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The obedience studies originally conducted by Stanley Milgram (sometimes referred to as the Milgram Shock studies) have finally been replicated in a university setting. Will people obey an authority figure and give a stranger a dangerous shock? Or have things changed in the last 40 years such that people will be more willing to be disobedient to authority? Even if you are familiar with the Milgram Obedience studies I guarantee you will learn something new in this podcast. I certainly did. Don’t miss this episode of The Psych Files as I review both the original Milgram obedience study and the new study conducted by professor Jerry Burger at Santa Clara University.
Resources on the Milgram Obedience Study
- You can view the PowerPoint file with my notes from this episode by clicking here: Stanley Migram Obedience Study Replication. You can also download the PowerPoint file by clicking here: the Burger Replication of the Milgram Obedience Study.
- Interesting interview with Dr. Thomas Blass, Milgram’s biographer, on NPR.
- Dr. Blass maintains this website on Stanley Milgram which contains some very interesting information.
- Interesting article that appeared in the New York Times about the Milgram study.
- You can purchase the Milgram Videos from the Penn State Media Sales website.
- Derren Brown has an interesting post on his site about the Milgram Studies that also contains video of the experiment.
- The LiveVideo site has a very interesting video on the Milgram Study.
- The Milgram Studies page on Wikipedia
- One of my “virtual colleagues”, Dr. Christopher Green, professor of psychology at York University, allowed me to share this observation he sent to me via email:
The key to the Milgram effect, as you mentioned, is gradualism. The Nazis didn’t come to power declaring immediately that they would kill all the Jews. First, they gassed the “insane” and “defective” (in a time when (1) eugenics had just passed the height of its popularity in Europe and North America, (2) mental illness and disability was still widely believed to be hereditary, and (3) when the German economy was in collapse and could no longer sustain major social institutions like asylums). In short, in that context, it seemed to many to be a defensible, if distasteful, solution to an apprehended problem, and there was little reaction from the population. Then they gassed homosexuals, a group that was easily conflated in the public mind with the “insane” but who were, by contrast, functioning members of society. Again, little public reaction. Then they gassed the “Gypsies” (Roma), the only “racial” group that was even more despised (for its alleged inherent criminality) by the general population than the Jews, but much larger and more “normal”apparently than either of the previous two groups (a little bit more gradualism). Still, no major public reaction. Only then did Hitler announce the “final solution” for the Jews. For most (non-insane, non-homosexual, non-Gypsy, non-Jewish) Germans, they had been led along this gradual path, and behavioral consistency (not to mention the SS) demanded compliance (and years of this on smaller scales had begun to “normalize” this kind of “solution”). What public opposition there was could be easily dismissed or crushed.
And it has happened again and again and again in the decades since: Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, and, on a much smaller scale, at Abu Graib (and many other prisons and similarly “closed” institutions about which we know little).
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What kind of experiment was Milgram’s study of obedience to authority? Was it a formal experiment or correlational method?
Good question Malerie. There’s a good bit of controversy over this. I think it’s best to call Milgram’s early study a “laboratory observation”. In later studies he did manipulate whether or not the experimenter was in the same room as the “learner” and he manipulated the number of people who sat with the “learner” while he gave out the questions and the answers, and these could be called experiments. But none of these would be called correlational studies.