The 20 Key Studies in Psychology
Study 1: Milgram’s obedience studies:
Framework: Social psychology
Aim: Milgram’s studies aimed to look at the obedience of naïve individuals when persistently
told to continue performing in an experiment by an authority figure.
Method: His studies encompassed experimental devices such as actors being used to simulate
real human responses, pretend shocks to simulate administration of real pain, and indeed the
central role, which is the role of the authority figure. These devices were all used to create a
scenario which attempted to simulate reality, to best observe how these naïve individuals
would act.
While many experiments stemmed from the main Milgram experiment, Milgram’s studies
should be viewed as a whole; with the original pilot experiment as a sort of grounding toward
how Milgram expanded upon his original design with alterations to independent variables.
From this original ‘blueprint’ design, Milgram began to mould and change his experimental
designs to test for different variables.
The original experiment produced an obedience rate (obedience being defined as the number
of participants which went on administering shocks up to the maximum of 450 volts: a lethal
shock) of 65%. This was the ‘remote-victim’ (victim was not present in the same room)
experiment as it came to be known by. Milgram had not anticipated these results and indeed
was shocked by the outcomes.
Milgram created a procedure which consisted of informing a naïve participant (teacher) to
administer shocks to a ‘learner’ (really only an actor). A simulated shock generator was used
which went from 15V to 450V. While this did not in fact actually generate a current, it was
identical to one that might have been used at the time. The settings of voltage were
accompanied by written labels, which ranged from ‘slight shock’ to ‘danger: severe shock’
and ‘XXX’.
The teacher pretended that the experiment was that of a ‘learning experiment’, set up to study
the effect of punishment on memory. This, in fact, reflects the trend of behaviourism at the
time which was becoming ever more popular. Both the actor and naïve participant were given
a briefing at the beginning of the experiment and asked to pick slips of paper to determine
who would play the role of the learner and who would play the role of the teacher. This was,
of course, rigged in favour of the naïve participant being the teacher.
As the experiment proceeded, the naïve participant was asked to administer increasingly
more severe shocks every time the learner gave an incorrect answer (the list of incorrect
answers was scripted), even up to the point of ‘danger: severe shock’. As the shocks
increased, the actor (learner) in another room would be making sounds of pain, in conjunction
with the shock treatment, to simulate and replicate someone in pain. These were standardised
across all participants.
As the experimental procedure was repeated over a number of studies, films of the
experiment were recorded and participants were interviewed immediately after the
experiment.
General procedure
,In the original 1963 study, the conditions were exactly the same for all participants.
The independent variable in this experiment could be seen as the experimenter’s ‘prompts
and prods’ (the incitement to obey) to carry on administering shocks to the ‘learner’ (remote-
victim) for giving wrong answers (this individual was an actor pretending to be a participant).
The further up the shock gradient (from 0-450v) the participant was willing to go was an
indicator of their obedience level. This was the dependent variable (the measured outcome).
It is tested to see if it is indeed the effect produced by the independent variables. Photographs
and tape recorders were used to record the participant’s behaviour during the experiment
which produced qualitative evidence, and the distance up the shock scale each individual
would go was a quantitative measure.
The participant’s willingness to give the shocks would decrease as the intensity of the shocks
rose, and eventually the participant would refuse to go on with the experiment. Behaviour up
to this point is considered ‘obedience’, i.e. the naïve participant is complying with the
experimenter. A quantitative value was then drawn from the participant, based upon the
level they were willing to go up to. Milgram varied the factors within the experiment to test
different hypotheses and how they had influenced obedience within the study e.g., aspects of
the authority figure (male or female?), instrumentalities for its execution (e.g. remote-victim
or present victim?), target object etc. This will be touched upon later.
Participants: Forty males, aged between 20 to 50 drawn from New Haven and surrounding
communities asked to volunteer for a study on ‘Learning and Memory’ at Yale. They all had
a wide range of occupations and educationally ranged from doctorates to those who had not
even completed elementary school. They were paid $4.50 USD for their participation,
regardless of the outcome.
Personnel: The experimenter was played by a 31-year-old high school biology teacher. His
manner was passive and his appearance mildly stern. The learner (victim) was played by a
41-year-old accountant, trained for the role. Each trial consisted of a naïve participant and a
‘victim’.
Historical context and rationale
The background of this study revolved around the atrocities that occurred at concentration
camps run by the Nazis during World War II. The systematic destruction of millions of Poles,
Jews and other communities gave a horrendous message to the world about our capabilities
for harm as humans, and it was questioned as to how any individual could commit such
deeds. The 1963 study began shortly after the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf
Eichmann who was one of the major organisers of the holocaust.
Milgram was moving against the hypothesis that historians posed after the war, which was
simply that ‘Germans are different’, i.e., that they posed some sort of character defect
compared to the rest of humanity where they would readily obey authority without question.
Hitler could not have put his plan into action without the support of thousands of individuals
working in synchrony. While Hitler was known as an excellent orator, only by the obedience
of the masses could he be able to carry out such acts. Milgram (1963) devised the experiment
to address the popular question at the time, of whether we could indeed even call Adolf
Eichmann and his ilk accomplices, for simply following orders.
Methodologies of milgram’s variations
,Since Milgram’s 1963 experiment, many experiments were conceived from its idea (18 other
Milgram studies in total). These are described in Milgram (1974), and have been summarised
in this website:
The Milgram Shock Experiment
One of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology was carried out by Stanley
Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University. He conducted an experiment focusing on the
conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.
Milgram (1963) examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the
World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on "obedience"
- that they were just following orders from their superiors.
The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question:
Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following
orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (Milgram, 1974).
Milgram (1963) wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to
authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.
Milgram selected participants for his experiment by newspaper advertising for male
participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University.
The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to
find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher.’ The draw was fixed so
that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s
confederates (pretending to be a real participant).
The learner (a confederate called Mr. Wallace) was taken into a room and had electrodes
attached to his arms, and the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained
an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375
volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX).
Milgram's Experiment:
Aim:
Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an
instruction if it involved harming another person.
Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into
committing atrocities, for example, Germans in WWII.
Procedure:
volunteers were recruited for a controlled experiment investigating “learning” (re: ethics:
deception). Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from
unskilled to professional, from the New Haven area. They were paid $4.50 for just turning
up.
At the beginning of the experiment, they were introduced to another participant, who was a
confederate of the experimenter (Milgram).
, They drew straws to determine their roles – learner or teacher – although this was fixed and
the confederate was always the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a gray
lab coat, played by an actor (not Milgram).
Two rooms in the Yale Interaction Laboratory were used - one for the learner (with an
electric chair) and another for the teacher and experimenter with an electric shock generator.
The “learner” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped to a chair with electrodes. After he has learned a
list of word pairs given him to learn, the "teacher" tests him by naming a word and asking the
learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.
The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake,
increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator
marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).
The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose), and for each of these, the teacher gave
him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock, the experimenter was
to give a series of orders/prods to ensure they continued.
There were four prods and if one was not obeyed, then the experimenter (Mr. Williams) read
out the next prod, and so on.
Prod 1: Please continue.
Prod 2: The experiment requires you to continue.
Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Prod 4: You have no other choice but to continue.
Results:
65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All
the participants continued to 300 volts.
Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations of his study. All he did
was alter the situation (IV) to see how this affected obedience (DV).
Conclusion:
Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of
killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is fixed in us all from the way we
are brought up.
People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right
and/or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations,
for example in the family, school, and workplace.
Milgram summed up in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), writing:
'The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very
little about how most people behave in concrete situations.
I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen
would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental
scientist.
Study 1: Milgram’s obedience studies:
Framework: Social psychology
Aim: Milgram’s studies aimed to look at the obedience of naïve individuals when persistently
told to continue performing in an experiment by an authority figure.
Method: His studies encompassed experimental devices such as actors being used to simulate
real human responses, pretend shocks to simulate administration of real pain, and indeed the
central role, which is the role of the authority figure. These devices were all used to create a
scenario which attempted to simulate reality, to best observe how these naïve individuals
would act.
While many experiments stemmed from the main Milgram experiment, Milgram’s studies
should be viewed as a whole; with the original pilot experiment as a sort of grounding toward
how Milgram expanded upon his original design with alterations to independent variables.
From this original ‘blueprint’ design, Milgram began to mould and change his experimental
designs to test for different variables.
The original experiment produced an obedience rate (obedience being defined as the number
of participants which went on administering shocks up to the maximum of 450 volts: a lethal
shock) of 65%. This was the ‘remote-victim’ (victim was not present in the same room)
experiment as it came to be known by. Milgram had not anticipated these results and indeed
was shocked by the outcomes.
Milgram created a procedure which consisted of informing a naïve participant (teacher) to
administer shocks to a ‘learner’ (really only an actor). A simulated shock generator was used
which went from 15V to 450V. While this did not in fact actually generate a current, it was
identical to one that might have been used at the time. The settings of voltage were
accompanied by written labels, which ranged from ‘slight shock’ to ‘danger: severe shock’
and ‘XXX’.
The teacher pretended that the experiment was that of a ‘learning experiment’, set up to study
the effect of punishment on memory. This, in fact, reflects the trend of behaviourism at the
time which was becoming ever more popular. Both the actor and naïve participant were given
a briefing at the beginning of the experiment and asked to pick slips of paper to determine
who would play the role of the learner and who would play the role of the teacher. This was,
of course, rigged in favour of the naïve participant being the teacher.
As the experiment proceeded, the naïve participant was asked to administer increasingly
more severe shocks every time the learner gave an incorrect answer (the list of incorrect
answers was scripted), even up to the point of ‘danger: severe shock’. As the shocks
increased, the actor (learner) in another room would be making sounds of pain, in conjunction
with the shock treatment, to simulate and replicate someone in pain. These were standardised
across all participants.
As the experimental procedure was repeated over a number of studies, films of the
experiment were recorded and participants were interviewed immediately after the
experiment.
General procedure
,In the original 1963 study, the conditions were exactly the same for all participants.
The independent variable in this experiment could be seen as the experimenter’s ‘prompts
and prods’ (the incitement to obey) to carry on administering shocks to the ‘learner’ (remote-
victim) for giving wrong answers (this individual was an actor pretending to be a participant).
The further up the shock gradient (from 0-450v) the participant was willing to go was an
indicator of their obedience level. This was the dependent variable (the measured outcome).
It is tested to see if it is indeed the effect produced by the independent variables. Photographs
and tape recorders were used to record the participant’s behaviour during the experiment
which produced qualitative evidence, and the distance up the shock scale each individual
would go was a quantitative measure.
The participant’s willingness to give the shocks would decrease as the intensity of the shocks
rose, and eventually the participant would refuse to go on with the experiment. Behaviour up
to this point is considered ‘obedience’, i.e. the naïve participant is complying with the
experimenter. A quantitative value was then drawn from the participant, based upon the
level they were willing to go up to. Milgram varied the factors within the experiment to test
different hypotheses and how they had influenced obedience within the study e.g., aspects of
the authority figure (male or female?), instrumentalities for its execution (e.g. remote-victim
or present victim?), target object etc. This will be touched upon later.
Participants: Forty males, aged between 20 to 50 drawn from New Haven and surrounding
communities asked to volunteer for a study on ‘Learning and Memory’ at Yale. They all had
a wide range of occupations and educationally ranged from doctorates to those who had not
even completed elementary school. They were paid $4.50 USD for their participation,
regardless of the outcome.
Personnel: The experimenter was played by a 31-year-old high school biology teacher. His
manner was passive and his appearance mildly stern. The learner (victim) was played by a
41-year-old accountant, trained for the role. Each trial consisted of a naïve participant and a
‘victim’.
Historical context and rationale
The background of this study revolved around the atrocities that occurred at concentration
camps run by the Nazis during World War II. The systematic destruction of millions of Poles,
Jews and other communities gave a horrendous message to the world about our capabilities
for harm as humans, and it was questioned as to how any individual could commit such
deeds. The 1963 study began shortly after the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf
Eichmann who was one of the major organisers of the holocaust.
Milgram was moving against the hypothesis that historians posed after the war, which was
simply that ‘Germans are different’, i.e., that they posed some sort of character defect
compared to the rest of humanity where they would readily obey authority without question.
Hitler could not have put his plan into action without the support of thousands of individuals
working in synchrony. While Hitler was known as an excellent orator, only by the obedience
of the masses could he be able to carry out such acts. Milgram (1963) devised the experiment
to address the popular question at the time, of whether we could indeed even call Adolf
Eichmann and his ilk accomplices, for simply following orders.
Methodologies of milgram’s variations
,Since Milgram’s 1963 experiment, many experiments were conceived from its idea (18 other
Milgram studies in total). These are described in Milgram (1974), and have been summarised
in this website:
The Milgram Shock Experiment
One of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology was carried out by Stanley
Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University. He conducted an experiment focusing on the
conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.
Milgram (1963) examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the
World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on "obedience"
- that they were just following orders from their superiors.
The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question:
Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following
orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (Milgram, 1974).
Milgram (1963) wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to
authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.
Milgram selected participants for his experiment by newspaper advertising for male
participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University.
The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to
find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher.’ The draw was fixed so
that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s
confederates (pretending to be a real participant).
The learner (a confederate called Mr. Wallace) was taken into a room and had electrodes
attached to his arms, and the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained
an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375
volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX).
Milgram's Experiment:
Aim:
Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an
instruction if it involved harming another person.
Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into
committing atrocities, for example, Germans in WWII.
Procedure:
volunteers were recruited for a controlled experiment investigating “learning” (re: ethics:
deception). Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from
unskilled to professional, from the New Haven area. They were paid $4.50 for just turning
up.
At the beginning of the experiment, they were introduced to another participant, who was a
confederate of the experimenter (Milgram).
, They drew straws to determine their roles – learner or teacher – although this was fixed and
the confederate was always the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a gray
lab coat, played by an actor (not Milgram).
Two rooms in the Yale Interaction Laboratory were used - one for the learner (with an
electric chair) and another for the teacher and experimenter with an electric shock generator.
The “learner” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped to a chair with electrodes. After he has learned a
list of word pairs given him to learn, the "teacher" tests him by naming a word and asking the
learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.
The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake,
increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator
marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).
The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose), and for each of these, the teacher gave
him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock, the experimenter was
to give a series of orders/prods to ensure they continued.
There were four prods and if one was not obeyed, then the experimenter (Mr. Williams) read
out the next prod, and so on.
Prod 1: Please continue.
Prod 2: The experiment requires you to continue.
Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Prod 4: You have no other choice but to continue.
Results:
65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All
the participants continued to 300 volts.
Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations of his study. All he did
was alter the situation (IV) to see how this affected obedience (DV).
Conclusion:
Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of
killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is fixed in us all from the way we
are brought up.
People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right
and/or legally based. This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations,
for example in the family, school, and workplace.
Milgram summed up in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), writing:
'The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very
little about how most people behave in concrete situations.
I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen
would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental
scientist.
