Case Study
Milgram Obedience Experiment
Stanley Milgram, Yale University
Psychologist Stanley Milgram recruited ordinary participants for what they believed was a learning experiment, instructing them to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to another person (an actor, not actually shocked) whenever that person answered questions incorrectly, under the direction of an authoritative scientist figure at Yale University.
Result: participants proved willing to administer shocks they believed reached 450 volts — a level explicitly labeled as dangerous — simply because the scientist instructed them to continue, despite audible distress from the "learner" and no coercion beyond a calm verbal instruction to proceed. One of psychology's most famous demonstrations of Authority Bias.
A much richer account (Episode 274). Sunita Sah gives the study's full design: the "teacher" (real participant) read 25 multiple-choice word pairs to a "learner" (a confederate, strapped into an apparatus resembling an electric chair) and had to administer an escalating shock (15V increments, up to 450V) for each wrong answer. If the teacher hesitated, the experimenter delivered up to four scripted prompts, the last being "you have no choice, you must go on." Every participant continued to at least 150V and 300V (when the learner began pounding on the wall); 65% continued all the way to the labeled-dangerous 450V. Milgram privately called the compliant two-thirds "moral imbeciles" in a letter, but also documented that a large share showed visible distress — nervous laughter, sweating, swearing — while continuing. The study was designed to test whether the WWII "just following orders" defense reflected a real psychological phenomenon.
Discussed in
- Episode 28 — 28- Coronavirus- How to change the behavior of a nation
- Episode 81 — 64- of us would vandalise a library book- Would you (connected to face-to-face compliance research generally, via Vanessa Bohns)
- Episode 159 — 159-six-proven-principles-to-persuade-anyone (referenced)
- Episode 196 — 196-7-cognitive-biases-that-might-ruin-your-life (re-cited, alongside the Stanford Prison Experiment)
- Episode 274 — 274-why-is-it-so-hard-to-say-no (much richer procedural detail, via Sunita Sah)