“We are programmed to obey authority even against our own consciences.
In 1961 and 1962, in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University professor Stanley Milgram designed and filmed one of the most astonishing psychological experiments ever conducted. Milgram set out to pit the human tendency to obey authority as squarely as possible against individual conscience. Concerning his method of inquiry, he wrote, “Of all moral principles, the one that comes closest to being universally accepted is this: one should not inflict suffering on a helpless person who is neither harmful nor threatening to oneself. This principle is the counter-force we shall set in opposition to obedience.”
Milgram’s experimental procedure was relentlessly straightforward, and the filmed version of his study has outraged humanists, and unsuspecting college students, for forty years. In the study, two men, strangers to each other, arrive at a psychology laboratory to participate in an experiment that has been advertised as having to do with memory and learning. Participation is rewarded with four dollars, plus fifty cents for carfare. At the lab, the experimenter (Stanley Milgram himself, in the filmed version) explains to both men that the study concerns “the effects of punishment on learning.” One of the two is designated as the “learner” and is escorted into another room and seated in a chair. All watch as the learner’s arms are matter-of-factly strapped to the chair, “to prevent excessive movement,” and an electrode is attached to his wrist. He is told that he must learn a list of word pairs (blue box, nice day, wild duck, etc.), and that whenever he makes a mistake, he will received an electric shock. With each mistake, the shock will increase in intensity.
The other person is told that he is to be the “teacher” in this learning experiment. After the teacher has watched the learner get strapped to a chair and wired for electric shock, the teacher is taken into a different room and asked to take a seat in front of a large, ominous machine, called a “shock generator.” The shock generator has thirty switches, arranged horizontally and labeled by “volts,” from 15 volts all the way to 450 volts, in 15-volt increments. In addition to the numbers, the switches are branded with descriptors that range from ‘slight shock’ to the sinister appellation of ‘danger-severe shock.” The teacher is handed the list of word pairs and told that his job is to administer a test to the learner in the other room. Hen the learner gets an answer right -- for example, teacher calls out “blue,” and the learner answers “box” – the teacher can move on to the next test item. But when the learner gives an incorrect answer, the teacher must push a switch and give him an electric shock. The experimenter instructs the teacher to begin at the lowest level of shock on the shock generator, and with each wrong answer, to increase the shock level by one increment.
The learner in the other room is actually the experimenter’s trained confederate, an actor, and will receive no shocks at all. But of course the teacher does not know this, and it is the teacher who is the real subject of the experiment.
The teacher calls out the first few items of the “learning test,” and then trouble begins, because the learner – Milgram’s accomplice, unseen in the other room – starts to sound very uncomfortable. At 75 volts, the learner makes a mistake on the word pair, the teacher administers the shock, and the learner grunts. At 120 volts, the learner shouts to the experimenter that the shocks are becoming painful, at 150 volts, the unseen learner demands to be released from the experiment. As the shocks get stronger, the learner’’s protests sound more and more desperate, and at 285 volts, he emits an agonized scream. The experimenter – the Yale professor in the white lab coat – stands behind the teacher, who is seated at the shock generator, and calmly gives a sequence of scripted prods, such as “Please continue,” or “The experiment requires that you continue,” or “Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on.”
Milgram repeated this procedure forty times using forty different subjects – people who were “in everyday life responsible and decent” – including high school teachers, postal clerks, salesmen, manual laborers, and engineers. The forty represented various educational levels, from one man who had not finished high school to others who had doctoral or other professional degrees. The aim of the experiment was to discover how long the subjects (the teachers in this experiment) would take to disobey Milgram’s authority when presented with a clear moral imperative. How much electric shock would they administer to a pleading, screaming stranger merely because an authority figure told them to do so?
When I show Milgram’s film to a lecture hall full of psychology students, I ask them to predict the answers to these questions. The students are always certain that conscience will prevail. Many of them predict that a large number of the subjects will walk out of the experiments as soon as they find out about the use of electric shock. Most of the students are sure that, of the subjects who remain, all but a few will defy the experimenter, perhaps telling him to go to hell, at least by the time the man in the other room demands to be freed (at 150 volts). And of course, the students predict, only a tiny number of very sick, sadistic subjects will continue pushing switches all the way to 450 volts, where the machine itself says “danger – severe shock.”
Here is what actually happens: Thirty-four of the Miligram’s original forty subjects continue to shock the learner, whom they believe to be strapped to a chair, even after he asks to be released from the experiment. In fact, of these thirty-four subjects, twenty-five – that is to day, 62.5% of the total group – never disobey the experimenter at any point, continuing to press the switches all the way to the end of the sequence (450 volts) despite entreaties and shrieks from the man in the other room. The teachers sweat, they complain, they hold their heads, but they continue...
“A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.”
