statistic that 65 percent of people went to maximum voltage on the shock machine was reported, very few people, I think, realized then and even realize today that that statistic applied to 26 of 40 people. Of those other 700-odd people, obedience rates varied enormously. In fact, there were variations of the experiment where no one obeyed."

On how Milgram's study coincided with the trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann — and how the experiment reinforced what Hannah Arendt described as "the banality of evil"

"The Eichmann trial was a televised trial and it did reintroduce the whole idea of the Holocaust to a new American public. And Milgram very much, I think, believed that Hannah Arendt's view of Eichmann as a cog in a bureaucratic machine was something that was just as applicable to Americans in New Haven as it was to people in Germany."

On the ethics of working with human subjects

"Certainly for people in academia and scholars the ethical issues involved in Milgram's experiment have always been a hot issue. They were from the very beginning. And Milgram's experiment really ignited a debate particularly in social sciences about what was acceptable to put human subjects through."

Gina Perry is an Australian psychologist. She has previously written for The Age and The Australian. Chris Beck/Courtesy of The New Press hide caption

Gina Perry is an Australian psychologist. She has previously written for The Age and The Australian.

On conversations with the subjects, decades after the experiment

"[Bill Menold] doesn't sound resentful. I'd say he sounds thoughtful and he has reflected a lot on the experiment and the impact that it's had on him and what it meant at the time. I did interview someone else who had been disobedient in the experiment but still very much resented 50 years later that he'd never been de-hoaxed at the time and he found that really unacceptable."

On the problem that one of social psychology's most famous findings cannot be replicated

"I think it leaves social psychology in a difficult situation. ... it is such an iconic experiment. And I think it really leads to the question of why it is that we continue to refer to and believe in Milgram's results. I think the reason that Milgram's experiment is still so famous today is because in a way it's like a powerful parable. It's so widely known and so often quoted that it's taken on a life of its own. ... This experiment and this story about ourselves plays some role for us 50 years later."

Related NPR Stories

Shocking TV Experiment Sparks Ethical Concerns

How stanley milgram 'shocked the world', research news, scientists debate 'six degrees of separation'.

Final dates! Join the tutor2u subject teams in London for a day of exam technique and revision at the cinema. Learn more →

Reference Library

Collections

• See what's new
• All Resources
• Student Resources
• Assessment Resources
• Teaching Resources
• CPD Courses
• Livestreams

Study notes, videos, interactive activities and more!

Psychology news, insights and enrichment

Currated collections of free resources

Browse resources by topic

• All Psychology Resources

Resource Selections

Currated lists of resources

Study Notes

Explanations for Obedience -Variations of Milgram (1963)

Last updated 22 Mar 2021

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share by Email

Following Milgram’s original research, numerous variations were carried out to examine how different variables affect obedience.

• Agentic State

An agentic state is when an individual carries out the orders of an authority figure and acts as their agent, with little personal responsibility. In Milgram’s original experiment, the participants were told that the experimenter had full responsibility and therefore they could act as an agent, carrying out the experimenter’s orders. If the participants were told that they were responsible, it is possible that Milgram would have obtained very different results.

Milgram argued that people operate in one of two ways when faced with social situations. Individuals can act autonomously and choose their behaviour, or they can enter an agentic state, where they carry out orders of an authority figure and do not feel responsible for their actions. When a person changes from autonomous state to an agentic state, they have undergone an agentic shift.

In Milgram’s original experiment 65% of participants administered the full 450 volts and were arguably in an agentic state . However, in one variation of Milgram’s experiment and additional confederate administered the electric shocks on behalf of the teacher. In this variation the percentage of participants who administered the full 450 volts rose dramatically, from 65% to 92.5%. This variation highlights the power of shifting responsibility (agentic shift), as these participants were able to shift their responsibility onto the person administering the electric shocks and continue obeying orders because they felt less responsible. Therefore, the ability to enter an agentic state increases the level of obedience, as the level of personal responsibility decreases.

In Milgram’s original research the teacher and the learner were in separate rooms. In order to test the power of proximity, Milgram conducted a variation where the teacher and learner where seated in the same room. In this variation the percentage of participants who administered the full 450 volts dropped from 65% to 40%. Here obedience levels fell, as the teacher was able to experience the learner’s pain more directly. In another variation, the teacher had to force the learner’s hand directly onto the shock plate. In this more extreme variation, the percentage dropped even further, to 30%. In these two variations, the closer the proximity of the teacher and learner, the lower the level of obedience.

The proximity of the authority figure also affects the level of obedience. In one variation, after the experimenter had given the initial instructions they left the room. All subsequent instructions were provided over the phone. In this variation participants were more likely to defy the experimenter and only 21% of the participants administers the full 450 volts.

Milgram’s conducted his original research in a laboratory of Yale University. In order to test the power of the location, Milgram conducted a variation in a run down building in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The experiment was no longer associated with Yale University and was carried out by the Research Association of Bridgeport. In this variation the percentage of participants who administered the full 450 volts dropped from 65% to 47.5%. This highlights the impact of location on obedience, with less credible locations resulting in a reduction in the level of obedience.

In most of Milgram’s variations the experimenter wore a lab coat, indicating his status as a University Professor. Milgram examined the power of uniform in a variation where the experimenter was called away and replaced by another ‘participant’ in ordinary clothes, who was in fact another confederate. In this variation, the man in ordinary clothes came up with the idea of increasing the voltage every time the leaner made a mistake. The percentage of participants who administered the full 450 volts when being instructed by an ordinary man, dropped from 65% to 20%, demonstrating the dramatic power of uniform.

Bickman (1974) also investigated the power of uniform in a field experiment conducted in New York. Bickman used three male actors: one dressed as a milkman; one dressed as a security guard; and one dressed in ordinary clothes. The actors asked members of the public to following one of three instructions: pick up a bag; give someone money for a parking metre; and stand on the other side of a bus stop sign which said ‘no standing’.

On average the guard was obeyed on 76% of occasions, the milkman on 47% and the pedestrian on 30%. These results all suggest that people are more likely to obey, when instructed by someone wearing a uniform. This is because the uniform infers a sense of legitimate authority and power.

Legitimate Authority

Milgram’s variations investigating location and uniform highlight an important factor in obedience research – legitimate authority. For a person to obey an instruction they need to believe that the authority is legitimate and this can be affected by multiple variables.

In Milgram’s original research, which took place at Yale University, the percentage of participants administering the full 450 volts was high (65%). However, when the experiment took place in a run down building in Bridgeport, Connecticut, obedience levels dropped significantly (48%). This change in location reduced the legitimacy of the authority, as participants were less likely to trust the experiment. In addition, when the experimenter in Milgram’s research was replaced by another participant, in ordinary clothes, the obedience levels dropped even further (20%). The lack of a uniform and questionable position of authority reduced the credibility of the authority, which meant the participants were far less likely to obey.

You might also like

Explanations for obedience - milgram.

Quizzes & Activities

Dispositional Explanation for Obedience: the Authoritarian Personality

Great lesson starter for obedience!

16th February 2016

Dispositional Explanation for Obedience: Authoritarian personality

Explanations for obedience - milgram (1963), resistance to social change, video: the authority hoax - you don't know what you would do.

1st November 2016

Lights, Camera, Action! A Shocking Rendition of Milgram

28th January 2017

Our subjects

• › Criminology
• › Economics
• › Geography
• › Health & Social Care
• › Psychology
• › Sociology
• › Teaching & learning resources
• › Student revision workshops
• › Online student courses
• › CPD for teachers
• › Livestreams
• › Teaching jobs

Boston House, 214 High Street, Boston Spa, West Yorkshire, LS23 6AD Tel: 01937 848885

• › Contact us
• › Terms of use
• › Privacy & cookies

© 2002-2024 Tutor2u Limited. Company Reg no: 04489574. VAT reg no 816865400.

• Bipolar Disorder
• Therapy Center
• When To See a Therapist
• Types of Therapy
• Best Online Therapy
• Best Couples Therapy
• Best Family Therapy
• Managing Stress
• Sleep and Dreaming
• Understanding Emotions
• Self-Improvement
• Healthy Relationships
• Student Resources
• Personality Types
• Verywell Mind Insights
• 2023 Verywell Mind 25
• Mental Health in the Classroom
• Editorial Process
• Meet Our Review Board
• Crisis Support

Stanley Milgram Psychologist Biography

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

Isabelle Adam/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Stanley Milgram was a social psychologist best-remembered for his now infamous obedience experiments. His research demonstrated how far people will go to obey authority. His experiments are also remembered for their ethical issues, which contributed to changes in regulation for experiments performed today. Learn more about his life, legacy, and influence on psychology in this brief biography.

Best Known For

• The Milgram Obedience Experiment  
• Familiar Stranger  
• The Small World Experiment  

Stanley Milgram was born on August 15, 1933, to a family of Jewish immigrants in New York City. Milgram attended James Monroe High School where quickly earned a reputation as a hard worker and a strong leader. He completed high school in just three years. One of his classmates was future social psychologist Philip Zimbardo .

He earned his bachelor's in political science from Queens College in 1954. After graduation, his interests shifted to psychology, but he had not taken a single psychology class throughout his undergraduate years. Because of this, he was initially rejected from Harvard University's graduate program in social relations, but was eventually able to gain admission. He earned his Ph.D. in social psychology in 1960 under the instruction of psychologist Gordon Allport .

Career and Famous Obedience Experiments

During his graduate studies, Milgram spent a year working as a research assistant to Solomon Asch who was studied conformity in social groups. Asch's famous conformity experiment involved having participants judge the length of a line amidst actors who would all give the same incorrect answer. Milgram was inspired by the study and went on to perform a similar experiment that would make him famous.

Milgram began working at Yale in 1960 and started conducting his obedience experiments in 1961. In these experiments, participants were ordered by an authority figure to deliver increasingly strong electrical shocks to another person. In reality, the other person was a confederate in the experiment and was simply pretending to be shocked. Surprisingly, 65% of the participants were willing to deliver the maximum voltage shocks under orders from the experimenter.

In 1963, Milgram returned to teach at Harvard for a few years but was not offered tenure largely due to the controversy swirling around him thanks to his infamous obedience experiments. City University of New York (CUNY) asked him to head up their newly formed social psychology program, and in 1974 he published his book Obedience to Authority . Milgram remained at CUNY until his death on December 20, 1984, from a heart attack.

Contributions to Psychology

The 19 different experiments that Milgram conducted on obedience demonstrated that people were willing to obey an authority figure even if the actions went against their morals. The experiments are well-known today, mentioned in virtually every introductory psychology textbook. While Milgram himself was known for his concern for the well-being of his participants, his work was often harshly criticized for the possible negative emotional impact it had on subjects.  

Part of the reason why the American Psychological Association established standards for working with human subjects and why Institutional Review Boards exist today is because of Milgram's work.

In his 2004 biography, author Thomas Blass noted that social psychology is often dismissed as something that simply proves so-called "common sense." Through his surprising results, Milgram was able to demonstrate that the things we think we know about ourselves and our behavior in social groups may not necessarily be true. In essence, Milgram was able to shine a light on a subtopic of psychology that some may view as unimportant, but in reality reveals important truths about human behavior.

"A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act, and without pangs of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority," Milgram explained of his work.

Milgram's research on obedience shocked people back during the 1960s, but his findings are just as relevant and stunning to this day. While recent findings have suggested that there may have been problems with his experimental procedures, replications of his work have found that people are surprisingly willing to obey authority figures - even when they know the orders they are following are wrong.  

Milgram S. Behavioral Study of obedience . Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology . 1963;67(4):371–378. doi:10.1037/h0040525

Milgram S. The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments (3rd expanded ed.). London: Pinter & Martin; 1977.

Travers J, Milgram S. An experimental study of the small world problem . Sociometry . 1969;32(4):425-443. doi:10.2307/2786545

Blass, T. The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York: Basic Books; 2004.

Blass T. From New Haven to Santa Clara: A historical perspective on the Milgram obedience experiments .  Am Psychol . 2009;64(1):37–45. doi:10.1037/a0014434

Russell NJ. Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiments: Origins and early evolution .  British Journal of Health Psychology. 2011;50(1):140–162. doi:10.1348/014466610X492205

Milgram, S. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper & Row; 1974.

Herrera CD. Ethics, deceptions and ‘those Milgram experiments’ . J Appl Philos . 2001;18:245-256. doi:10.1111/1468-5930.00192  

Haslam N, Loughnan S, Perry G. Meta-Milgram: An empirical synthesis of the obedience experiments . PLoS ONE . 2014;9(4):e93927. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0093927

Harvard University. Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) .

Rogers K. Stanley Milgram . Encyclopaedia Britannica. Updated December 16, 2019.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

• Utility Menu

Department of Psychology

• https://twitter.com/PsychHarvard
• https://www.facebook.com/HarvardPsychology/
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFBv7eBJIQWCrdxPRhYft9Q
• Participate

Stanley Milgram

In 1954 Harvard’s Department of Social Relations took the unusual step of admitting a bright young student who had not taken a single psychology course.  Fortunately Stanley Milgram was soon up to speed in social psychology, and in the course of his doctoral work at Harvard he conducted an innovative cross-cultural comparison of conformity in Norway and France under the guidance of Gordon Allport. 

Obtaining his Ph.D. in 1960, Milgram was ready to expand his work on conformity with a series of experiments on obedience to authority that he conducted as an assistant professor at Yale from 1960 to 1963. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s report on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem, Milgram wondered whether her claims about “the banality of evil” – that evil acts can come from ordinary people following orders as they do their jobs – could be demonstrated in the lab. Milgram staged meticulously designed sham experiments in which subjects were ordered to administer dangerous shocks to fellow volunteers (in reality, the other volunteers were confederates and the shocks were fake). Contradicting the predictions of every expert he polled , Milgram found that more than seventy percent of the subjects administered what they thought might be fatal shocks to an innocent stranger. Collectively known as The Milgram Experiment, this groundbreaking work demonstrated the human tendency to obey commands issued by an authority figure, and more generally, the tendency for behavior to be controlled more by the demands of the situation than by idiosyncratic traits of the person.

The Milgram Experiment is one of the best-known social psychology studies of the 20th century. With this remarkable accomplishment under his belt, young Dr. Milgram returned to Harvard in 1963 to take a position as Assistant Professor of Social Psychology.

During this time at Harvard, Milgram undertook a new, equally innovative line of research, known as the Small World Experiment.  Milgram asked a sample of people to trace out a chain of personal connections to a designated stranger living thousands of miles away. His finding that most people could do this successfully with a chain of six or fewer links yielded the familiar expression “Six Degrees of Separation,” which later became the name of a play and a movie,  a source for the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” and a major theme of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 bestseller,  The Tipping Point . The internet has made it easier to study social networks, and several decades after its discovery, the phenomenon has become a subject of intense new research.

Stanley Milgram left Harvard in 1967 to return to his hometown, New York City, accepting a position as head of the social psychology program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  Tragically, he died of a heart attack at the age of 51. Milgram is listed as number 46 on the American Psychological Association’s list of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century.

Blass, T. (2002).  The man who shocked the world.  Psychology Today, Mar/Apr2002, 35(2), p. 68.

Eminent psychologists of the 20th century.  (July/August, 2002). Monitor on Psychology, 33(7), p.29.

Milgram, S. (1977).  The individual in a social world.  Reading, MA:  Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.

Role/Affiliation

Filter: role.

• Faculty (26)
• Affiliated Faculty (5)
• Non-Ladder Faculty (14)
• Visiting Scholars (4)
• Fellows and Associates (72)
• Graduate Students (79)
• Historical Faculty (24)
• Postdocs and Research Associates (60)
• Professors Emeriti (4)

Filter: Research Program

• Clinical Science (6)
• Cognition, Brain, & Behavior (17)
• Developmental Psychology (7)
• Social Psychology (12)

Filter by alphabetical grouping of Last Name

Milgram’s Experiment on Obedience: Ethical Issues Essay

Introduction, milgram’s main experiment, the ethical issues of milgram’s experiment, attempts to replicate milgram’s study.

The experimental method is an important tool that allows scientists to make significant discoveries. However, some of the most major findings were made during experiments the ethical side of which remains doubtful. The experiments conducted by Milgram in the 1960s are an example of such studies; their results were among the most significant discoveries about the human’s behavioural tendencies, but the method caused a vast amount of discussions on ethical issues. In this paper, after describing the Milgram’s main experiment and its findings, we will consider the ethical problems that arise, and discuss some similar experiments that were adapted to avoid these problems.

The main experiment conducted by Milgram (1963) was designed to test the level of naive subjects’ obedience to authority. The subjects were told that the experiment tested the potency of punishment in improving learning capabilities, and were asked to administer electrical shocks to a “learner” (an accomplice of the experimenter). The subject did not know the shocks were false; measures were taken to convince the subject that the shocks were real. The “learner” was given some pairs of words. Then he was told one word from one of the pairs, and four more words. The “learner” had to choose the word that came in a pair with the first word, and press a respective button, which turned on a respective light that the participant could see. The subject did not see or hear the learner. If the answer was wrong, the subject was to apply an electric shock to the “learner” and continue.

Each time the subject had to increase the voltage of the shock by 15 V. The voltage of electric shocks ranged from 15 V to 450 V, and there were 30 switches; they were subdivided into the following groups: “Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Very Strong Shock, Intense Shock, Extreme Intensity Shock, Danger: Severe Shock” (Milgram, 1963); the last two switches were marked XXX. When the participant paused or stopped, four standardized phrases were used to tell them to go on. If, after being told all the phrases, the subject refused to administer more shocks, they were considered as one who defied the experiment. The others, who carried on and administered the highest shock (450 V), were considered obedient (Milgram, 1963).

Importantly, when the subject applied the 300 V shock (the last one in the “Intense Shock” subsection), the “learner” kicked the wall so that the subject could hear it, and stopped giving answers. The “learner” once again kicked the wall at 315 V (the first level in the “Extreme Intensity Shock” subsection), and then stopped giving any feedback at all. The subject was asked to wait for 5-10 seconds for the answer, and when none was received, to proceed applying shocks.

The subjects were agitated; they perspired, groaned, bit their lips, dug fingernails into their flesh, spoke to themselves, nervously laughed, etc.; 3 subjects experienced uncontrollable seizures of laughter. However, out of 40 subjects, 26 carried out the experiment to the end and administered the 450 V shock. None stopped at a level below 300 V. Five stopped at 300 V (after the first kick), four at 315 V (the second kick), two – at 330 V (when no response followed). Finally, three more persons stopped, one at every of the next three levels. Thus, out of 40 subjects, only 14 defied the experiment, and at very high levels of voltage (Milgram, 1963).

These results strictly contradicted all the predictions made by psychologists; it was expected that only about 0-3% of subjects would administer the highest level of shock (Milgram, 1963). However, similar experiments (with slight variations) were carried out later in other countries, and they also showed analogous levels of obedience in subjects (Smith & Bond, 1998, p. 23; Shanab & Yahya, 1978).

It is noteworthy that Milgram’s experiments are believed to have been somewhat exaggerated or altered by Milgram to produce stronger impact (Brannigan, Nicholson, & Cherry, 2015). However, it is stressed that few researchers doubted the soundness of his results (McArthur, 2009); the soundness is also confirmed by other similar studies (Smith & Bond, 1998, p. 23; Shanab & Yahya, 1978).

This experiment is considered to be one of the most controversial experiments conducted by social psychologists (Smith & Bond, 1998, p. 22). In many experiments, it is important that subjects are not aware of the nature of the study, so that their natural behaviour might be observed (Orne & Holland, 1968). However, the experiment conducted by Milgram uses direct lies and deception in order to prepare the participants for the test. This raises the ethical problem of deception. It is sometimes stated that it is unethical to lie or use tricks in order to lead participants to believe in false things (Herrera, 2001).

On the other hand, Herrera (2001) argues that many critics who protest against deception are often unable to show what is wrong with it and how the participants suffer from deception on its own. It is arguable that as long as participants do not come to any harm or stress due to being deceived as a part of an experiment, and as long as they are debriefed and told the truth after the study, it could be ethical to use deception and manipulation in research.

However, the case of Milgram’s experiment is more complicated than that. His test subjects were not only deceived; they were put in a situation where they were forced to make extremely tough moral decisions and harm the “learner,” a random innocent stranger. It was already mentioned that the subjects were anxious and agitated. In fact, some of them even might have experienced some dire consequences to their health, if they, for example, had heart problems; fortunately, there were no such happenings. Still, the ethical side of the experiment remains doubtful.

Thus, it is no wonder that Milgram’s research caused a large wave of discussions related to the ethics of scientific research. It should be noted that many of Milgram’s subjects were afterward grateful to him for letting them know about some features of their character they would not have suspected about before the study (Milgram, 1974). Still, nowadays numerous restrictions were placed to keep research from becoming too unethical. The significant loss in the amount of experimental realism has charged its costs, making some more sophisticated experiments impossible (Benjamin & Simpson, 2009).

There are, however, some workarounds for these limitations. For instance, Benjamin and Simpson (2009) mention that it is possible to use “experimental instructions or manipulations that lead participants to believe they might experience some event or procedure that, in the end, never happens” (p. 18). But the ethical limitations still restrict the space for conducting experiments.

Milgram also claimed that his experiments caused the ethical criticism because extremely unnerving facts about the tendencies in human behaviour were uncovered (Milgram, 1974). Noteworthy, this discovery may indeed be even dangerous in some cases, by showing some malevolent politicians how easy it might be to make people obey (Pina e Cunha, Rego, & Clegg, 2010). But many significant scientific discoveries might carry that threat, and it is arguable that they still bring more good than harm; in our case, if people know about the Milgram’s experiment, they might be less likely to obey openly harmful orders coming from some authority.

while Using Ethically Approved Methods

There have been numerous attempts to replicate the Milgram’s experiment. However, these attempts often changed some conditions of the original experiment – not only to test the influence of changing different variables but also because of the need to comply with the new ethical restrictions imposed on the studies. For example, Smith and Bond (1998) report a number of studies where participants could choose what level of shock to administer (p. 24). In another research carried out in the Netherlands, the subjects did not administer electrical shocks or use other means of pain infliction, but instead applied psychological pressure, screaming at and harassing fake job applicants (Smith & Bond, 1998, p. 24). Such a method might be perceived as much more ethical, as the subjects knew that they would not be causing any physical pain to the job applicants and would not harm their health (like an electric shock could).

Sheridan and King (1972) conducted another experiment in which participants, students who volunteered to take part in the experiment in order to fulfil a university course requirement, were to administer electrical shocks to a puppy they could partially see. After the experiment, the subjects were debriefed, reassured that the puppy was safe, handled the puppy, and interviewed. This experiment could be considered as more ethical due to the fact that, even though the shock was believed to be administered, the receiver was not a human but an animal. However, it is clear and justified that agitation and nervousness were still experienced by the subjects.

Slater et al. (2006) carried out another similar study, but with somewhat different goals; it was aimed at determining whether participants would still respond to an extreme social situation even if they knew it was not real. This time, the subjects “administered” an electric shock (with a “higher voltage” each time) to a virtual female stranger. 23 participants heard and saw the virtual human experience discomfort and suffering, and communicated with her; 11 subjects communicated with her only using text. It is interesting that, despite the fact that all the participants knew that neither the shocks nor the person were real, they still showed the same physiological, behavioural and subjective reactions as if everything was real. This important finding allows to continue experiments similar to Milgram’s by employing the modern technologies of virtual reality, without having to deal with ethical issues related to both deception and the belief that a real person (or an animal) is suffering.

As it can be seen, Milgram’s findings were significant in uncovering some tendencies of human behaviour that are dangerous indeed. His research caused a surge of similar studies, as well as numerous discussions on the ethics of the experimental method. Although many restrictions were imposed on the scientific methods due to ethical considerations, and these restrictions often limit the capabilities of scholars, researchers are in some cases able to find workarounds to these limitations in order to conduct similar studies in an ethically satisfying manner.

Benjamin, L. T., Jr., & Simpson, J. A. (2009). The power of the situation: The impact of Milgram’s obedience studies on personality and social psychology. The American Psychologist, 64 (1), 12-19. Web.

Brannigan, A., Nicholson, I., & Cherry, F. (2015). Introduction to the special issue: Unplugging the Milgram machine. Theory & Psychology, 25 (5), 551-563.

Herrera, C. D. (2001). Ethics, deception, and ‘those Milgram experiments’. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 18 (3), 245-258.

McArthur, D. (2009). Good ethics can sometimes mean better science: Research ethics and the Milgram experiments. Science and Engineering Ethics, 15 (1), 69-79. Web.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67 , 371–378. Web.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view . New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Orne, M. T., & Holland, C. H. (1968). On the ecological validity of laboratory deceptions . International Journal of Psychiatry, 6 (4), 282-293. Web.

Pina e Cunha, M., Rego, A., & Clegg, S. R. (2010). Obedience and evil: From Milgram and Kampuchea to normal organizations. Journal of Business Ethics, 97 (2), 291-309. Web.

Shanab, M. E., & Yahya, K. A. (1978). A cross-cultural study of obedience . Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 11 (4), 267-269. Web.

Sheridan, C. L., & King, R. G., Jr. (1972). Obedience to authority with an authentic victim. Proceedings of the 80th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association . Web.

Slater, M., Antley, A., Davison, A., Swapp, D., Guger, C., Barker, C.,…Sanchez-Vives, M. V. (2006). A virtual reprise of the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments. PLoS One, 1 (1), e39. Web.

Smith, P. B., & Bond, M. H. (1998). Social psychology across cultures (2nd ed.). Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, January 12). Milgram's Experiment on Obedience: Ethical Issues. https://ivypanda.com/essays/milgrams-experiment-on-obedience-ethical-issues/

"Milgram's Experiment on Obedience: Ethical Issues." IvyPanda , 12 Jan. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/milgrams-experiment-on-obedience-ethical-issues/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Milgram's Experiment on Obedience: Ethical Issues'. 12 January.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Milgram's Experiment on Obedience: Ethical Issues." January 12, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/milgrams-experiment-on-obedience-ethical-issues/.

1. IvyPanda . "Milgram's Experiment on Obedience: Ethical Issues." January 12, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/milgrams-experiment-on-obedience-ethical-issues/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Milgram's Experiment on Obedience: Ethical Issues." January 12, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/milgrams-experiment-on-obedience-ethical-issues/.

• Puppy Mills: Are You Supporting Puppy Bedlams?
• Obedience in Milgram’s Experiment
• Puppy Mills. Problems. The alternatives for puppy mills
• Obedience Phenomenon in Milgram's Research
• Obedience to Authority in Milgram’s Study
• Behavioral Study of Obedience by Stanley Milgram
• Obedience to Authority Figures: Replicating Milgram's Experiment
• Milgram’s Research: How and why Milgram’s research on obedience is relevant to our understanding of the conduct of soldiers in times of war
• Psychology: Diana Baumrind's Obedience Study
• Milgram’s Behavioral Study of Obedience
• The Bystander Problem Phenomenon in Psychology
• Kristen Monroe's Views on Humanity During a War
• Behavior of Adolescents With Oppositional Defiant Disorder
• Psychological Counseling Using Behavioral Theory
• Altruism and Elevation Relationship

• TOP CATEGORIES
• AS and A Level
• University Degree
• International Baccalaureate
• Uncategorised
• 5 Star Essays
• Study Tools
• Study Guides
• Meet the Team
• Social Psychology

Outline and evaluate Milgram's study into obedience (12 marks)

Outline and evaluate one study into obedience. (12 marks)

Milgram was interested in why normal German people followed the orders of the Nazis, leading to their treatment of the Jews. He was interested in whether normal Americans would also blindly follow instructions from authority, even if it led to them hurting other people.

Milgram set up a study where participants believed they were taking part in a learning experiment. Each participant was a `teacher` who read out word pairs to a `learner` (who was actually a confederate). Every time the learner gave an incorrect response, the participant had to give them an electric shock. With each shock, the voltage was increased up to a final level of 450 V, labelled `XXX`. At 300 V, he was silent. If the participant asked to stop, they were told that the experiment had to continue.

Milgram found that no participants stopped the experiment before 300 V, and 65% actually continued as far as 450 V. Milgram concluded that ordinary Americans obey orders even if it leads to them acting against their conscience and hurting others.

This was a very influential study, which provided great insights into human behaviour. It disproved the `Germans are different` hypothesis, and led to increased awareness of how easily we can just blindly obey orders, without questioning whether we morally should. However, there are a number of criticisms, including ethical issues and issues of validity.

This is a preview of the whole essay

The participants in Milgram’s study suffered a lot of psychological distress. They were also deceived as to the nature of the experiment, which meant they couldn’t provide informed consent. Additionally, they were not informed of their right to withdraw, which is now common practice in psychology experiments. Instead, they were urged to continue with the experiment when they asked to stop. This experiment was therefore very ethically questionable, and would never be allowed today. However, Milgram extensively debriefed his participants, including reuniting them with the learner. The participants therefore left understanding that they hadn’t hurt anyone. They did, however, leave in the knowledge that they were capable of hurting people, which may have caused them distress.

Milgram’s study can also be criticised in terms of external and internal validity. Some people claim that it lacks internal validity – that it wasn’t actually measuring obedience rates at all. Perhaps instead, participants were just acting along with the experimenter, not actually believing they were hurting the learner (showing demand characteristics). The experiment has also been criticised in terms of external validity – that it doesn’t represent traits that would happen in the real world, with different people, and different situations. However, similar obedience rates have since been shown in other studies (e.g. Hofling et al), which do have high external validity.

Document Details

• Author Type Student
• Word Count 451
• Page Count 1
• Level AS and A Level
• Subject Psychology
• Type of work Exam preparation

Related Essays

Outline and evaluate research into obedience (12)

Outline and evaluate research into obedience

outline and evaluate research into obedience authority

Evaluation of Milgram's Obedience Study