A Level Psychology at Spalding Grammar School

1963 was the year that old certainties started to crumble. President John F Kennedy was assassinated and the accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, murdered on live television by Jack Ruby. The conspiracy theories have never stopped since then. In Britain, the scandal of the Profumo Affair brought down a government. Across the Western world, people defied their rulers on matters of race, gender and faith: Martin Luther King made his celebrated I Have a Dream speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The rumblings of the great youth rebellion could be heard in the screams of Beatlemania and the lyrics of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

Stanley Milgram published this article in 1963, though his experiments at Yale University actually began two years earlier. Milgram called them "experiments" but strictly speaking they are controlled observations, because Milgram did not set up a control group with which to compare his experimental group. Like a lot of late 20th century social psychology, Milgram's research is inspired by the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust. It is important to think about the social and ethical context of his work.

The trial of Adolf Eichmann was the big news in 1961. Eichmann was a Nazi colonel who had been responsible for organising the arrest and imprisonment of Jews during the Second World War. He was nicknamed "the architect of the Holocaust". In 1960, it was discovered that Eichmann had been living secretly in South America. A team of secret agents kidnapped him and took him back to Israel to stand trial for his war crimes. Many Holocaust survivors gave testimony against him but Eichmann's defence was that he was "only following orders". He was found guilty, sentenced to death and hanged.

The case prompted a huge debate. Was Eichmann a wicked and bloodthirsty criminal? Or just a bureaucrat who joined the SS to build his career and was only doing as he had been instructed by his Nazi bosses? More importantly, would you or I, if we were in Eichmann's position, have behaved differently? Some writes argued that Eichmann was evil, or even that German people have a natural tendency to follow orders blindly. This is a DISPOSITIONAL view, since it explains behaviour through a person's or a group's personality (which is what "disposition" means).

Other psychologists took a SITUATIONAL view. They argued that there was nothing unusual about Eichmann; rather, what was unusual was the intense situation for many Germans living under the Nazis. According to this view, it is circumstances, not personality, that lead people into evil.

Milgram put this "Situational Hypothesis" to the test. He set up a situation whee people would get orders that went against their consciences. He expected that most Americans would disobey these orders. Discussing the experiment with his students, they agreed that only 3% would obey an order to electrocute someone to death...

Milgram wanted to investigate the process of obedience. He defines this as acting on the instructions of a LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY even when the command requires DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOUR.

Milgram recruited 40 men, all aged between 20 and 50, who responded to an advert placed in a local newspaper. They were told they would be paid $4.50 to take part in a memory experiment. They were certainly paid (roughly equivalent to $50 today), but the bit about the memory experiment was the first deception in this study. The participants were NAÏVE PARTICIPANTS because they didn't know what was really going on.

The part of the "Experimenter" was played by a stern-looking biology teacher in a lab coat. The "Learner" (or victim) was a middle-aged accountant. Both of these men were acomplices of Milgram's - called CONFEDERATES or STOOGES because they knew what was really happening.

Each participant arrived at the university and met the two confederates. They were told to draw lots to see who got to be the "Teacher" in the study but this was rigged so that the naïve participant was always the Teacher and the confederate was always the Learner. This was the second deception. The Learner was then strapped into an electric chair and the Experimenter announced that, "Although the shocks can be extremely painful they cause no permanent tissue damage".

The Teacher sat in a room next door and could speak to the Learner through a microphone. The Teacher reads a series of word-pairs through the mic then tests the Learner's memory by calling out one word and waiting for the Learner to press a button (A, B, C or D) for the correct word that goes with it.

The SHOCK GENERATOR was used to punish the Learner for each wrong answer. The first switch delivers a 15 volt shock but there are 30 switches, going up in 15-volt intervals. The last two switches are labelled "XXX" in red and deliver 435 volts and 450 volts each. The Teacher gets to feel a 45 volt shock to convince him the machine really works. In fact, there are no electric shocks being given and the Learner is not suffering any pain - this is the third deception.

Milgram set up a number of CONTROLS to stop anything interfering with the experiment and guarantee the results would be valid.

First of all, the Teacher got to do a "trial run" of 10 word-pairs where the Learner made 7 errors. Then the real test began.

In the real test the Learner gave scripted answers, giving roughly three wrong answers for every correct one. The Learner answered al the questions until the 300 volt shock was reached. At this point the Learner kicked loudly on the wall then stopped answering any more questions.

If the Teacher asked the Experimenter for advice, the Experimenter also had scripted replies. Milgram called these "prods" and the Experimenter would use them in order.

1. Please continue...
2. The experiment requires that you continue
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue
4. You have no other choice, you must go on

Each participant scored between 0 and 30 depending on how many shocks they gave. Someone who delivered all the shocks up to 450 volts scored 30. Milgram secretly taped and photographed some of the sessions and took notes on the participants' behaviour.

Nearly two-thirds of the participants (26/40) went all the way with the shocks, scoring 30. Only 9 participants stopped at the 300 volt point.

All the participants showed signs of great distress. Examples include:

• sweating
• trembling
• stuttering
• biting lips
• groaning
• digging fingernails into flesh
• fainting

Milgram concluded that the pressure to obey an authority figure is very powerful and creates great tension. Milgram coined the phrase AGENTIC STATE to describe the mentality of someone obeying orders and AGENTIC SHIFT to describe the stressful change from he mindset of someone who makes their own mind up to someone who obeys orders.

Milgram offered several explanations for why obedience was so high:

• The study took place as a very respected university
• The participants felt under an obligation to carry on as they had volunteered
• The fact they were being paid added to the feeling of obligation
• The situation was unusual and they had no one to discuss things with
• Since the Learner has "played the game" up to the 20th shock (300 volts), the Teacher assumes it's OK to continue
  

Milgram's study caused an uproar when it was published and he found himself suspended from the univesity while he defended himself. There are a number of criticisms of the study:

1. Milgram deceived the participants about their role in the study and the electric shocks
2. The participants did not give INFORMED consent to take part
3. When they tried to withdraw, the Experimenter told them they couldn't
4. The participants were put under great stress and suffered emotionally

However, Milgram defended himself successfully:

1. This study is the first to use DEBRIEFING, since Milgram explained the real nature of the study at the end and had a reconciliation between the Teacher and the Learner
2. In a follow-up questionnaire, 84% said they were glad they participated and 74% said they'd learned something personally important
3. Milgram argued that "momentary excitement is not the same as harm" and no participants showed signs of any long-term trauma