Experiments on Obedience

Milgram

"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act."
-Quote from Milgram's Obedience to Authority

Psychologist Stanley Milgram shocked the world with his unprecedented study on obedience, one that made him one of the most important social psychologists of the 20^th century.  In the early 1960’s, Milgram, a Yale University Social Psychologist at the time, conducted a series of experiments, his most famous being the obedience study. 

THE STUDY

Subjects were told that the purpose of the experiment was for a study on the effects on punishment in learning.  They were informed of their job: to read off to a learner (who was in a room adjacent to them) a list of word-pairs that the learners were then to memorize.  The “teacher” was to then read one of the words and the “learner” was to repeat the pair back, through means of a loud-speaker device (the “teacher” could only hear into the other room, not see the person in it). 

In the teacher/subject’s room was an electric shock generator with thirty levers—volts ranging from 15 to 450. Each mistake the “learner” made would result in an electric shock.  The severity of the shock, the subjects were told, was to be increased with each mistake.  The subjects, obviously, were unaware that no electric shock was actually generated and that the “learner” in the adjacent room who was actually in on the experiment, too, was only pretending to be shocked by simulating screams and pleas that would be heard if a real electric shock were administered

Jerry M. Burger

Social Psychologist Jerry M. Burger repeated Milgram’s experiment, with minor changes because of ethical guidelines.  Rather than having 450 volts be the maximum shock on the board, it was 150 volts. 

Results today weren’t any different.  Burger’s results correlated with Milgram’s – 70% of the 40 participants were willing to continue after 150 volts