H567/02 Section A - Milgram (1963): obedience

Authority and the research question

Milgram investigated how far ordinary adults would follow an authority's instruction when it conflicted with the apparent welfare of another person.

Obedience helps organisations coordinate useful action, but can also enable harm. The atrocities of the Second World War prompted Milgram to examine destructive obedience rather than assume that only unusually cruel people would obey harmful orders. His laboratory task was an analogue of a conflict between authority and conscience; it did not recreate or fully explain genocide.

The apparent purpose was research on punishment, learning and memory. The real question was the maximum supposed electric shock a participant would administer when instructed by an experimenter. This places the study in the social area: behaviour is understood through a relationship with an authority figure and the expectations of an institutional setting. Its prescribed theme is Responses to people in authority.

Sample and controlled observation

The published 1963 condition studied 40 men aged 20–50 from New Haven and nearby communities.

Newspaper advertisements and direct mail recruited volunteers who believed they were attending a memory and learning study at Yale University. They had varied occupations and education levels, including manual workers, teachers and professionals. Each received $4.50, explicitly theirs for arriving regardless of what happened afterwards. This is a self-selected sample, not a random sample of Americans.

Milgram called the research an experiment. For this single reported condition, however, all participants encountered the same situation: there was no systematically varied independent variable with comparison groups. Controlled laboratory observation is therefore the more precise description of the prescribed condition. Later variations of Milgram's programme must not be treated as its design or results.

The main quantitative measure was the highest shock level reached before refusal. Observers also recorded behaviour; most sessions were tape-recorded, notes captured unusual actions, and photographs were sometimes taken through one-way mirrors. These qualitative records reveal emotional conflict that a maximum-voltage score alone would hide.

Shock procedure and standardisation

The apparatus made an apparently harmful instruction measurable while the learner received no real shocks.

A rigged drawing of lots assigned the genuine participant to be the teacher and a confederate to be the learner. The participant saw the learner strapped into a chair and electrodes attached. A real 45-volt sample shock to the participant strengthened the credibility of the apparatus. The teacher then sat in an adjacent room beside a generator with 30 switches, from 15 to 450 volts in 15-volt increments. Labels progressed from slight shock to severe warnings; the final two switches were marked XXX.

The teacher read word pairs and tested the learner's memory. Predetermined answers gave approximately three errors to each correct response. The teacher was instructed to increase the shock by one switch after each error and announce the voltage. A preliminary ten-word run allowed practice; the main list then began at 15 volts.

In this 1963 reported condition, the learner first protested by pounding on the wall at 300 volts and stopped answering. The experimenter told the teacher to count no answer as an error after waiting 5–10 seconds. Pounding occurred again at 315 volts; afterwards the learner was silent. Do not add the spoken heart-condition protests from other conditions to this one.

When a teacher resisted, the experimenter used a fixed sequence of four prods, moving from a request to continue to a claim that there was no choice. Refusal after the fourth prod ended the session; reaching the maximum was classified as obedience. Standardised responses and prods reduced procedural variation, though a participant's behaviour and the timing of resistance still varied. Afterwards participants were interviewed, the deception was addressed and a friendly reconciliation with the learner was arranged to reduce tension.

Obedience and distress findings

The observed obedience was much higher than a separate group predicted, and often coexisted with distress.