The Milgram experiment is a famous psychological study exploring the willingness of individuals to follow the orders of authorities when those orders conflict with the individual’s own moral judgment. Psychologist Stanley Milgram began the obedience study at Yale in 1961, shortly after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Albert Eichmann. Milgram’s research was documented as “Behavioral Study on obedience” in 1963 in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.
Although the researcher’s name will always be associated with the obedience study, Milgram is also known for research with less troubling implications, the small-world experiment. In 1967, the psychologist developed a model of distribution to demonstrate the six degrees of separation phenomenon, according to which any person on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of no more than five intermediaries.
The study
Milgram said he developed his research to answer the question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?" In the experiment, subjects thought that they were administering electrical shocks to “learners” who failed to respond correctly. In reality, the learners were actually part of the research team.
The experiment's subjects were told they would be operating a shock generator with gradations ranging from Slight Shock to Danger: Severe Shock. Despite the "learners" who acted as if they were experiencing clear signs of discomfort and distress, the majority of subjects continued to follow instructions to deliver shocks -- even the maximum shock, which could be fatal.
More recent examinations of Milgram’s research by Gina Perry indicate that only about half of the participants were fully convinced that they were delivering shocks and that 66 percent of those participants refused to comply. Nevertheless, even that level of compliance has troubling implications for human behavior under unethical authority.
Applications of the Milgram experiment in business
In business, implications of the study have relevance for a number of areas including human resource management. For example, candidates for positions of authority should be taught counter-measures to blind obedience. Such counter-measures include the encouragement of critical thinking supported by a degree of autonomy among employees.
The Milgram experiment is also relevant to software development and AI ethics. In the case of the latter, AI might, for example, be programmed with a code of conduct and with weighted priorities that would supersede any conflicting instructions.
This was last updated in July 2019
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| You won't need ALL the material on this page. The Examiner expects you to be able to explain how different factors affect obedience and prejudice. The Exam could ask you specifically about CULTURE. The Exam could also ask about "situational factors" (or "environment") in general. Make sure you have a study or theory you can write about for how situations/environments affect obedience and prejudice - but it's up to you which evidence you learn. You won't be asked
specifically about any of the studies or concepts on this page. |
| As well as individual differences, there are circumstances that affect whether or not people obey. These circumstances are known as situational variables. The Exam might refer to them as "the
environment"
SITUATIONS & OBEDIENCE Milgram's "Variations" explore a number of situational variables which increase or decrease obedience or else have no effect.
Location In Variation #10, Milgram compares obedience at prestigious Yale University to obedience in a shabby downtown office, with the Experimenter claiming to work for a private research company. Obedience goes down from 65% (baseline) to 45.5%. This is a drop, but not as big as in Variation #7. Milgram
concludes that the location is much less important than the physical presence of the authority figure. Lots of other researchers have investigated the effects of situational variables on obedience.
Giving a patient a drug without the doctor being physically present was against the hospital's rules but, more importantly, the dosage ordered by Doctor Smith was 4 times the safe limit. A real doctor was on hand to intervene and stop the nurse from actually giving the patient the drug. 21 out of the 22 nurses obeyed the unknown doctor. When Hofling asked other nurses by questionnaire whether they would break hospital rules in this way, 31 out of 33 said they wouldn't. This goes to show that, when people are alone with no one else to turn to, they tend to be more obedient. Milgram also found that obedience decreased when there were other participants present: in Variation #17, with two other confederates pretending to be participants who refused to go past 150V, the obedience dropped from 65% (baseline, isolated condition) to
10%.
Crash Course Psychology covers this topic. Milgram is at 0:30 SITUATIONS & PREJUDICE Sherif and Tajfel both propose that people easily fall into an in-group/out-group mentality, but
there are situational factors that make this more likely.
According to SIT, there's no need for competition. Just recognising that someone is from an out-group is enough - all by itself! - to trigger prejudice and discrimination will follow.
Charismatic Leaders "Charisma" is influence over other people's emotions. A "charismatic leader" is someone other people look up to and want to follow. Charismatic leaders can promote prejudice and discrimination or they can oppose it.
The Pathology of Power In the famous Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), Philip Zimbardo turned the basement of Stanford University Psychology Department into a simulated prison and recruited students to play the roles of prisoners and guards, with himself as "Governor". The study was supposed to run for a month but was cancelled after 6 days because the guards became so hostile towards the prisoners, while the prisoners suffered breakdowns. The guards became authoritarian - the power "went to their heads" and they psychologically tortured the prisoners. Zimbardo himself got "sucked into" his role as Governor. It was his fiancee, Christina Maslach, whose shocked reaction made him realise what he was encouraging was wrong.
Crash Course Psychology covers prejudice & discrimination. Prejudice is defined at 2:15 and in-groups/out-groups at 7:30 SITUATIONS VS DISPOSITIONS Dispositions are the opposite of situations. They are facts
about you which remain true all the time, even the your situation may change. They include things like your cultural beliefs, your age and gender and your personality. They are also known as individual differences. How much of our behaviour is due to situations and how much to dispositions is a big debate in Social Psychology.
The social psychologists of the 1950s, '60s and '70s (Sherif, Milgram, Zimbardo) tended to rate situations as more important than dispositions. Psychologists today think it is a blend of both. This is an example of Psychology changing over time. |
| RESEARCH INTO CULTURAL VARIABLES & OBEDIENCEMilgram's obedience studies were all on Americans. America is a Western culture which values individualism particularly highly; it is also a democratic culture with relatively little deference (although American culture in the 1960s was more deferential than it is today). Furthermore, face-saving or shame does not play a big part in American culture. Because of this, we might expect obedience levels to be higher in many other cultures, but perhaps lower in cultures even less deferential and even more individualistic than the USA. Cross-cultural studies investigate this by replicating American studies like Milgram's in other countries and comparing the results to Milgram's original (baseline) findings. In
the UK, South Africa, Spain and Austria, replications found 50-87.5 % of participants were fully obedient. This supports Milgram's results, where 65% of participants were fully obedient. The results of cross-cultural studies are summed up below:
Beware: not all of these studies were full replications. For example, Meeus & Raaijmakers (1986) only ordered their Dutch participants to insult the confederate, not shock him. When viewed cross-culturally, the American participants seem to have quite low levels of obedience. Thomas Blass, a psychologist and Holocaust survivor who has written books on Milgram, calculates the mean obedience for US studies to be 61% and the rest of the world to be
66% (Blass, 2002). Kilham & Mann (1974) stands out, with an overall obedience level among Australians of 28%, less than half of Milgram's baseline 65%. Are the Australians really fierce individualists who don't defer to authority?
Yeah, that must be it The cross-cultural study worth looking at in detail comes from Jordan in the 1970s. SHANAB & YAHYA (1978): A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY OF OBEDIENCE This study was carried out at the University of Jordan in Amman. It followed a year after the 1977 study on children and recruited 48 university students, 24 male and 24 female. The procedure replicated Milgram's baseline (1963) study, except for the following changes:
There were some interesting results:
12.5% of participants who received NO
ORDERS still choose to shock a fellow human being unconscious and (for all they knew) to death. Shanab & Yahya regard their results as supporting Milgram's Agency Theoryand the idea that obedience is universal (found in every culture); they don't comment on the oddity of the over-obedient Controls. Of course, Milgram didn't have a Control Group. Perhaps, if he had given his participants the choice, 1 in 8 Americans would also have taken it upon themselves to shock an innocent man to death. Shanab & Yahya also comment that No subject appeared to be affected adversely throughout the experiment - Mitri Shanab & Khawla Yahya This qualitative data contrasts with the shaking,
groaning, hysterical laughter and fainting in Milgram's 1963 study. It strengthens the impression that there are some cultural differences in obedience. |
| APPLYING THESE FACTORS TO OBEDIENCE |
| EVALUATING FACTORS IN OBEDIENCE & PREJUDICE (AO3) |
| EXEMPLAR ESSAY |