Milgram's 1963 obedience experiment is still a disquieting study today

If those words sound a bit ominous, it may be because you have at least a passing familiarity with "the most famous, or infamous, study in the annals of scientific psychology."

We're talking about Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, which showed most people apparently are willing to inflict increasingly painful and dangerous electrical shocks to a stranger if ordered to do so by an authority. In this case, a man in a lab coat saying, "It is absolutely essential that you continue."

When Milgram first published the disquieting results of his study in 1963, the Yale psychologist drew parallels between the behavior of the subjects he saw in his lab -- ordinary men seemingly able to torture a fellow New Haven-area resident -- to the willingness of ordinary Germans to slaughter Jews in the Holocaust.

The field of psychology has never been the same since. Half a century later, controversy over the ethics and meaning of the experiment continues to rage.

The latest example of this is a three-day academic bun fight next month at Nipissing University in Canada, called the 2013 Obedience to Authority Conference.

In between afternoon teas and a screening of a film about Hannah Arendt and the Adolf Eichmann trial, about 70 scholars from around the world -- psychologists, sociologists, criminologists -- will discuss how Milgram's obedience experiment can be used to explain everything from corporate corruption to environmental degradation.

Even Harry Potter hasn't escaped the grip of the "shock box" experiment on the cultural psyche. One presentation at the conference is called, "Obeying in Narnia, Rebelling at Hogwarts: Stanley Milgram's Influence on Children's Fantasy."

"It's a study that's resonated in culture," said Neil Lutsky, a psychology professor at Northfield's Carleton College who will give a presentation at the conference. "You see the kind of shadow that it has cast."

Even after 50 years, "Milgram's experiments are hot. They're hot news. They've always been hot," said Miami University psychology professor Arthur Miller.

Milgram ran several variations of the experiment long before his death in 1981. But in the most well-known version, a test subject brought to a Yale laboratory was given the role of a "teacher," and paired with another test subject called the "learner." The teacher was instructed by an "experimenter" in a lab coat to give increasingly higher electrical shocks to the learner if the learner failed to correctly answer questions in a word memory task.

Ostensibly, the experiment was supposed to test the effect of punishment on learning.

In reality, the shock box was fake, and both the learner and the experimenter were actors.

But the experiment was rigged so that the teacher would hear the voice of the learner in another room yelling in pain and complaining of a heart condition as he supposedly was being zapped.

Eventually, the learner would fall silent, apparently unconscious or unable to answer the questions. But the experimenter instructed the teacher to continue administering shocks, responding to any reluctance with commands such as, "You have no other choice; you must go on."

Milgram's findings: Despite exhibiting signs of "extreme tension" like sweating, trembling, stuttering, lip biting and nervous laughter, 65 percent of the people cast as teachers obeyed the experimenter and went all the way. They gave the learner the maximum shocks of 450 volts.

"He went in there thinking no one would obey," said University of Minnesota psychology professor Jeffry Simpson.

"It was a study the results of which would shock the world and the study's designer and would dramatically alter the course of psychology both conceptually and methodologically," according to a paper co-authored by Simpson.

Milgram almost immediately attracted fame and criticism, said Miller, who has written a book on the obedience experiments.

The subjects weren't given informed consent of the nature of the experiment and their right to back out was challenged, Miller said. Some critics argued that they could have suffered harm from the stress they experienced.

Nestar Russell, an organizer of the Nipissing conference, said some of Milgram's test subjects were Jewish who later learned they played the role of the perpetrator in what was portrayed as a laboratory replication of the Holocaust.

Milgram responded that the subjects were debriefed and told they actually hadn't been harming anyone. According to Milgram, most said they were glad to have participated.

"At least by current standards, it was an unethical study," Miller said. "An unethical study that became one of the most famous and prominent studies ever done. Now that's a paradox."

Critics also challenged the idea that parallels between the experiment could be made to the Holocaust. Or they felt that Milgram, who was Jewish, seemed to be validating the "I was just following orders" excuse of Holocaust perpetrators.

Lutsky will argue at the Nipissing conference that the experiment and the conference shouldn't be labeled "obedience to authority."

He said the subjects continued to administer shocks not so much out of slavish obedience to an authority figure, but in response to being set up in a situation in which they felt trapped.

"People don't want to do what they're doing," Lutsky said. "They were in a situation where they didn't know how to get out."

"Milgram set up an experiment where he coerced people to do the wrong thing," Russell said.

But Milgram also tinkered with his experiment to make it more likely for people to disobey. He moved the setting out of Yale into a nondescript office. He placed the experimenter in a different room from the teacher. He made the teacher force the learner's hand onto a shock plate.

Some of those changes resulted in more disobedience. In fact, most of the more than 1,000 subjects who went through different variations of the experiment ended up disobeying, according to Miller.

"A lot of people said, 'No more.' That's often minimized," Miller said. "The same person who will obey in situation X will disobey in situation Y."

"I expect that we'll see that the original studies themselves were more complicated than people took them to be," Lutsky said.

Today, Milgram's work is taught to virtually every psychology student and has even found its way into pop culture. The 1976 TV movie "The Tenth Level" with William Shatner was inspired by Milgram, as was the Peter Gabriel song "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)."

But Miller said many people have a hard time viewing the obedience studies objectively.

"It's still hard to approach them with a neutral attitude," he said. "People either love them or hate them.

"It's never going to end, the fascination. It's one of a kind. There's no other study quite like it."

Changes in ethical standards, spurred in part by the Milgram experiment, would make it impossible to precisely repeat what Milgram did today.

But in 2008, Santa Clara University researcher Jerry Burger performed an experiment dubbed "obedience lite," in which the shocks were stopped at 150 volts. Burger found that 70 percent of the participants seemed willing to go beyond the 150 volt mark despite being told three times they could withdraw from the study at any point.

Simpson has argued in favor of higher-impact studies like Burger's, that protect participants but still examine stressful, difficult situations.

According to the paper co-authored by Simpson, that's what continues to make the Milgram study compelling.

"It asked a big question, an important question, the ultimate question about blind obedience -- how far will a person go in inflicting severe pain on a stranger when instructed to do so by an authority figure? It is not just a psychological question. It is a moral question."

Kind of scary when you consider what’s going on in the public schools today with such teachings as “Your parents have destroyed your planet” and bullying is bad unless the target is conservative.

Milgram showed that obedience without question is almost a norm and that’s reflected in modern psychology where the communist homosexuals who dominate the field say that NOT being blindly obedient is a mental illness: Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD).

See how that works?

Don’t like the IRS auditing you for your politics? You’re mentally ill.

Don’t like Obamacare? You’re mentally ill.

Don’t like no-knock, warrantless raids of your home at 3am? You’re mentally ill.

Just like in the USSR the left is using psychology as a weapon against their opponents.

Social scientists love to retell this story, the famous Milgram experiment.
See, we’re all closet Nazis so we need a strong hand—gov. and ‘Those Who Know’: academicians, donchaknow?
I’ve always thought the test subjects knew or strongly suspected what was going on, but didn’t want to lose their pay. What was minimum wage in ‘63? 75 cents @ hour?

I wonder if there is a selection bias in these studies. Are people who are willing to participate in them more subordinate to authority than the general population?

"You may as well get used to that. It's the kind of resentment that your ability is going to provoke in some people."

"Do you think I have it Dr. Venkman?"

"You're no fluke Jennifer..."

Jeez. The little kid being punished for saying the rabbit was the good guy echoes the way kids get punished now for saying things that go against the politically correct dogma in the public schools. Including how the kid got mocked for voicing an unpopular opinion!

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.