Stanley Milgam's Study of Obedience

Stanley Milgram conducted a study of obedience in the early 1960’s that became extremely well-known.

Milgram grew up in the Bronx and Queens, New York. He attended Harvard University under the mentorship of Gordon Allport and was a teaching assistant to Solomon Asch, who studied conformity. Milgram wrote his dissertation of the behavioral differences across several European countries to help reveal social pressure and conformity among different ethnic groups. During his studies, Asch moved to Princeton and later contacted Milgram asking him to help edit a book on conformity that Asch was writing. Milgram accepted Asch’s job offer. While working with Asch at Princeton, Milgram was offered an assistant professorship which he eventually accepted after turning down a job offer at Harvard (Blass, 2009).

There were three main reasons Milgram wanted to study obedience. First, he wanted to expand on Asch’s conformity studies. Second, as a son of Jewish immigrants, Milgram wanted to use obedience research to help understand the Holocaust. His final reason for studying obedience is that he wanted to pursue a career in social psychology (Blass, 2009).

Milgram’s study consisted of many experiments. The study for which he gained notoriety consisted of a paid participant from the community and a confederate who were told the study was focused on the effects of punishment on learning. The participant was the teacher and the confederate was the learner. The participant was allowed to watch as the learner was strapped into a chair in another room. Electrodes were attached to the learner’s arm. The participant/teacher’s task was to administer a paired-associate learning test to the learner through an intercom. The learner would then indicate his/her response by pressing a button which were connected to the participant’s side of the room. The participants were seated in front of a shock generator with 30 switches and were told to give a shock to the learner each time he/she gave an incorrect answer. The 30 switches in front of the shock generator ranged in strength from 15 to 450 volts in 15-vold increments. The participants were taught to start with the lowest switch and incrementally move up the generator volts for each incorrect response (Burger, 2009).

In reality, the learner never received any shocks although he/she gave many incorrect responses. This required the participant to administer increasingly stronger shocks. When the voltage reached 150, the learners would cry out and the cries could be heard through the wall by the participant.