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What Stanley Milgram taught us about human nature
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Jun 28, 2010 - 1:24:34 AM

The following is the text of the Headmaster’s address to the school in Assembly on Monday 28 June 2010.

Last week, I told you about the fake electric shock experiment cunningly devised by Stanley Milgram, to see the effect of authority on decision-making. One individual is duped into thinking he is giving electric shocks to another – and the experiment is designed to see how far people will go, simply out of a sense of obedience to authority.

So, how many people would administer lethal electric shocks just because someone in authority tells you to do so?

Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology students as to what they thought would be the results. All of the poll respondents believed that only a few (average 1.2%) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues (fellow Psychology professors at the University) and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.

The results, however, are far less reassuring. As I mentioned last week, many people indicated their desire to stop at various points during the experiment. Some paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. If at any time they indicated their desire to halt the experiment, they were given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:

Firstly, a simple “Please continue”

Then: “The experiment requires that you continue.”

Then: “It is absolutely essential that you continue.”

And finally: “You have no other choice, you must go on.”

A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner. But the crucial fact is that most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. 65 percent of participants administered the experiment's final, massive 450-volt shock. 65%! Many, as I have said, were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment. Some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. But 65% did carry on, despite these objections. Only one of the forty participants steadfastly refused to administer shocks below the 300-volt level.

In his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", Milgram spelt out the significance of his findings: “I set up a simple experiment in which stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Even when the destructive effects of their actions become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

The original Simulated Shock Generator is located in the Archives of the History of American Psychology at the University of Akron, Ohio. It is a grisly exhibit, I’m sure, but far less grisly than the truth it helped to uncover.

There is a little-known coda to the Milgram Experiment, reported by Philip Zimbardo, author of “The Lucifer Effect”. Not one of the “good guys” (the one third of people who refused to administer the final shocks) then insisted that the experiment itself be terminated. So even the “good guys” fell short of what we might expect of ourselves.

You might think it is a strange thing for a Head to say, but blind obedience to authority is not something I believe in. Milgram’s experiment warns us that obedience has less to do with the charisma of a “leader” – and more to do with the power situation in which we find ourselves. This has ramifications not just for anti-Western suicide bombers, but also for those who committed torture at Abu Ghraib – Milgram suggests that authority is incredibly powerful, situational and hard to resist. Thus ordinary people, in the “right” circumstances, can do extraordinarily nasty things. Much as we condemn cruelty at an individual or mass level, we cannot explain away such atrocities simply as the result of a uniquely charismatic and misguided leader figure. The truth, as Milgram puts it, is that “ordinary people – people like you and me - simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process, if the situation allows it”. That’s an uncomfortable insight, but one worth remembering.

(If you are interested in the Milgram Experiment and other psychological experiments, I would highly recommend Lauren Slater’s brilliant book, “Opening Skinner’s Box”. Thanks to Mrs Beck, Head of Psychology at Warminster School, for suggesting it to me.)