Obedience to Authority

Background

The first systematic effort by a social psychologist to study obedience to authority was conducted by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. Milgram's obedience studies are arguably the most well-known research in social psychology, both within the field and among the general public. The obedience studies were conducted between August 1961 and May 1962. With one exception, all the studies were carried out on the campus of Yale University. Participants were members of the community recruited through newspaper ads and direct mail solicitations. All of Milgram's participants were between the ages of 20 and 50, and in all but one version of the study, they were men. Participants believed at the outset that they would be participating in a “scientific study of memory and learning.”

The basic experimental procedure involved three individuals: the participant, a confederate pretending to be another participant, and the experimenter. The experimenter explained to the participant and confederate that they would be randomly assigned to either the role of learner or the role of teacher. He further explained that the study was concerned with the effect of punishment on learning and that electric shocks would be used as the punishment in the experiment. The drawing was rigged so that the real participant was always the teacher and the confederate was always the learner.

The experiment was conducted in two rooms separated by a thin wall. On one side of the wall, the learner was strapped into a chair. Electrodes supposedly connected to a shock generator in the adjacent room were attached to his arm. A speaker allowed the learner to hear the teacher's instructions from the other room, but the learner could respond only by pressing one of four buttons within reach of his strapped-in hands. With the real participant watching, the learner mentioned that he had a heart condition and that he was worried about the effect of the electric shocks.

The participant-teacher was then seated on the other side of the wall in front of a large machine the experimenter identified as a shock generator. Thirty switches spanned the front of the machine, each identified with the amount of voltage it supposedly delivered. The voltage labels started at 15 volts (V) and continued in 15-V increments to 450 V. Labels on the machine identified the shocks as increasingly severe, ranging from Slight Shock[Page 614]to Danger: Severe Shock. The 450-V lever was labeled simply with three red Xs.

The teacher read a list of 25 word pairs (e.g., blue-girl) for the learner to memorize. The teacher then tested the learner by providing the first word in the pair and four possible options for the second word. The learner gave his response to each test item by pressing one of the four switches, which lit up a corresponding light on the teacher's side of the wall. If the learner got the test item incorrect, the teacher was instructed to deliver an electric shock. The teacher was told to give a 15-V shock for the first wrong answer and to increase the intensity by 15 V for each successive wrong answer until the learner had memorized all 25 word pairs. In reality, the learner received no shocks. But he deliberately gave many wrong answers, forcing the teacher to deliver increasingly severe shocks. After pressing the 75-V lever, the participant heard the learner grunt in pain (actually, a prerecorded sound) through the wall. After the 150-V punishment, the participant heard the learner cry out that his heart was bothering him and that he wanted to be released. The learner gave increasingly loud protests after each successive punishment, including screams of pain and demands to be released.

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