Obedience to Authority (Review of Psychology Classics)

Book Title:  Obedience to Authority (1974)  by Stanley Milgram

In 1961 and 1962, a series of experiments were carried out at Yale University. Volunteers were paid a small sum to participate in what they understood would be ‘a study of memory and learning’.

In most of the experiments, a white-coated experimenter took charge of two of the volunteers, one of which was given the role of ‘teacher’ and the other ‘learner’. The learner was told he had to remember lists of word pairs, and if he couldn’t recall them, the teacher was asked to give the person, who was strapped into a chair, a small electric shock. With each incorrect answer, the voltage rose, and the teacher was forced to watch as the learner moved from small grunts of discomfort to screams of agony.

What the teacher didn’t know was that there was actually no current running between his control box and the learner’s chair, and that the volunteer was in fact an actor who is only pretending to get painful shocks. The real focus of the experiment was not the ‘victim’, but the reactions of the teacher pressing the buttons. How would they cope with administering greater and greater pain to a defenseless human being?

The Milgram experiment is one of the most famous in psychology. Here we take a look at what actually happened and why the results are important.

Expectations and reality

If you are like most people, you would expect that at the first sign of genuine pain on the part of the person being shocked, you would want the experiment halted. After all, it is only an experiment. This is the response Milgram got when, separate to the actual experiments, he surveyed a range of people (psychiatrists, graduate students, psychology academics, middle-class adults) on how they believed the subjects would react in these circumstances. Most predicted that the subjects would not give shocks beyond the point where the other subject asked to be freed. These expectations were entirely in line with Milgram’s own. But what actually happened?

Most subjects were very stressed by the experiment, and protested to the experimenter that the person in the chair should not have to take any more. The logical next step would be then demand that the experiment be terminated.

In reality, this rarely happened.

Despite their reservations, most people continued to follow the orders of the experimenter and inflict progressively greater shocks. Indeed, as Milgram notes, “…a substantial proportion continue to the last shock on the generator”. This is even when they could hear the cries of the other subject, and even when that person pleaded to be let out of the experiment.

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