Milgram experiment

MILGRAM EXPERIMENT

Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) was an American social psychologist, best known for his experiment on obedience known as “the Milgram’s experiment” conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.

First of all we are going to present this experiment in detail and then focus on the results which are shocking, finally we are going to see the reasons and the critics of the experiment with his applicability to a dramatic event.

Stanley Milgram

1) The experiment

The experiment involves three individuals: the one who directs, a volunteer subject of the experiment and a fake volunteer. They have three different roles, there is the "experimenter" (the authoritative role), the teacher (who obeys at the orders of the experimenter) and the learner (the one who receive the stimulus from the teacher). The teacher and the learner are separated and placed in different environments in which they could communicate but not see each other. Before the test, the "teacher" gets an electric shock from the generator in order to try to the master the shocks that the learner will receive during the test. He also receives a list of words in which there are combinations of two words and the remaining words are considered as wrong answers. Then he gives the first words of the pairs and four possible answers. The learner press a button to indicate his response (A,B,C or D). If the answer is incorrect, the teacher give a shock to the learner, with the increasing of 15 volt for each wrong answer. The learner set up a tape recorder related with the electroshock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a certain number of voltage, the learner start to complain, banging on the wall, but at a certain point he cease to complain. If the subject would like to stop the experiment, the experimenter says:

Please continue.

The experiment requires that you continue.

It is absolutely essential that you continue.

You have z no other choice, you must go on.

If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive intervention of the experimenter, the experiment is stopped. Otherwise, it stops after the subject give the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.

2) Results

Milgram predicted a very small number of teachers (the range was from 0 to 3 out of 100, with an average of 1.2) that will inflict the maximum voltage, but the results were different, they not even come close to what happened. In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of the teachers administered the final massive 450-volt shock. Even if many of them 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.

3) Why?

Applicability to the Jewish Holocaust

The real reason of the experience reside in the attempt to explain certain behaviours about the