Milgram’s Experiment
“The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority” (“Quotes”). Stanley Milgram’s research has been a controversy since the 60s, he was devoted on figuring out the conflict between obedience to authority and the personal conscience. Milgram is a psychologist who designed a psychology experiment in which people think they are delivering actual shocks to a stranger strapped into a chair in another room. Subjects are told that it is about memory. But, in reality, the experiment is about conformity, conscience, and people’s free will. Milgram is simply trying to come to terms about the Holocaust and to test people’s tendencies to comply with authority figures. His experiment is said to begin after the trail of Adolf Eichmann, who was one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. The question being raised is how does civilized human beings participate in human acts?
Milgram wanted to try to investigate whether the Germans were obedient to the authority figures. The research consists of a learner and a teacher; men only, every hour and the experiment’s participants were always the teacher and were given questions to ask the “learner” and were also instructed on how to punish the “learner”, the learner tells the participants that he has a heart condition beforehand and the teacher is given a sample shock of 45 volts. 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. 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.” (McLeod 2007).
When the experiment continues, the participants start to get worried about the learner, because of the exclaims that he is making to tell them to stop. The participants usually look back at the experimenter in hesitation wondering if they should continue on with the shocks, but the experimenter tells them to continue on with the research and will take responsibility. As Milgram states:
"I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed choose to reject the experimenter’s commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals” (Milgram, as quoted in Blass, 2004, p.128).
He goes on to say that his feeling is that he viewed in the total context of values served by the experiment. One of the teachers gets up and leaves the experiment, because he cannot go on with it since he works with electricity and knows what its all about. The point of the experiment is to learn something about human nature. There was a purpose to advance science for the experiment to see if people obeyed authority figures. There were 25 different variations of the experiment, they adjusted the script from the “learner”, moved the experiment to a shabby hall, “Obedience dropped to 47.5%. This suggests that status of location effects obedience” (McLeod 2007) and they also started to include women. One woman even turned off the machine, because she could not do it, and nearly every case was the same result, but they all continued to do the experiment anyway when told to. The results in Milgram’s research was 65% of the subjects were obedient, so therefore, obedience compliance was more. When the experiment was complete, the subjects did a questionnaire, 1.3% indicted negative feelings and 74% said they had learned something of importance about themselves that shaped human connection. This experiment indicates that American society cannot be counted on, because we truly do not know within ourselves whether we would continue to harm someone when told by an authority figure. According to the article by Thomas Blass, “They demonstrated with jarring clarity that ordinary individuals could be induced to act destructively even in the absence of physical coercion, and humans need not be innately evil or aberrant to act in ways that are reprehensible and inhumane” (Blass 2002). There are three types of people that are confirmed in Milgram’s study, one who makes things happen; watches things that happen; and the person that asks what happened, ultimately the person has a choice; once you assume the role it is impossible to go back. There were many other experiments that Milgram has done within his lifetime.
When Milgram got his new job as the head of department of Social Psychology, he did an experiment with his students where they had to go on a bus and sing; no humming. Another one of his experiments that he did was “Leave a Letter” and it proved that the pro white letters get mailed more often in white neighborhoods and pro negro letters get mailed more often in black neighborhoods. In another experiment, Milgram looked in New York to have participants look at pictures of the sites and try to identify those sites. Milgram has two agency theories that he explains the behavior of his participants: The autonomous state and the agentic state. The autonomous state simply means that people direct their own actions and then take responsibility as the result of those said actions. Then, the agentic state is that people allow others to direct their actions and then just pass off the responsibility of the consequences to the person that is giving the orders. According to Milgram, in order for a person to enter the state of “agentic” the person giving the orders is perceived as being “qualified” to direct other people’s behavior and then the person that is being ordered about is also able to believe that authority figure will accept responsibility for what happens.
Was Milgram’s experiment biased? Milgram’s study was conducted with only males, so, do the findings transfer to females as well? What would happen if the experiment was only females? Milgram’s study could not be seen as a representative of the American population, because the sample was self-selected. Meaning, the participants became the participants because by electing to respond to the the newspaper advertisement about the experiment they selected themselves.
There are three ethnical issues surrounding his experiment, the first one being: Deception. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, deception means, “a: the act of causing someone to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid: the act of deceiving resorting to falsehood and deception used deception to leak the classified information” (“Deception”). The reason why deception was involved was because the participants actually believed they they were shocking a real person and they were unaware that the learner was part of Milgram’s study. Milgram argued that, “illusion is used when necessary in order to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at-truths” (McLeod 2007). The second ethnical issue was the protection of the participants. The participants in this experiment were exposed to stressful situations that could have psychological harm and many of them were distressed. Many of the participants pleaded to stop, but the authority figure had them continue. But, Milgram argued that this situation was short-term, because once they saw that the learner was in fact fine, their stress level decreased. The final ethnical issue was the right to withdrawal. They should make it plain and simply to the participants that they have the right to withdrawal anytime throughout the experiment. The experimenter gave the participants four statements, which mostly likely discouraged the withdrawal.
Milgram wanted to prove and understand if the Nazi soldiers are different to normal people. According to the article from Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, “the experiment is useful because it does provide some support for the hypothesis that ‘Nazi soldiers were fundamentally different to normal people. Moreover, the study is useful because it tells us that we have a tendency to follow people with authority” (Milgram 1963). The justifications that Milgram examined were for the acts of genocide that were offered by those accused at the World War II trials. Their defense was based often on the term “obedience” and that they were simply following orders from their superiors. Could we all call them accomplices if they were just following orders? Milgram was interested in experimenting about how far people would go in obeying the instructions they were given if it involved in harming another person. Ordinary people are likely to follow orders that are given by the authority figure and when they believe that the authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, which is supported by some of the aspects in Milgram’s evidence. The final question is: How far would you go?