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...
- 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%
(However, the mean shock level was still nearly
270v)
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)
- 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
(Only one participant went to 450v and 95% refused to administer
any more shocks after the learner protested for the first time.
