The Milgram Shock Experiment

The Milgram Shock Experiment instructed study participants to deliver shocks of increasingly higher voltage to an actor in another room, who screamed and eventually fell silent as the shocks grew stronger. The shocks weren’t real, but study participants were made to believe that they were.

In the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of studies on the concepts of obedience and authority. Today, the Milgram experiment is widely criticized on both ethical and scientific grounds.

However, Milgram’s conclusions about humanity’s willingness to obey authority figures remain influential and well-known.

The Experiment

In the most well-known version of experiment, the 40 male participants were told that the experiment focused on the relationship between punishment, learning, and memory. The experimenter then introduced each participant to a second individual, explaining that this second individual was participating in the study as well.

Participants were told that they would be randomly assigned to roles of “teacher” and “learner.” However, the “second individual” was an actor hired by the research team, and the study was set up so that the true participant would always be assigned to the “teacher” role.

During the study, the learner was located in a separate room from the teacher (the real participant), but the teacher could hear the learner through the wall. The experimenter told the teacher that the learner would memorize word pairs and instructed the teacher to ask the learner questions.

If the learner responded incorrectly to a question, the teacher would be asked to administer an electric shock. The shocks started at a relatively mild level (15 volts) but increased in 15-volt increments up to 450 volts. (In actuality, the shocks were fake, but the participant was led to believe they were real.)

Participants were instructed to give a higher shock to the learner with each wrong answer. When the 150-volt shock was administered, the learner would cry out in pain and ask to leave the study.

He would then continue crying out with each shock until the 330-volt level, at which point he would stop responding.

During this process, whenever participants expressed hesitation about continuing with the study, the experimenter would urge them to go on with increasingly firm instructions, culminating in the statement, “You have no other choice, you must go on.”

Conclusions

The study ended when participants refused to obey the experimenter’s demand, or when they gave the learner the highest level of shock on the machine (450 volts).

Milgram found that participants obeyed the experimenter at an unexpectedly high rate: 65% of the participants gave the learner the 450-volt shock.