Milgram Experiment

What was the Milgram experiment?

Stanley Milgram’s obedience research examined how far participants would follow an experimenter’s instructions to deliver apparently harmful electric shocks during a supposed learning task. The learner was a confederate, and the shocks to that learner were simulated.

What participants were asked to do

1. A rigged drawing assigned the participant to be the teacher and the confederate to be the learner.
2. The teacher tested the learner on word pairs and was told to operate the shock generator after each wrong answer.
3. The labeled settings increased in 15-volt steps up to 450 volts, with warnings of increasing severity.
4. If the teacher resisted, the experimenter used a sequence of prompts to continue, ending with an assertion that there was no choice.

Results of the Milgram experiment

In Milgram’s 1963 report, 26 of 40 participants continued to the highest setting, while 14 stopped earlier. Some showed marked distress, including trembling and sweating. These observations are central both to the interpretation of the study and to its ethical importance.

Why the experimental version matters

In Milgram’s 1965 proximity series, each condition involved 40 adults. The proportion continuing to the maximum was 62.5% when the learner’s protests were audible from an adjacent room, 40% when the learner was in the same room, and 30% when continuing required forcing the learner’s hand onto a shock plate. These are results from specified arrangements, not interchangeable estimates of a general tendency.

Criticisms and limits

The 65% figure belongs to that particular procedure and sample; it is not the percentage of all people who will obey any harmful instruction.

The procedure demonstrates conduct under an arranged and deceptive laboratory situation. It does not by itself determine the motives of every participant or provide a complete explanation of historical atrocities.

Deception prevented participants from knowing the real purpose of the task, and distress raised questions about their welfare. Repeated instructions to continue also put pressure on their freedom to withdraw.

What participants believed remains important to interpretation. An archival reanalysis by Perry and colleagues examined differing beliefs about whether the shocks were real. Such evidence challenges the assumption that everyone understood the situation identically; retrospective reports also cannot perfectly recover what a person believed at each moment.