Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) was an American social psychologist. He earned his Ph.D. in Social psychology in 1960 under psychologist Allport’s direction.
During his graduate studies, he had worked as a research assistant with Asch who was especially interested in social groups’ conformity. Inspired by this study, Milgram began to work in Yale and started conducting his experiments about obedience in 1961.
The book written by Milgram tries to study individual reactions set at the middle of a conflict between conscious and authority. This problem seems of paramount importance and permanent in human society and that’s why Milgram tries to explore it by a scientific method.
Obedience to authority is one of the fundamental elements of social edifice and seems self-evident in normal life conditions. Historic events and observed facts in everyday life suggest that obedience is deeply rooted at individuals. Obedience seems prevail over ethic and personal rules of conduct. Jews’ extermination by Nazis is the extreme example of horrible actions realized by millions of individuals to the name of obedience.
Milgram’s purpose was to discover when and how occur the break with the authority despite a moral imperative.
The person who comes to the lab is ordered to impose an increasingly difficult punishment to another person, which will trigger reflexes to encourage rebellion.
The behavior before rebellion is called “obedience” and the point of break, which could happen at any time, represented the “disobedience act”.
In this experience, the punishment is the administration of electric shocks.
To find participants, Milgram published a note in local newspaper requesting people of any profession, exclusive of students, to participate on a study about memory and learning.
The experience has been located in the lab of Yale University.
The investigator explained to the participant that the study tried to understand the effect of punishment in learning. The learning test was a word association test.
The “naïve” participant always was the instructor who inflicted punishments to the student who was installed on a chair with straps.
The operating panel of electric shocks had 30 joysticks ranging from 15 to 450 volts.
The investigator asked to the instructor to administrate an electric shock to student every time he would give a wrong answer.
Milgram realized several experience conditions:
In the first one, the student is installed in a room next door and can’t be seen or heard by the instructor. At 300 volts of electric shocks, he drummed to the door to protest.
In the second one, the student is installed in a room next door but the instructor can hear his vocal complaints.
In the third one, the student is installed in the same room than the instructor so he could be seen and heard.
In the fourth one, the student received an electric shock only if his hand is placed in the right spot. At 150 volts, he has been refused to put his hand on the spot so the instructor had to have a physical contact to placed his hand.
Results show that the obedience rate decrease significantly when the student come closer.
Indeed, 35% of participants refused to obey to the investigator in condition 1, 37.5% in condition 2, 60% in condition 3 and 70% in condition 4.
Some factors could explain this obedience diminution:
- Empathic reaction: in condition 1 and 2, the student’s pain is abstract and distant. The instructor knows that he inflicts a painful treatment but doesn’t feel it. Apparent manifestations of pain could cause empathic reaction to participants and give them knowledge more acutely of what the student endure.
- Denial mechanism: the student is forgotten by the participant when he is on another room.
- Mutual field: It’s less difficult to give pain when the person can’t see us act. If this person can see us, we will certainly feel ashamed and guiltier.
- Start of group formation: Install the student in a different room is a way to connect more the investigator and the instructor together.
These results are unexpected. The observing members were flabbergasted to see participants administrate electrical shocks more and more intense to the student.
The key lesson of this study is that ordinary people, deprived of hostility, can by achieving task become operators of a horrible process of destruction.
Indeed, participants are obsessed to details of the experimentation method: they formulate precisely words to the student and activate joysticks with great application. The desire of participants to succeed the task decrease their ethical preoccupations. Participants no longer make value judgments about their actions but are concerned to be worthy of what authority expects from them.
Obedient participants give up all responsibilities for the student’s pain and assign the whole initiative of their action to the investigator who represents the legitimate authority. Incapable of rebellion, they reject all responsibilities to the investigator.
My personal opinion: I really like this book because I think it’s really important to have conscious of what we could do under the influence of an authority. And it’s a little scary, so take conscious of our behavior is the first step to succeed to keep our ethics and moral values.
Milgram Stanley. (2017). Soumission à l’autorité : Un point de vue expérimental. [Paris]: Pluriel.