In 1974 Stanley Milgram published details of a whole series of variations on the original 1963 ‘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. 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...

• Another participant (confederate of the experimenter) taking over the authority role (using the experimenter’s brief) when the experimenter had to leave the room - 20%
• Two fellow ‘teachers’ (confederates of the experimenter) in the room - one reading the list of word pairs, the other informing ‘Mr Wallace’ whether he was right or wrong and the naive participant administering the shocks - with one ‘upset’ confederate quitting at 150v and the other at 210v - 10%, with 50% refusing to carry on past 150v
  (Interestingly, Milgram carried out an alternative version of this experiment in which 2 confederate teachers gave shocks without protest and chiding the real participant when he expressed discomfort with the procedure, resulting in 72.5% going all the way)
• Having two experimenters arguing - one telling the participant to stop and the other to continue - 0%
• Allowing the teachers to set their own voltage levels resulted in lower levels of shock being administered

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, 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.

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!

In response to ‘dispositionalists’ such as Theodore Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson & R Nevitt Sanford (1950) - who argued that authoritarian personalities will obey much more than personalities low in authoritarianism, Milgram found that high scorers on Adorno’s F-Scale (Fascism Scale) questionnaire - designed to identify authoritarian personalities - gave more stronger shocks and held the shock buttons down longer than those who were low scorers.

• Learner in another room, neither seen nor heard - 100%
• Learner just one metre from teacher, seen and heard - 40%
• When learner started expressing reluctance at 150v, teacher having to force learner’s hand down onto ‘electric plate’ - 30%

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

• Having only to pull a switch to signal an ‘assistant teacher’ (confederate of the experimenter) to administer the shocks on the teacher’s behalf - the assistant obeying without question all the way - 92.5%
• Being told that the learner had only agreed to a limited contract - “you let me out when I say so” - 40%
• Experimenter phoning in commands or commands pre-recorded on tape - 23%

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

Hand on plate! [Copyright © Alexandra Milgram]