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Location, Background, Gender, Morality and Personality

Milgram also considered whether the location of the experiments had any bearing on the authority of the experimenter. He moved the experiment to some run-down offices in nearby industrial Bridgeport, ostensibly run by a private firm, Research Associates of Bridgeport, and had the experimenter not wearing the scientist’s lab coat. In that condition he found that only 47.5% would go to the full 450v.


Background was also investigated. Participants who had gone on to higher education were less obedient overall - possibly because they had learned to think independently and may also have gone on to higher positions in life where they were used to giving orders, rather than receiving them. Correspondingly, participants with a military background, used to receiving orders, tended to be more obedient. Roman Catholics tended to be the most obedient from amongst those who were members of Christian churches.


To counter the accusations of gender bias with regard to the original experiment, Milgram replicated the original conditions with 40 local women and found that gender made no difference - 65% went all the way!


A small number of participants in one of the experiments were rated on Lawrence Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development - 34 according to Milgram  and 27 according to Kohlberg (1984). While the number of defiant participants (8) was small - too small to be anything other than ‘suggestive’ (Milgram) - they undoubtedly scored higher on Kohlberg’s scale - at a Post-Conventional level, indicating the ORANGE and/or GREEN vMEMES were dominant in their selfplexes, while the more obedient were at a Conventional level and concerned just with obeying the ‘legitimate authority’, indicating BLUE was dominant.


In response to dispositionalists such as Theodore Adorno (Adorno et al, 1950) - who argued that authoritarian personalities will obey much more than personalities low in authoritarianism, one of Milgram’s assistants, Alan Elms (Alan Elms & Stanley Milgram, 1966) tested sub-samples of the 20 most obedient and the 20 most defiant from Milgram’s first 4 experiments, using Adorno’s F-Scale (Fascism Scale) questionnaire, designed to identify authoritarian personalities. He found that those who tested highest on the F-Scale - gave more stronger shocks and held the shock buttons down longer than those who were low scorers. Though Elms’ sample groups are small, the implication is that there is a dispositional element in blind obedience - so that some will respond to a situation demanding obedience more than others.

Updated: 4 February 2012



In 1974 Stanley Milgram published details of a whole series of variations on the original 1962 ‘Obedience Experiment’. He wanted to investigate reasons for the high levels of obedience - how much the concept of agency could be validated and how much moral strain participants could take. So, in a systematic way, he changed one variable at a time to see what the effect was. Apart from that one change, Milgram replicated the original experiment precisely. In all, Milgram studied over 1,000 participants.


What Milgram effectively found was that increasing the proximity of the ‘learner’ to the ‘teacher’ - thus making the learner’s plight more obvious - decreased the % of participants who went to 450v. Decreasing the proximity of learner to teacher increased the % of participants going all the way...


Decreasing the authority and/or proximity of the experimenter also had the effect of decreasing obedience while increasing the experimenter’s authority increased obedience...

(Some of the teachers cheated in this condition and either pretended to administer shocks or gave lower ones than instructed)

Hand on plate!

[Photos and video copyright © 1991 Alexandra Milgram]


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The concluding excerpt  from Migram’s ‘Obedience’ film (1965).