Milgram's Study of Obedience to Authority

Stanley Milgram is a famous psychologist who focused his studies on authority and peoples reaction and obedience to it. His famous experiment and it's results were groundbreaking in psychology, surprising both psychologists and regular people alike. First I will discuss the reason for Milgrims study of obedience to authority. Then I will explain the experiment, its formulation, and its results. Finally I will cover the influence of the experiment on psychology and society.

Stanley Milgrim was born in New York City in 1933, the son of European immigrants. He earned his bachelors degree in Political Sciences from Queens College, where he never even took a course in psychology. He then applied to Harvard for his Ph.D. but was not accepted because of his lack of background in psychology. After taking a few courses in psychology he was accepted to Harvartd where he earned his Ph.D. in 1960 (American National Biography).

Before going into Milgrim's studies one must first examine the time period in which he started his career. The world was in the wake of World War II and society was still shocked by the discovery of what was really going on in Europe during the war. The Nazi concentration camps were being discovered and the world found out about Hitler's plan to purify the "supreme race" of blonde haired and blue eyed Germans. What was most shocking about the holocaust though was that Hitler's plan was actually being executed.

How could one man get an entire country to go along with such an evil plan? Why did people listen to Hitler and blindly obey his orders? These were the questions that were on everyone's mind as they found out about the Holocaust. Everyone thought to themselves that they would never do the things the Nazis did if they were being told to by their government. No one wanted to believe that people were so submissive to authority that they would carry out orders they knew were wrong (Blass).

This intrigued Milgrim. If the German people could be controlled by their government to the point where they were doing things they knew were evil, then who is to say it couldn't happen in any other country, even America? Milgrim wanted to find out how far a person will go when they are given orders by an authoritative figure. People wanted to believe that they wouldn't do anything that they thought was morally wrong just because an authority was telling them to. Milgrim however suspected that people would succumb to authority further than they liked to think (Slater).

Milgrim first became interested in this area of psychology at Harvard where he was a research assistant to social psychologist Solomom Asch. Asch conducted conformity experiments in which the subject was seated among seven other people who he believed to be subjects as well but were actually part of the experiment. Each person was asked which one of three lines was equal in length to a fourth. Some of the seven fake subjects would give wrong answers and it was found that one third of the time the real subject would follow the majority and give the same incorrect answer. Milgrim altered this experiment and conducted it in Norway and France so he could compare the way people of different cultures responded to peer pressure. In Milgrims experiment subjects identified which one of two of tones was longer. As subjects waited for their trial, they heard fake subjects give wrong answers. Milgrim found that Norwegians conformed and gave the same answer as the majority more often than the French did (Blass).

After Milgrim earned his Ph.D. in 1960 he became an assistant psychology professor at Yale. The next year he started his famous "shock experiment" (Blass). The subjects of the experiment believed that they were taking part in a study on the relationship of learning and punishment. The subject would sit in a room and ask questions to an actor in another room, who was supposed to be another subject. In front of the questioner was a box that had a series of buttons labeled from 15 volts to 450 volts. The subject was told to shock the person every time they answered incorrectly, increasing the voltage each time. As the shocks got worse, the actor would make noise, bang on the wall, yell for help, etc. but the researcher would tell the subject to keep going. Milgrim found, contrary to many psychologists predictions, that sixty-five percent of the subjects delivered the shocks all the way up to 450 volts (Slater).

These results were very revealing about people's obedience to