In the early '60s psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted his "obedience" experiments, showing that most people will do what an authority figure tells them to do. Psychology professor
In the Milgram experiment, obedience was measured by the level of shock that the participant was willing to deliver. While many of the subjects became extremely agitated, distraught, and angry at the experimenter, they nevertheless continued to follow orders all the way to the end.
Milgram's experiment demonstrated the power of authority and how someone in a position of authority can influence people to behave unethically and against their wishes.
In the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of studies on the concepts of obedience and authority. His experiments involved instructing study participants to deliver increasingly high-voltage shocks to an actor in another room, who would scream and eventually go silent as the shocks became stronger.
Charles Sheridan and Richard King in 1972 recreated the experiment using a puppy as the student. The puppy was given real, but harmless, shocks. They found that 54% of the male subjects and all of the females obeyed throughout even during what appeared to be great emotional stress. Some openly wept.
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.
Milgram was horrified by the results of the experiment. In the “remote condition” version of the experiment described above, 65 percent of the subjects (26 out of 40) continued to inflict shocks right up to the 450-volt level, despite the learner's screams, protests, and, at the 330-volt level, disturbing silence.
Summary: A replication of one of the most widely known obedience studies, the Stanley Milgram experiment, shows that even today, people are still willing to harm others in pursuit of obeying authority.
Social psychologist Stanley Milgram researched the effect of authority on obedience. He concluded people obey either out of fear or out of a desire to appear cooperative--even when acting against their own better judgment and desires.
Each experiment lasted about 50 min, and resulted in levels of agitation among some subjects that were unprecedented in previous psychological research. Milgram's question was simply how far the teacher would continue to issue painful shocks before defying Mr. Williams's directives to continue.
Practical Application. Milgram's discovery about the unexpectedly powerful human tendency to obey authorities can be applied to real life in several different ways. First, it provides a reference point for certain phenomena that, on the face of it, strain our understanding-thereby, making them more plausible.
The experiment is considered unethical because the people who were the participants were led to believe that they were administering a shock to real people. The individuals were unaware the learners were individuals associated with Milligram.
It could be argued that Milgram's work shows beta-bias, meaning that he erroneously minimises the role of potential differences between males and females, for example, assuming that there was no need to test females as the results would have been very similar.
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.
"We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)" is a Peter Gabriel song found on his 1986 album So. The title refers to the 37 out of 40 participants who showed complete obedience in Experiment 18.
In Milgram's experiments, conducted at Yale University in the early 1960s, around 780 people took part in what they were told was a study about learning and memory.
Finally, Milgram's research lacked population validity. Milgram used a bias sample of 40 male volunteers, which means we are unable to generalise the results to other populations, in particular females, and cannot conclude if female participants would respond in a similar way.
In the original studies by Milgram it was found that the smaller the 'distance' between the Learner and the Teacher the more likely that the Teacher would refuse to give the higher level of shocks.
The experiment was deemed unethical, because the participants were led to believe that they were administering shocks to real people. The participants were unaware that the learner was an associate of Milgram's. However, Milgram argued that deception was necessary to produce the desired outcomes of the experiment.
In the interest of fairness, follow up research, performed after the experiment, indicated that there were no long term psychological effects on the participants. However, the fact that these people thought that they had caused suffering to another human being, could have caused severe emotional distress.
The subjects believed that for each wrong answer the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks.
Most research suggests gender is not a factor in obedience. Milgram and Shanab & Yahya both found women to be as obedient as men.
In everyday situations, people obey orders because they want to get rewards, because they want to avoid the negative consequences of disobeying, and because they believe an authority is legitimate. In more extreme situations, people obey even when they are required to violate their own values or commit crimes.
A real-life example of obedience includes a child honoring the wishes of parents. Another example would be a soldier respecting the commands of a higher-ranking soldier.
The Milgram experiment, and the replications and related experiments that followed it, showed that contrary to expectations, most people will obey an order given by an authority figure to harm someone, even if they feel that it's wrong, and even if they want to stop.