Milgram: The Obedience Experiments

He ran more than twenty of them. You have heard about one.

A course on the thought of Stanley Milgram.

Psychology

What you will learn

• Describes the procedure accurately: the recruitment, the roles, the machine, the four prods.
• States what the 1963 paper reported and what it did not.
• Identifies the condition the famous 65 percent came from, and how it differs from the version usually recounted.
• Explains why the result landed as it did in 1963, including the Eichmann trial and Milgram's own framing.
• Reads the proximity series as a gradient and states what it shows.
• States the carte blanche result and why Milgram ran that condition.
• Explains how the group conditions move the rate in both directions.
• Describes the different-actors result and what it implies about how much of the finding is the performance.

Course outline

1. The Number — In 1961 Milgram advertised in a New Haven paper for volunteers for a study of memory, paid $4.50, and had them administer what they believed were electric shocks to a stranger. Sixty-five percent…
2. The Dial — Between August 1961 and May 1962 Milgram ran more than twenty conditions, each altering one element. The obedience rate across them runs from 2 percent to 92 percent. Read as a set rather than as a…
3. Did They Believe It? — Every figure in the programme assumes the men believed the shocks were real. Milgram asked them, and published that more than three-quarters did. Gina Perry went to his files at Yale and found that…
4. When He Gave an Order — The experimenter had four scripted lines for a hesitating teacher, rising in force to "You have no other choice, you must go on". That last one is the only one of the four that is actually an order.…
5. What Survives — The critique is not that the studies show nothing. Burger's 2006 partial replication found rates only slightly lower than Milgram's, so something real is being measured. This module states what that…

Works read in this course

• Behavioral Study of Obedience (1963) — the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology paper that reported 65 percent and made the name. It describes one condition.
• Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974) — the book, eleven years later, that finally reported the full programme and its very different numbers.
• The Individual in a Social World (Blass ed., 2010) — the collected essays and experiments, including the later reflections.
• Perry, Behind the Shock Machine (2013) — the archival account, from Milgram's own files at Yale — the source for what was not published.
• Haslam and Reicher, Contesting the Nature of Conformity (PLoS Biology 2012) — the engaged-followership reading, open access.
• Burger, Replicating Milgram (American Psychologist 2009) — the 2006 partial replication, stopped at 150 volts.

Terms introduced

condition, the prods, engaged followership, debriefing

Part of the Simposeum course library.