Analysis Of The Obedience To Authority: Milgram Experiment

The Obedience to Authority: Milgram Experiment

Starting in 1961, Stanley Milgram, a professor of psychology at Yale University began conducting one of the most “infamous” psychology experiments in history. The tests are “infamous” because of not only the results they revealed, but also because the manner in which the tests were performed is considered unethical by today’s standards of testing. The experiment, which was mentioned in the New Haven Register newspaper as a “scientific study of memory and learning,” was actually an effort to investigate obedience to authority. In order to attract participants Milgram offered $4 for one hour of a person’s time. In the ensuing two years, hundreds of people would be a part of the experiment at Milgram’s

Mr. Milgram wanted to see how long a person would inflict pain on another person simply because they were told to do so. The results of his experiment are still applied to this day when explaining why people are so willing to follow the instructions of authority, no matter how inhumane, malicious, and egregious the instructions may be (Romm, 2015).
The experiment had three main roles: The “proctor,” the “teacher,” and the “learner.” In every experiment the proctor was played by an actor, not Milgram himself. The teacher was the participant, who would be administering shocks to the learner for each wrong answer. In every experiment the learner was a confederate man, Mr. Wallace, acting as a participant. The experiment was set up as shown by the diagram

Wallace, and that they were going to draw in order to figure out who would be the learner, and who would be the teacher. The draw was rigged so that Mr. Wallace would always be the student, and the participant, the unknowing true subject of the experiment, would always be the teacher (McLeod, 2007). Mr. Wallace would ask the proctor if he should be concerned about his previous heart condition, and the proctor would say that the shocks might inflict pain, but will not be detrimental to his overall well-being. This would come to be decisively influential in the latter parts of the experiment when the “learner” would complain about his heart bothering him (Billikopf Encina, 2004).
To begin the experiment, the teacher and the proctor would take Mr. Wallace into a room adjacent to where they would sit and strap him to a chair with electrodes attached (Explorable.com, 2008). One real shock at 45 volts was given to the teacher to prove the legitimacy of the machine. The shock machine as shown below, went from 15-450 volts increasing at 15 volt increments, labeled with warnings such as, “moderate” and “strong” shocks, as well as “Danger: Severe Shock,” and finally at the end a “simple but ghastly XXX” (Billikopf Encina,