Also, this fact isn't particularly fun except for the fact that it's a great conversation topic. But since that's kind of how this blog started, it's what we're talking about today.
The 1960s and early 1970s were a wonderful time to be an experimental psychologist, in that a lot of laws regarding ethical experimentation were only made in reaction to some of these experiments. In addition to the Milgram experiment, there was also the Stanford Prison experiment (I plan to cover it tomorrow) and the end stages of the CIA's MKULTRA experiments into LSD. Basically, you could get away with almost anything, which made for some interesting research. Unethical by modern standards, but totally interesting nonetheless.
The Milgram experiment was fairly simple, looking into whether negative reinforcement could be used to help someone learn, and if so, how much negative reinforcement worked best. People were recruited in pairs: Someone has to answer questions correctly (the 'learner'), and someone on the other side of a wall has to ask them the questions (the 'teacher'). If the answer was wrong, the teacher would give the learner an electric shock. And if there was another wrong answer, they had to give a stronger shock. And so on and so forth until the learner had learned all the correct answers. If the teacher wanted to stop the experiment at any point, Milgram would give them one of four responses ("The experiment requires that you continue," was the second response), and if the person refused to continue at any point after the fourth response, the experiment would end.
Oh, did I forget to mention that the learner had a heart condition? And that he let both Milgram and the teacher know about it at the start of the experiment? Because he did, and he did.
Not very long into the experiment, the learner yelled quite loudly about the pain from the shocks. About halfway through the scale, the learner started to complain and say that he wanted to stop. For the last half dozen shocks or so (labeled as "Danger: Severe Shock" for the teacher), the learner refused to answer. Which the teacher was told counted as a wrong answer. For the last few switches (labeled "XXX" for the questioner), the learner didn't even make a noise when the shock was administered.
So, on a machine that labels the shocks according to both volts and severity (15V = Slight Shock, 135V = Strong Shock) and goes from 15V to 450V, how far along the scale do you think you would have gone? Most of Milgram's associates thought that very few 'teachers' would go past 195V if it came to that. Almost nobody thought that anyone would ever reach the end of the scale like happened with our man with the heart condition.
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| That's a lot of switches to work your way through. |
Oh, hold the phone a second. It wasn't actually an experiment into negative reinforcement and learning. It was an experiment into obedience to authority. And guess what? The man with a heart condition was an actor who wasn't actually getting shocked. And guess what? If you're average, you would have flipped the switches all the way past "Danger: Severe Shock" and into "XXX" territory. 65% of the people in the study did. Hell, 100% of them made it into "Strong Shock" territory before complaining to the experimenter. It turns out that, as a whole, we're terrible at disobeying authority.
Which goes a long way to explaining how come perfectly normal people can turn into, say... Watchtower guards at Auschwitz. Which is what inspired him into doing the experiment. The trial of Karl Adolf Eichmann, the man who figured out the logistics of transporting Jews from the ghettos to the concentration camps during WWII had started not long before Milgram came up with the experiment, and Milgram set out to find out if there was "a mutual sense of morality among those involved" in the Holocaust. It turns out that, even if someone objected to the extermination of the Jews, they probably would have assisted in doing it if they were told by someone in authority.
But we've come a long way from that, haven't we? I mean, we're much more suspicious of authority now than we used to be. You could never get a 65% total compliance rate nowadays, right? Well, that's true amongst people that have heard of the Milgram experiment. I mean, it's hard to replicate results in a psych experiment if people know what result you're looking for. But amongst those that haven't heard about the Milgram experiments? If you've got 15minutes, here's someone who got approval to run the experiment again in 2009, in England. It's in three parts.
In case you didn't have time, let me sum up for you: 75% of the subjects went all the way. In England. In 2009.
In 2010, French scientists reframed the experiment to look like a reality TV show called Le Jeu De La Mort, which means, if your French is weak, The Game Of Death. How many people walked out on a reality TV show called The Game Of Death before flipping the 450V switch? 16 out of 80. Only 20% of the 'contestants' refused to flip a switch that might be killing someone, on a show called The Game Of Death. In 2010.
Basically, as a generalization, the experiment still gets around the same numbers if it's replicated using the same circumstances (there's always exceptions). The numbers drop significantly if the experimenter isn't viewed as an authority, or (perhaps strangely) if the 'learner' demands to be shocked instead of begging for the experiment to end. And it also drops markedly if the 'teacher' has to do more than just flick a switch. The more active the 'teacher' has to be, the less obedient they are.
But the question behind this is: Would you have flicked that last switch if a scientist told you to? Odds are, you would.
And now that you know just how easily we bow to authority, what are you going to do next time you're asked to do something you object to on moral grounds?
For further viewing, here's Milgram's 45min documentary "Obedience" (in three parts), which is based on the experiment, and includes actual footage of it.
Sources:
Experiment-Resources.com
Yale Alumni Magazine
Berkeley University
Pysch web
About.com
Wikipedia
The various YouTube videos linked above
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