Curiosity Post 2: The Milgram Project
In my first post I introduced you to the man and the inspiration, today I show you the experiment.
Allow me to set the scene: it is 1961, three months preceding the trials of Adolf Eichmann you are a man in New Haven, America and you see this poster:
While 4$ these days doesn't seem worth the experiment; I used the inflation calculator to determine that in 1961, 4$ was worth to approximately 35$ in 2020. This sounds much more reasonable for an hour of “Memory and Learning”. However, what the participants didn’t know, was that they were being deceived in the experiment.
There were two roles in this experiment: a learner, and a teacher. The learner was strapped to an electric chair and was told to memorize pairs of words. The teacher was seated at the electric shock generator and would administer an increasing amount of volts for each answer that was wrong. The participants were randomly selected by draw to be the learner or teacher. However, the draw was fixed and Milgram’s associate would always be the leaner, therefore forcing the participants to be the teacher 100% of the time and thus deal the electric shocks. I should also mention that there was an “experimenter” role played by an actor, he was the person leading this “memory” experiment and wore a lab coat to show his status as above those participants.
Milgram’s associate the learner purposefully got many questions wrong for this experiment to see how far the teachers would go to in increasing volts. Now, I know that sounds masochistic to want more pain, but be aware that there were no real shocks being administered to the learner, yet he would often yell, exclaim he had heart problems and refuse to carry on in the experiment to give the teacher a image that he was in fact, hurting them.
When the teacher refused to carry on administering the shocks,(thankfully none of the participants went full psycho and never questioned the experiment) the teacher would have 4 sentences to use in order.
1: First sign of refusal
“Please Continue”
2: Second sign of refusal
“The experiment requires you to continue.”
3: Third Sign of refusal
“It is absolutely essential to the experiment that you continue”
4: Last ditch effort to get them to continue (often didn’t work because the teachers had made up their minds)
“The experiment requires you to continue.”
These were the only words spoken by the experimenter during the procedure, further adding weight to the commands.
Before i go on to show the results, here are some other points to consider:
the teachers could not see the learner, they could hear them.
The experimenter never referred to the learner by name, further dehumanizing them (a common strategy of war IE: Villain, Enemy Insurgents, Bad Guys).
Each Teacher met the learner afterwards and was assured to have done no harm to him.
Before I share the results of this experiment, I would like you, the reader to observe this scale and try to place yourselves as the teacher. Where would you stop? would you keep going? would you disobey the man in the lab coat?
I would now ask you to guess the voltage that EVERY participant surpassed, and how many out of the 40 participants reached the final 450 voltage.
THE RESULTS:
This may shock you.
100% (40/40) of the 40 participants proceeded to 300 volts (the 20th switch)
65% (26/40) of the participants proceeded to the maximum voltage of 450 before the experiment was halted by the experimenter.
this boggles my mind. I cannot simply imagine it that every single one of them made it to 300, I kept looking for more and more articles but the number stayed consistent, even in Milgram’s own research paper. At 300 voltages the learner exclaimed extreme refusal to be there and asked to be let out multiple times (acting) and from voltages 330 to 450, every shock was answered with long eerie silence.
To restore my faith in humanity I read that all of the participants were not comfortable in doing these actions, most showed signs of sweating, biting fingernails, loud sighs, and anxiety induced laughing fits.
Some more experiments were also done by Milgram regarding the shock experiment:
Uniform: Experimenter was taken off the street. Obedience fell to 20% to administer the 450 volts.
Location Change: Ran in old abandoned offices rather than Yale. Obedience fell to 47.5%.
Two Teachers: Teachers instructed a Teaching Assistant (Milgram associate) to administer the shocks. 92.5% obeyed.
Touch Proximity: The teacher was face to face with the learner and had to force his hand down onto a shocking plate after 150 volts. 30% obeyed.
Social Support: Two more associates joined and associate 1 refused to shock after 150, associate two stopped at 210. obedience fell to 10%.
Absent Experimenter: the Experimenter pretended to take an important phone call outside of the room. Obedience fell to 20.5%
TAKEWAYS: This curiosity post helped me delve into my main talking point of all my upcoming curiosity posts: Obedience. Truly, this information scared me, but it is still wildly interesting to see how people obey authority blindly regardless of the morality. While I don’t think obedience is objectively a bad trait, Stanley Milgram said it perfectly in his title of his report. “The perils of obedience”.
Thank you for reading! next post will cover the Rwandan Genocide and the attachment of Obedience.
SOURCES:
Inflation Rate between 1961–2020: Inflation Calculator. (n.d.). Retrieved October 18, 2020, from https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1961?amount=4
Lof Der Zotheid Psychologenpraktijk(April 26th, 2016)The Milgram Experiment 1962 Full Documentary. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdrKCilEhC0
Mcleod, S. (2017). The Milgram Shock Experiment. Retrieved October 16, 2020, from https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html
Milgram experiment. (2020, October 18). Retrieved October 19, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Obedience to AuthorityThe experiments by Stanley Milgram. (n.d.). Retrieved October 19, 2020, from https://www.age-of-the-sage.org/psychology/milgram_obedience_experiment.htm
OpenLearn from The Open University. (n.d.). Retrieved October 19, 2020, from https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/mod/oucontent/view.php?printable=1
