Questioning Authority: A Rethinking of the Infamous Milgram Experiments

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted February 12, 2009.

Between 1963 and 1974, Dr. Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments that would become one of the most famous social psychology studies of the 20th century. His focus was how average people respond to authority, and what he revealed stunned and disturbed people the world over.

Under the pretense of an experiment on "learning" and "memory," Milgram placed test subjects in a lab rigged with fake gadgetry, where a man in a lab coat instructed them to administer electrical shocks to a fellow test subject (actually an actor) seated in another room in "a kind of miniature electric chair."

Participants were told they were the "teachers" in the scenario and given a list of questions with which to quiz their counterparts (the "learners"). If the respondent answered incorrectly to a question, he got an electric shock as punishment.

The shocks were light at first -- 15 volts -- and became stronger incrementally, until they reached 450 volts -- a level labeled "Danger: Severe Shock." The actors were never actually electrocuted, but they pretended they were. They groaned, shouted, and, as the current became stronger, begged for relief. Meanwhile, the man in the lab coat coolly told the test subjects to keep going.

To people's horror, Milgram discovered that a solid majority of his subjects -- roughly two-thirds -- were willing to administer the highest levels of shock to their counterparts. This was as true among the first set of his test subjects (Yale undergrads), to subsequent "ordinary" participants as described by Milgram ("professionals, white-collar workers, unemployed persons and industrial workers"), to test subjects abroad, from Munich to South Africa. It was also as true for women as it was for men (although female subjects reported a higher degree of anxiety afterward).

For people who learned of the study, this became devastating proof, not only of human beings' slavish compliance in the face of authority, but of our willingness to do horrible things to other people. The study has been used to explain everything from Nazi Germany to the torture at Abu Ghraib.

But what if Milgram's obedience studies tell us something else, something just as essential, not about our obedience to authority, but what it takes for people to resist it? Now, for the first time in decades, a psychologist has replicated Milgram's famous study (with some critical changes).

The bad news: His results are statistically identical to Milgram's. The good news: Contrary to popular perception, the lesson it teaches us is not that human beings are a breed of latent torturers. "Actually," says Dr. Jerry Burger, the psychologist who led the exercise, "what I think is that the real lesson of the demonstration is quite the opposite."

Replicating Milgram: 'I Can't Tell You Why I Listened to Him and Kept Going'

Burger works at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, Calif. Like many in his field, he has long been interested in Milgram.

"Everybody who works in my area has his or her own ideas about why Milgram's participants did what they did," he says. And many have ideas about what they would change if they did the study themselves. "I have kind of had ideas like that forever … but it's pretty much been considered to be out of bounds for research. I think we all kind of assumed no one was every going to be able to do this study again."

Indeed, Milgram's obedience study was deeply controversial in its time. His deceptive methodology would later be criticized as unethical, and stiffer regulations concerning the psychological well-being of participants in such studies would follow. Thus, despite its enduring role in the popular imagination -- and relevance to the events of the day -- Milgram's study would remain firmly entrenched in its time and place.

Then, in 2004, the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. In the analysis that followed, many pointed to Milgram's findings as a way to understand what could have led otherwise-average soldiers to act so cruelly. At ABC News, producers decided they wanted to do an investigative report on this question.

"I think what they had in mind at first was some sort of journalistic stunt," Burger recalls "… to set up the Milgram study themselves." But ABC was advised not undertake such a project lightly. "Someone told them, 'If you want to do some sort of exploration of obedience, you need to talk to someone who works in the field,' " says Burger. "Somehow my name surfaced in this conversation."

When ABC called him, "I told them, 'No you can't replicate Milgram,' but I thought it was great that they wanted to explore these questions. … I was not interested in helping them put on some kind of stunt (but), it was something that I always wanted to do. And if ABC would foot the bill …"

It took months to set up the project -- recruiting and vetting participants, getting insurance, consulting lawyers, etc. When it came to conduct the experiment, Burger had implemented significant changes to Milgram's original study. One crucial adjustment had been to establish a threshold that did not exist under Milgram. Burger calls it the "150-volt solution."

See more stories tagged with: abu ghraib, jim jones, abc news, stanley milgram, dr. jerry burger, the nation magazine

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