There were two confederates: an experimenter and a learner. The participant drew lots with the confederate and always ended up as the teacher. He was told that he must administer increasingly strong electric shocks to the participant each time he got a question wrong. The machine was tested on the participant to show him that it worked.
The learner, sitting in another room, gave mainly wrong answers and received his (fake) shocks in silence until they reached 300 volts (very strong shock). At this point he pounded on the wall and then gave no response to the next question. He repeated this at 315 volts and from then on said and did nothing. If the teacher asked to stop, the experimenter had a set of prods to repeat, such as saying: ‘it is absolutely essential that you continue’ or ‘you have no other choice you must go on’.
Predictions:
Milgram asked 40 psychiatrists to predict the results, they said that less than 1% would go all the way and that those who did would be psychopathic sadists.
Results
The psychiatrists were very wrong. Obedience rates were way higher. Two thirds of volunteers went up to 450V. No one stopped before 275V! These results surprised everyone, including Milgram. No one expected to find so many people prepared to give 450V shocks to a stranger!
What’s important is that you remember what the results were and possible reasons for them, plus some of the arguments in the controversy that this research provoked.
Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations of his study. All he did was alter the situation, not the type of volunteers.
The following table shows the different situations Milgram used in his experiments, and which situations lead to the highest obedience rates. 1 is the highest and 7 is the lowest.
Conclusions:
Milgram’s work shows us how difficult it is to resist pressures from ‘authority’. The real ‘heroes’ of the experiment were those who had the courage to disobey!
Criticism of Milgram’s work
Milgram was fiercely criticised.
His results upset people - this may have been because they felt uncomfortable with what it showed about ordinary Americans. Maybe if they had not been so shocking (excuse the pun!) people would not have given Milgram’s work a second thought, perhaps the unpalatable findings made people seek to discredit the procedures.
Milgram’s work on obedience was attacked on ethical grounds, saying he deceived people and caused unreasonable distress. Volunteers often showed extreme stress – sweating, trembling, stammering, even having uncontrollable fits.
The APA decided that Milgram’s work was ethically acceptable.
On practical grounds, people argued that demand characteristics created the high rates of obedience. It was a highly artificial setting and in a prestigious location, but even when Milgram moved the experiment to a downtown location, obedience rates were still alarmingly high.
However, Zimbardo defended Milgram and has said his work is “the most generalizable in all of social science… dozens of systematic replications with a 1000 subjects from as diverse backgrounds as possible….”
Hofling et al, testing nurses’ obedience in a natural setting (1966)
Aim: To create a more realistic study of obedience than Milgram’s by carrying out field studies on nurses who were unaware that they were involved in an experiment.
Procedure: Nurses in a hospital were given orders from a ‘doctor’ over the telephone to administer a dose of medication above the maximum allowed. The nurses were watched to see what they would do. The medication was not real, though the nurses thought it was.
Results:
21 out of 22 nurses were easily influenced into carrying out the orders. They were not supposed to take instructions by phone, let alone exceed the allowed dose.
When other nurses were asked to discuss what they would do in a similar situation, 21 out of 22 said they would not comply with the order.
Conclusions:
Hofling demonstrated that people are very unwilling to question supposed ‘authority’, even when they might have good reason to.
Evaluation:
Like Milgram, Hofling was criticised on ethical grounds. This was because the nurses were not aware that they were in a psychological study and could have felt threatened by the results and their implications.
On practical grounds, as a field study, this research was hard to replicate. Other studies which have tried to have not obtained similar results. This means that this study only applies to this hospital. The results cannot be applied generally, therefore it is not an ecologically valid study.
