Obey At Any Cost Milgram’s Famous Experiment
In 1963, Stanley Milgram of Yale University conducted an experiment based on obedience. He wanted to demonstrate how to cause one individual to order a second person to physically hurt a third one without anyone getting hurt. Milgram believed that humans have a tendency of obeying others who are in a higher position of authority. He designed a shock generator starting from the lowest of 30volts, increasing to 15-volt intervals, to its highest power of 450-volts.Ads were placed to catch the public’s attention and get subjects to participate in a study about memory and learning. A total of 40 males ranging from the ages of 20 to 40 years old participated in this experiment and were paid $4.50 for just showing up. Besides the 40 subjects there were two others who participated as well, one played as another subject and the second one played as the experimenter. The subject who played the learner had his arms strapped down and was able to reach for the buttons labeled a, b, c, and d in order to answer
questions from the teacher that was in a different room. The teacher had to read out loud many word pairs for the learner to memorize. When the learner responded incorrectly or when he didn’t answer at all the experimenter gave orders to the teacher to shock the learner and increase the voltage each time. What they didn’t know was that no shocks were truly being delivered, that’s how realistic this experiment was.
Results
Every subject reached up to 300-volts, 14 of them defied orders and quit before reaching 450-volts, 26 of them followed through until reaching the maximum voltage. Although the subjects obeyed, they were all showing signs of stress and were highly upset with the experimenter. Milgram was concerned some subjects could suffer from psychological distress from having to shock another person so he explained the purpose of this experiment and the findings towards it.
First was how the subjects had strength to obey commands and secondly how he noticed extreme tension and anxiety from having to obey the experimenter. A psychiatrist interviewed all 40 subjects that were uncomfortable during the study and none of them suffered any long-term effects.
Interesting Findings
Milgram also conducted further experiments that promote or limit obedience. He found that in one of them the physical and emotional distance of the victim from the teacher altered the amount of obedience with the highest level of 93% on the voltage scale just by having the learner be in a different room. Then when the learner was in the same room as the subject, the subject forced the learner’s hand onto the shock plate and the rate of obedience dropped by 30%. To end this on a positive note, when the subjects were allowed to punish the learner, nobody pressed the switch no higher than 45volts.