﻿The milgram experiment.
How can a regular person be talked into committing heinous acts upon another person,
and could you be convinced to maybe injure or potentially kill someone?
I’m not talking about self defence or during war on the battlefield,
but upon someone you have never met before and have had no interaction previously.
How can perfectly normal people commit a genocide,
like what we saw in the 1930s and 1940s in europe, or in cambodia in the 1970s amongst other events,
what causes people to be active particpetents in crimes against humanity.
If we take Germany in the 1930’s as an example what caused a large part of a modern country to
be willing in the pogrom of people that had been their neighbours and community members for years.
It really is a fascinating thought experiment,
as when you think to yourself I could never do something like this or like this?
But what would it actually take for you to pull the trigger, push a button, or pull a lever?
Well this is where a psychologist set out to see what would be the minimum amount of suggestion for
a regular person to administer a deadly electric shock to someone they had never met before.
The simple but effective study would come to be known by its inventors name
the Milgram experiment.
The actual experiment would not result in any physical pain, but extreme stress and
inflicted insight suffered by the participants instead would create controversy with the study.
As such i'm going to rate it Here 5 on my ethics scale,
this is mainly due to it being such a fascinating dive into
our hard wired ability to obey an authority figure even to the point of murder.
Welcome to the dark side of science.
Stanley Milgram was an american social psychologist,
born on August 15, 1933, in the Bronx, New york,
his parents were jewish and had fled Romania and Hungary during the first world war.
His background and family ties to europe would have an
important effect on his later studies into social psychology, as word came back to the
Milgram family during the late 30’s and 40’s of the atrocities inflicted by the Nazi regeme.
Although in relative safety in the USA,
many of Stanley’s family members were directly effected by the holocaust, after the war,
some survining members of the family came to stay whilst finding a new life in the US.
A Young Stanley was exposed to the horrors experienced by his relatives
and this would stay with him, igniting an interest into the darker side of human nature.
In 1954, Milgram received his bachelor's degree in political science
from Queens College in New York, initial applications to
Harvard for a psychology masters, were rejected but was eventually admitted.
The initial setbacks were due to Milgram not
taking any undergraduate courses in psychology at Queens College.
In 1961, Milgram received a PhD in social psychology, he became an assistant professor
at Yale around the same time. Later on he served as an assistant professor
in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard from 1963 to 1966 and this brings us
very quickly onto his obedience study, more commonly known as the milgram experiment.
Stanleys experience of relatives going through the holocaust
coupled with the arrest and trial of Adulf eichman in 1961, sparked an interest into
finding out what could make seemingly average people take part in atrocities.
Eichman organized the logistics of the deportation of Jews during the holocaust.
He made deportation plans down to the last detail. Working with other German agencies,
he also determined how the property of deported Jews would be seized.
What was interesting about the trial was that he claimed he had not dictated policy,
but only carried it out that he was “merely a little cog in the machinery” of destruction.
I was only following orders for defense, which highlights the question that is following an order
enough to convince someone to do something so heinous.
Milgram would later say in 1974 when explaining the experiment.
“Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust
were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"
The experiment was pretty simple, and would make use of 3 people, The "experimenter",
who was in charge of the session, The "teacher", a volunteer for a single session and a "learner".
Both the Teacher and Learner would arrive for the session together
and they would draw straws as to who would take each role.
Participants were sourced via a newspaper ad saying
“we will pay you for 1 hour of your time, in a study of memory.”
The teacher and learner after finding out their roles were taken into a room
where the learner was strapped into what appeared to be an electric chair
and electrode paste was applied to the learners wrist
to prevent blistering and burns. The teacher would hear this being explained and see it happen.
The experimenter, who was dressed in a lab coat in order to appear to have more authority,
told the participants that the restraints was to ensure that the learner would not escape.
The teacher was allowed to experience a sample electric shock
similar to what the learner could feel.
Before beginning the experiment the volunteers were informed that they
would be paid regardless of the outcome, thus removing any financial incentive to any results.
The teacher was led into another room, where they could not see the learner
but could hear them, and the experiment would begin.
The teacher was then given a list of word pairs that he was to teach the learner.
The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner.
The teacher would then read the first word of each pair
and read four possible answers. The learner would press a button to show his answer.
If incorrect, the teacher was then meant to administer a shock to the learner,
if correct, the teacher would read the next word pair. Each subsequent incorrect answer
would mean the teacher had to increase the voltage in 15-volt increments;
they were also instructed to announce the voltage before shocking the learner.
Pretty curel you might think, but there was only one actual volunteer in each test,
the teacher, who unbeknownst to them was the real subject.
You see the learner was actually a stooge and wasn't really receiving an electrical shock,
and the chance drawing of straws to find out who would do either role,
was actually fixed meaning the teacher would always be the teacher,
also probably not surprisingly the experimenter was also in on it.
This meant that the whole experience of the teacher was controlled from the authritory of
the experimenter to the reaction of the learner. To ramp things up in later versions of the study
the learner would also shout out in pain when the voltage got too high.
The experiment would have a preliminary and regular run,
the first was a practise of sorts where the learner would get 3
correct answers and 7 incorrect ones which would yeld a shock up to 105v.
The second or regular run the teacher would be told to read off a list of words
and had to continue repeating it until the learner had got all of the pairs correct.
The volt dial ranged from 15 to 450v and to add further explanation for
the teacher was labeled Slight Shock to Danger: Severe Shock.
Above 300v the learner would kick on the wall,
and then no longer give answers to the teachers multiple choice questions.
If the teacher showed any hesitation the experimenter was able to give
1 of 4 prodding responses in sequence,
1. Please continue or Please go on. 2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue. 4. You have no other choice; you must go on.
The experimenter could only progress to the next prod if the teacher refused, if all 4 responses
were reached then the experiment would end, if not it would continue all the way up to 450v.
If the teacher asked any specific questions the experimenter could reply, for example
will the shock leave any permanent damage? The experimenter could reply with “although
shocks can be extremely painful, they cause no permanent damage”
After the experiment an interview would be undertaken
and a question how painful do you think the last few shocks you administered were?
The teachers were instructed to indicate their answer on a scale between 1-14.
Afterwhich the teacher was reintroduced to the learner and the experiment was fully explained.
The experiments began in July 1961 at Yale university,
40 subjects would volunteer through this newspaper advert.
The results would surprise all predictions.
The 40 men were from a cross section in society from various different age and career groups,
ranging from 20 to 50.
During the experiment most of the test subjects showed signs of severe distress
when administering the electric shock. They were observed sweating, trembling,
stuttering, biting their lips, groaning, and digging their finger- nails into their flesh,
the discomfort seen showed that the subjects were aware of the pain the learner was experiencing.
3 out of the 40 had seizures with 1 person being so extreme
that the experiment had to be suspended. Pre experiment it was expected that only a
small amount of the subjects would administer the highest voltage shock between 1-3%,
but this prediction would be way off. Of the 40 subjects all reached 300volts, at which
the learner would bang on the wall and stop giving answers, only 5 refused to go beyond this point.
4 more went on to shock the learner 1 more time then also refuse.
Two stopped at the 330-volt level, and 1 each at 345, 360, and 375 volts respectively,
meaning that only 14 refused the experimenters' prods.
That meant that 26 proceeded all the way to the end giving the highest available shock
to the learner although most showed signs of discomfort and stress, they still obeyed the
perceived athuritory of a guy in a white lab coat. The results were understandably unexpected,
as from a young age we are taught to not hurt others, but with the addition of an
authority figure the teacher would abandon this fundamental part of their moral fabric.
Scarily was that there was no punishment for disobeying the experimenter
nor was there any reward to completing the experiment, as payment was assured from the start.
Even more strange was the results were similar when a control study
was undertaken on 43 unpaid students. In Milgram's paper into the study he
highlighted several particular conditions of the experiment that might have contributed
to the high level of about 65% of compliance to the highest voltage level.
The fact that the study was being undertaken at and sponsored by yale,
possibly reassured the subjects that the experiment was above board and reputable.
The perceived randomness of the selection of learner and teacher,
also could have factored in as the teacher may have thought that he could have been in the other
chair, hence he was exposed to the same risks. The subject may also have thought that
as he had volunteered that he was obligated to help the experimenter,
and to the same extent that the learner had also submitted to the authority of the experiment.
The subjects were also reassured that although painful the shocks were not deadly,
and that compliance was built though to shock level 20 when the learner would no longer reply.
To refuse would cause a conflict situation where the wants of the learner
and the experimenter were at odds with one another, and to side with the experimenter
was the path of least resistance so to speak. Also the short duration that the experiment ran
for meant that the teacher had less time to think about the actions,
resulting in little time for reflection. Milgram would repeat the experiment in several
variations to see if any of the conditions changed would yield different results.
Even when Milgram conducted the experiment in an unregistered office far away from
Yale that the results were similar. Now to the ethical question,
was the experiment cruel? Well in my opinion no, but it can leave long term distress to the learner
especially if they administered the full shock. For many the experience left self reflection on
how they had submitted to the authority of the experimenter.
Ethical criticism came from the allowed discomfort of the test subjects, where even though that had
provided their consent the experiment should have been paused when distress was observed.
However in his 1974 book Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View Milgram pushed back on
his detractors saying that the ethical criticism provoked by his experiments
was because his findings were disturbing and revealed unwelcome truths about human nature.
It really is open for debate as to whether the experiment was ethical or not, but regardless
it was a fascinating experiment into human nature. The study would later be compared with another
controversial experiment run by one of Milgram's friends Philip George Zimbardo at sanford
but that will be a subject for another video. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed the video,
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