THE MILGRAM EXPERIMENT

By: José Javier Salinas Z

Esteban Lemus

Diana Granados

Julio Guerra

"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." –Stanley Milgram, 1974

INTRODUCTION

He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on "obedience" - that they were just following orders of their superiors.

In Milgram´s 1974 book Obedience to Authority, Milgram posed the question, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

AIM

Milgram was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. 

THE EXPERIMENT

The participants in the Milgram experiment were 40 men recruited using newspaper ads.

These participants took a roll of a teacher, applying electric shocks to another person that had took the roll of an student.

The experiment take place in to separate rooms:

When the teacher refused to administer a shock and turned to the experimenter for guidance, he was given the standard instruction /order (consisting of 4 prods), two of them are:

Prod 1: please continue. Prod 2: the experiment requires you to

continue.

RESULTS

The level of shock that the participant was willing to deliver was used as the measure of obedience.

65%35%

65% of the participants in Milgram’s study delivered the maximum shocks.

Milgram later surveyed the participants and found that 84% were glad to have participated, while only 1% regretted their involvement.

CONCLUSION

Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. 

DISSCUSION

While Milgram’s research raised serious ethical questions about the use of human subjects in psychology experiments, his results have also been consistently replicated in further experiments.

VARIABLES

The Milgram experiment was carried out many times whereby Milgram varied the basic procedure. By doing this miligram could identify what factors affected obidience.

These factors were: 1 Status of location

2 Personal Responsability

3 Legitimacy of Authority Figure

4 Status of Authority Figure

5 Peer Support

6 Proximity of Authority Figure

A BIASED EXPERIMENT

The participants in Milgram's study were all male. Do the findings transfer to females?

ETHICAL ISSUES

Deception

Protection of participants

EXPERIMENT VALUE

Milgram’s experiment has become a classic in psychology, demonstrating the dangers of obedience.