The Milgram Experiment

Obedience can be observed in many different ways throughout society. A possible example could be viewing whether an employee acts upon what his or her boss asks of them to perform. Another example could be examined through young kids and whether or not they abide by the teacher’s class rules. The Milgram Experiment was an experiment which tested obedience to authority against personal conscience. Stanley Milgram was the person who constructed the experiment and was inspired to do so by the atrocities committed by German officers during WWII. He found it perplexing that a person was able to participate in these heinous acts. Around the same time Adolf Eichmann, a German officer, was put on trial at the Nuremberg Trials. His and many others’ defense was that they were simply following orders, that they were being obedient to their superiors. With the idea of obedience in mind, Milgram crafted his experiment to test this. He became interested in determining how far a person would go to obey an instruction given, even if it meant harming another person. This would in turn answer how easily regular people could be convinced to commit atrocities.  Milgram had precise procedures and interesting results.

Milgram began by selecting a group of 40 males between 20-40 years of age, and with job range between skilled and professional. Every participant was paired with another participant who would actually turn out to be an associate of Milgram. The pair would then pull straws to determine who would act out the learner role and who would act out the teacher role. This was a fixed drawing however and the associate of Milgram was always the learner. The learner would then be taken into a room with an electric chair and the teacher into a room with an electric shock generator. Accompanying the teacher would also be another associate of Milgram, posing as a experimenter, meaning that Milgram was completely removed from the experiment to ensure there would be no experimenter bias. 

The learner was given a set of words to study and after a while, the words would be taken away, and the learner quizzed on the words. The teacher was instructed to shock the learner for every wrong answer that was given. Along with shocking the learner for every wrong answer, the severity of the shock was to be increased upon every single wrong answer. The teacher was in possession of a board with 30 switches on it. The switches ranged from 15 volts, which was a slight shock, to 450 volts, which was an extremely dangerous amount of voltage. Being an associate of Milgram, the learner gave mostly wrong answers on purpose to cause a shock to occur. If the teacher refused to continue shocking, the experimenter was to give him phrases intended to get him to continue. Teachers were asked nicely to, “please continue,” all the way up to being told, “You have no other choice but to continue.”

The results Milgram gleaned from this experiment were that 65% of all participants continued to the highest voltage available and all participants continued to 300 volts. He performed the same test but through 18 variations to see whether or not the situation people were put in had an impact on their obedience. Milgram decided that the average person would be able to follow orders all the way to the extent of killing someone, if the person giving the order was of a form of authority. He claimed this was because of the way society brings up those born into it. Society has people perform tasks given by those in positions of legal or moral power such as a teacher, parent, or boss. To explain the behaviour of his participants, Milgram conceived a theory that people had two behavioural states they switch between at times in social situations. Milgram’s Agency Theory names the two states as the autonomous state and the agentic state. The first state is where people choose their actions as well as take responsibility for them. The second state is where a person allows another person to dictate their actions then passes the consequences to the person who gave the instructions. To enter the agentic state a person must view the person giving directions as a person of legitimate authority being legally or morally. Also the person performing the tasks must believe the task giver will accept responsibility for the consequences.

Stanley Milgram tested obedience to authority against personal conscience after hearing about how former Nazi officers were claiming they were simply being obedient and following orders. This idea of obedience can be found to be ingrained in people because authority figures are everywhere such as teachers, parents, and bosses. With the results from his experiment, Milgram concluded that the average person would follow orders from an authority figure to the extent of killing someone.