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 iunlike 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 Stanley 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.

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

Part 2

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 powerful electric shocks were not a believable punishment for making a mistake on a word-pair 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

One teacher...refusing to go on...

A lengthy excerpt  from Migram’s ‘Obedience’ film (1965). [Photos and video copyright © 1991 Alexandra Milgram]

“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

• 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 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.
• While he made a great deal out of the 65% who had obeyed all the way to 450v, Milgram never really explored the issue of why 35% refused to go all the way.
• 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.