MILGRAM'S OBEDIENCE

Milgram's Obedience

Milgram's Obedience

Introduction

Nations and cultures differ among themselves in countless ways, ranging from something as superficial as how people dress, to more serious matters, such as unwritten rules of appropriate social conduct. But one of the universals of social behavior that transcends specific groups is the presence of hierarchical forms of social organization. That is, all civilized societies seem to have people in positions of authority who are recognized as having the power or the right to issue commands that others feel obligated to follow. Most of the time, these authority-follower relationships serve useful functions. For example, children need to listen to parents to teach them right from wrong, that it is dangerous to cross the street when the light turns red, and countless other things. But there is also a potentially darker side to commands from authorities: their ability to lead their followers to act in ways that violate the followers' sense of right or wrong (Burger, 2008).

The most dramatic and powerful demonstration of this dark side of obedience was provided by a classic series of experiments on obedience to authority conducted by Stanley Milgram as a beginning assistant professor at Yale University in 1961-1962. The work was stimulated by his attempt to shed some light on the Holocaust—the systematic murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children during World War II by the Germans, aided by their allies. For Milgram, obedience seemed a likely explanation to pursue because it was generally known that Germany society placed a high value on unquestioning obedience to authorities. In fact, initially his plan was to repeat his experiment in Germany, after completing his research with American subjects. This plan was scrapped after completing his research at Yale because he found such a high degree of obedience among his American subjects that he saw no need to go to Germany.

Yale was Milgram's first academic position after receiving his Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University. Although he was very creative and, later in his career, he conducted many other inventive studies, none surpassed his very first experiments, the obedience studies, in their importance and fame.

Obedience Experiments

The subjects in the obedience experiments were normal adults who had responded to an ad in the New Haven Register, recruiting volunteers for a study of memory. When a subject arrived in Milgram's lab, he was met by the experimenter, who explained that his job was to try to teach another subject—the learner—to memorize a list of adjective-noun pairs. During the testing phase, each time the learner made a mistake, the subject-teacher was to punish the learner with an electric shock by pressing one of a row of 30 switches on a very realistic looking “shock generator.”

Above each switch was a voltage label, beginning with 15 volts and ending with 450 volts. The experimenter told the teacher-subject that the rule was that on each subsequent error he had to give the next, more intense shock. So, on the first mistake, he would press the ...