unlike real life as it was an artificial, controlled, environment. Consequently, the findings have low external validity as they lack generalisability to real-life settings. However, experimental realism can compensate for a lack of mundane realism, which it could be argued is the case with this study.

• An additional limitation with Milgram’s research is that he did not provide a clear explanation for the high levels of obedience to authority that he obtained. In addition, his research was extremely dubious ethically: he tried to prevent the participants from leaving the experiment and they were placed in a very stressful situation. See Ethical Issues in Research.
• The study was well-controlled so that all participants experienced the same conditions, allowing cause-and-effect to be inferred. The high levels of control also meant that the study was replicable.
• The experiment is open to criticisms of population validity - how

Stanley Milgram 1963

AIMS: In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials, many psychologists and sociologist were fascinated with explaining how such an advanced and civilised people as the Germans - including men who were faithful husbands, good fathers and otherwise law-abiding citizens - could have indulged systematically in such barbarism and cruelty. Then defence of many Nazis and concentration camp guards that they were ‘just following orders’ reached its apogee in the notorious 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the so-called ‘architect of the Holocaust’. Many of a dispositional view argued that, so despicable were the atrocities, there must be something inherently evil in the German nature - a sort of national character defect.

Stanley Milgram was not convinced. Of a situationalist viewpoint, he thought it likely most people would do serious injury to others if ordered to by the ‘right’ authority in the ‘right’ context. He aimed to test the hypothesis, “Germans are different”, by investigating how the situational context could lead ordinary people to show obedience to authority and inflict harm on others.

PROCEDURE (METHOD): 40 adult male volunteers aged between 20 and 50 (a self-selected sample answering a newspaper advert or direct mail) were paid $4.00 (plus 50c car fare) to take part in a

‘learning experiment’.

They were New Haven locals (not in high school or college) - a mixture of postal clerks,high-school teachers, salesmen, engineers and labourers, with education ranging from one who had not finished elementary school to doctorates and other professional degrees. The investigation took place at Yale University. The participants were deceived into thinking it was a test of learning – the effect of punishment on memory. In a rigged draw, the naive participant was always assigned the role of  ‘teacher’ and a confederate, ‘Mr Wallace’, played the role of ‘learner’. Mr Wallace, a mild-mannered  47-year-old accountant, advised that he had had a heart complaint in the past but would participate nonetheless. The experimenter in his lab coat was ‘Jack Williams’.

They were shown the equipment - a shock generator with 30 switches and lights going from 15v to 450v with various descriptions about the shock levels (ranging from “slight shock” to “danger: severe shock” - the final two switches were labelled “XXX”) and a chair in the next room, with straps on wired to the generator. The teacher was shown the learner being strapped into this so he was immobile. The teacher was given a sample shock of 45v from a battery wired into the generator. The teacher was assured that, although the higher voltage shocks would be painful, there would be no permanent tissue damage. Although they couldn’t see each other, teacher

and learner could communicate by intercom.

Mr Wallace being wired up

The shock generator

The layout of the experiment

A teacher being shown the shock generator...and later getting up in alarm.

he no longer responded. The teacher was then told to treat the absence of response as a wrong answer. When the max of 450 v was reached, the teacher was instructed to carry on and to administer the full 450v as the punishment for each unanswered question.

Teachers who protested at giving increasingly-dangerous shocks to someone who was clearly suffering were told they had to continue by the experimenter with the standardised prompts:-

• “Please continue” or “Please go on”
• “The experiment requires that you continue”
• “It is absolutely essential that you continue”
• “You have no other choice - you must go on”

If the teachers asserted that the learner clearly did not want to continue, the experimenter would respond: “Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on.”

The participants did not know until the end of the experiment - when they were reintroduced to ‘Mr Wallace’ that the learner responses were scripted and no shocks  were actually administered - other  than the sample shock to the teacher.

Milgram ensured that all participants were fully debriefed and given some assurance that their behaviour in the experiment was normal and that other participants had behaved similarly.

FINDINGS (RESULTS): All participants gave shocks up to the 300-volt level, and 26 of the 40 men (65%) of participants continued to the highest level, 450 volts. 14 teachers stopped between 300v and 375v. These findings completely contradicted the predicted results that 3% or less would reach 450 volts. (Milgram had surveyed groups of people, including professional psychologists and psychiatrists, students and middle-class adults - most of whom thought the teachers would stop at the point (140v) the learner asked to be released. Only 2-3% of the participants were thought likely to go to the full 450v.)   

Many participants asked who would take responsibility for any harmful effects resulting from shocking the learner at such a high level. Upon receiving the answer that the researcher assumed full responsibility, teachers seemed to accept this response and continue shocking, even though many were obviously extremely uncomfortable in doing so.

There were marked effects on the naive participants’ behaviour, with most showing signs of extreme tension. For example, they trembled, sweated, stuttered, groaned, swore, wept, dug their fingernails into their flesh, and 3 had full-blown uncontrollable seizures. (One, a 46-year-old encyclopaedia salesman, had such a violently convulsive seizure, the experiment had to be stopped!) 14 of the 40 showed nervous laughter - though, when debriefed, they made it clear that they weren’t sadists and hadn’t found the experience funny. Many participants heaved a sigh of

relief when it was over. Despite the considerable distress most of them experienced, they felt they had no choice other than to obey orders.

Of those who refused to go on, some got angry and some simply got up from their chairs and indicated they wanted to leave the lab.

CONCLUSIONS: The research showed that obedience to authority is due more to situational factors (the experimental setting, the status of the experimenter, and the pressure exerted on the participant to continue) than to ‘deviant’ personality. This contradicts the “Germans are different” hypothesis. (Milgram had originally intended the Yale experiment to be a pilot for actually conducting the study in Germany on Germans; but the results, which Milgram himself was astounded at, rendered the proposed German expedition unnecessary.)

It also provides evidence for the concept of agency - that people are more willing to take orders - especially when experiencing moral strain (going against their own sense of right and wrong) - if the order-giver is understood to take responsibility for the consequences of the orders.

Implications include the relevance of this research to the real-life atrocities of the Second World War and the need to identify ways of preventing people from showing misplaced obedience to authority.

CRITICISMS (EVALUATION):

• Martin Orne & Charles Holland (1968) claimed that the research lacked experimental realism,  

meaning that the experimental set-up was simply not believable. They thought the participants were alerted to the fact that the electric shocks were not real, because electric shocks were not a believable punishment for making a mistake on a test. Thus, the research lacked internal validity, as the obedience was not a genuine effect.
However, the participants’ stress reactions contradict this. (Orne & Holland claimed the participants were just playing along to please the experimenter - demand characteristics.) Additionally, in the post-experimental interview the participants were asked to rate how painful the last few shocks they administered were to the learner on a scale of 1 (“not at all painful”) to 14 (“extremely painful”). The mode of the results was 14, with a mean of 13.42.

• Orne & Holland also claimed that the research lacked mundane realism. The research set-up is w

One teacher...refusing to go on... [Copyright © Alexandra Milgram]

An excerpt  from one of the Migram’s films depicting full obedience and discussing  variations on the original experiment

A ‘teacher’ observes ‘Mr Wallace’ getting ready

A teacher is shown the paired-word task

A word association test was the learning task. The teacher was instructed to read a list of two word pairs - such as “blue/girl”, “fat/neck” - and the learner was supposed to memorise them. The teacher next read the first word of each word pair again and asked the learner to choose the correct second word from a choice of 4. The learner indicated his choice by pressing one of 4 switches in front of him which in turn lit up one of 4 numbered quadrants located above the shock generator.If the learner got the answer correct, then they would move on to the next word. If the answer was incorrect, the teacher was instructed by the researcher to deliver an electric shock to the learner.

The measure of obedience was the strength of the electric shock administered by the participants, with 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. The teacher was required to announce the voltage level before administering the shock (to emphasise the severity of the shock). From 75v on the learner grunted; at 120v he started complaining of pain; at 150v he began complaining his heart was bothering him and demanded to be released - although he continued to answer questions; from 270v on he screamed with each shock; at 300v he pounded on the wall; at 315v he refused to answer any more questions and stopped responding; at 330v he screamed and, now hysterical, demanded to be let out; from 345v on

“I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching,stuttering wreck who was rapidly approaching nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered, “Oh, God, let’s stop it!” And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter and obeyed to the end.’

- Stanley Milgram, 1963

representative of the general population the 40 local men really were - and gender bias as no females participated.

• The fact that the experiment took place in prestigious Yale University, with ‘Jack Williams’ looking and sounding like a competent research assistant (rather than the high school Biology teacher he really was) may have helped some of the participants convince themselves they were in a genuine experiment. To test the importance of the setting, Milgram switched a future version of the experiment to an industrial setting away from the university. See The Milgram Variations.
• John Darley (1992) has raised the possibility that ‘evil’ is latent in all of us and merely requires a conversion process to become active. On that basis, he speculates that Milgram turned innocent participants into evil people.
  To support his theory, Darley cites Robert Jay Lifton’s (1986) interviews with a number of physicians who participated in the Nazi death camps. Initially banal, ordinary individuals, by performing their extraordinary evil acts under the auspices of a “demonic killing machine”, themselves changed to become ‘evil people’.
• Milgram’s situationalist explanation of obedience in carrying out atrocities has been challenged by David Mandel (1998) whose research has uncovered evidence of German soldiers willingly taking part in the extermination of Jews.

Most notoriously he quoted the example of the Józefów massacre of 13 July 1942 in Poland. Having notified his men that he had received orders to carry out a mass killing of Jews, Major Wilhelm Trapp of the Reserve Police Battalion 101 told his men that those who did not “feel up to the task of killing Jews” could be assigned to other duties. In spite of it being made clear by Trapp that no stigma would be attached to choosing not to participate, only a dozen of the approximately 500 men chose to extricate themselves

from the killing.

Mandel notes instances where German soldiers and concentration camp guards did not require close supervision and the suffering of their victims seemed to cause no moral strain whatsoever. He asserts that opportunities for professional advancement and the lucrative personal gain from plundering Jews and their corpses almost certainly were motivating factors in some instances.

To Mandel, Milgram offered little more than an ‘obedience alibi’ for the behaviour of  Holocaust perpetrators.

See also Milgram & Validity.