Milgram's Obedience Experiment | Another Psi YouTube Video Summary

Milgram’s Obedience Experiment

The Another Psi YouTube channel explores one of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology, Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiment. Milgram’s experiment focused on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In 1963, Milgram examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II Nuremberg War Criminal Trials, where their defense was often based on obedience or that they were just following orders from their superiors.

Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, devised the experiment to answer the question if those who committed atrocities in the Holocaust were just following orders, could we call them accomplices? He wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.

The Study

To select participants for his experiment, Milgram advertised in a newspaper for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University. The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person, and they drew lots to find out who would be the learner and who would be the teacher. The draw was fixed, so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was an actor hired to pretend to be a real participant called Mr. Wallace. The teacher and researcher went into a room that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (a slight shock) to 375 volts (which had a danger reading of severe shock) and up to 450 volts, which is enough to kill a human being.

How It Worked

The learner, who was an actor, was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arms. The teacher tested them by naming a word and then asking the learner to recall its partner from a list of four possible choices. The teacher was told to administer an electric shock every time the learner made a mistake. Participants were comprised of 40 males aged between 20 and 50, and their job ranged from unskilled to professional. They were paid $4.50 for just turning up to the study. Participants were introduced to the ‘other participant’, but the other participant was an actor. The experimenter, also an actor, was dressed in a gray lab coat.

Results

Mr. Williams read out a prod if the teacher refused to administer a shock: Please continue, the experiment requires you to continue, it is absolutely essential that you continue and you have no other choice but to continue. All the participants continued to at least 300 volts, and Milgram found that 65%, or almost two thirds of the participants who played the role of teacher administering the electric shock, continued to the highest levels of 450 volts. From these results, Milgram developed a theory called the Agency Theory.

Agency Theory

Milgram explained the behavior of his participants by suggesting that people have two states of behavior when they are in a social situation. The first is the autonomous state where people direct their actions and take responsibility for the results of those actions. The second is the agentic state. Here, people allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the responsibility for those consequences to the person giving the orders. Agency theory states that people will obey an authority when they believe that that authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.