Experiment of Milgram

The experiment of Milgram aims at estimating at which level of Obéissance can go an individual directed by an authority which he judges legitimates and the process which carries out to and maintains this obedience, in particular when she induces actions which pose problems of Conscience on the subject.

It is of 1960 with 1963 that the psychological American Stanley Milgram carries out a series of experiments, with several alternatives, making it possible to estimate at which point an individual can yield with the orders of an authority which it accepts, even when that enters in contradiction with its system of values morals and ethics. Its results caused many comments in the Public opinion, but the method used gave birth to critical and controversies among the psychologists and philosophers from sciences.

Course of the experiment

The real objective of the experiment is to measure the level of obedience to an even contrary order with the morals of that which carries out it. Subjects agree to take part, under the authority of a presumedly qualified person, with an experiment of training where it will be asked to them to apply treatment cruel to thirds without another reason that “to check the capacities of training”.

The Université Yale with New Haven made appear advertisements in a local newspaper to recruit the subjects of an experiment on the training. The participation was to last one hour and was remunerated 4 American dollars, more 0,5 $ for the travelling expenses, which represented at the time a good opportunity (returned weekly means in 1960:25 $). The experiment was presented like the scientific study of the effectiveness of the punishment (here, by electric shocks) on memorizing.

The majority of the alternatives of the experiment took place in the buildings of the Yale university. The participants were men from 20 to 50 years of all mediums and various levels of education.

The majority of the alternatives comprises three characters:

learning it or raises ( in learner ), which will have to endeavor to memorize lists of words and will receive an electric shock, increasingly strong, in the event of error;
the teacher ( in teacher ), who dictates the words with learning and checks the answers. In the event of error, it will send an electric shock intended to make suffer learning it;
the experimenter ( to try out of it), official representative of the authority, vêtu of the gray blouse of the technician, firm and sure maintenance of him.

The experimenter and learning it are actually the fictitious actors, and electric shocks.

In the framework of the simulated experiment (training by the punishment), learning and teacher are both indicated like “subject” ( in subject ). Within the framework of the real experiment (level of obedience, tender to the authority), only the teacher will be appointed like subject.

To the beginning of the simulated experiment the future teacher is introduced to the experimenter and with the Learning future, one describes the conditions of this experiment to him, one informs it that after drawing lot it will be learning it or the teacher, then one subjects it to a light electric shock (real that one) of (45 volts) to show him a sample of what it will inflict with his pupil and to reinforce his confidence on the veracity of the experiment. Once it accepted the protocol a faked drawing lot is made, which systematically indicates it as Enseignant.

Learning then is placed in a part distinct, separated by a fine partition, and is attached on an electric chair. The subject seeks to make him memorize lists of words and questions it on those. It is installed in front of a desk where a line of levers is supposed to send electric shocks to learning. In the event of error, the subject engages a new lever and believes that thus learning it receives an electric shock of increasing power (15 additional volts with each discharge). The subject is requested to announce the voltage corresponding before applying it.

The reactions to the shocks are simulated by learning. Its apparent suffering evolves/moves during the meeting: starting from 75 V he groans, to 120 V he complains with the experimenter whom he suffers, to 135 V he howls, to 150 V he begs that it is released, to 270 V he launches a violent cry, to 300 V he announces that he will not answer any more. When learning it does not answer any more, the experimenter indicates that an absence of answer is regarded as an error. At the stage of 150 volts, the majority of the Subjects express doubts and question the experimenter who is at their side. This one is charged to reassure them in their affirming that they will not be held responsible for the consequences. If a subject hesitates, the experimenter asks him to act. If a subject expresses the desire to stop the experiment, the experimenter addresses to him, in the order, these answers:

“Please continue please. ”
“the experiment requires that you continue. ”
“It is absolutely essential that you continue. ”
“You do not have the choice, you must continue. ”

If the Subject always wishes to stop after these four interventions, the experiment is stopped. If not, it ends when the Subject managed three discharges maximum (450 volts) using the levers entitled XXX located after those mentioning Attention, dangerous shock .

At the conclusion of each experiment, a questionnaire and a discussion with the Subject made it possible to collect its feelings and to listen to the explanations which it gave of its behavior. This maintenance as aimed at comforting it by affirming to him as no electric shock had been applied, by reconciling it with learning and by saying to him that its behavior did not have anything sadist and was completely normal.

One year after the experiment, it received a new questionnaire on its impression about the experiment, as well as a detailed report of the results of this experiment.

Alternatives

On the whole, nineteen alternatives of the experiment with 636 subjects were carried out, thus allowing by modifying the situation, to define the true elements pushing a person to obey an authority which it respects and to maintain this obedience.

These alternatives modify parameters as the distance separating the subject from the pupil, that between the subject and the experimenter, the coherence of the hierarchy where the presence of two experimenters giving of the contradictory orders or the integration of the subject within a group which refuses to obey the experimenter.

The majority of the alternatives make it possible to note a maximum percentage of obedience near to 65%. It should be noted that it can exist extreme conditions. Thus we can see appearing a behavior of tender to the authority of almost 92% (shocks managed by a third), or has contrary low (proximity of the comparse receiving the shocks), or a null tender (decredibility of the authority).

Table of the alternatives

Here a summary table this these alternatives classified by types, and their results:

Results

During the first experiments undertaken by Stanley Milgram, 62,5% (25 out of 40) of the subjects in the long term led the experiment by inflicting to three recoveries the electric shocks of 450 volts. All the participants accepted the principle announced and, possibly after encouragement, reached the 135 volts. The average of the maximum shocks (levels to which the subjects stopped) was of 360 volts. However, each participant was at one time or with another stopped to question the professor. Many presented obvious signs of extreme nervousness and reserve at the time of last stages (verbal protests, nervous laughter, etc).

Other experiments throughout the world validated the results obtained by Milgram. The rates of obedience obtained even generally proved more raised than in the original situation. One can thus quote the achievements of David Rosenhan, and David Mantell in Germany. Later work, in particular by Thomas Blass, showed that the accepting percentage of people, under similar experimental conditions, to inflict very important discharges was about constant, between 61% and 66%, whatever the place and the time when the test was carried out.

Milgram qualified at the time these results unexpected and worrying ones . Preliminary surveys carried out near psychological colleagues and of adults of the middle-classes had established a forecast of a rate of obedience of 0% and one mean level of the shocks reached located between 120 V and 140 V. None questioned people had considered tensions exceeding 300 V.

Analyzes of Milgram

In addition to the many experimental alternatives which make it possible to emphasize factors of the tender, Stanley Milgram proposes in its book published in 1974 a detailed analysis of the phenomenon. It is placed within an evolutionary framework and conjectures that obedience is a behavior inherent in the life in society and that the integration of an individual in a hierarchy implies that its own operation is modified by it: the human being passes then from the autonomous mode to the systematic mode where it becomes the representative of authority. Starting from this model, he seeks the factors intervening with each of the three stages:

prerequisites of obedience: they go from the family (education rests on an authority in the family) to the dominant ideology (the conviction that the cause is right, i.e. here the legitimacy of the scientific experimentation).
the state of obedience (or state agentic): the most important demonstrations are the syntonization (receptivity increased vis-a-vis the authority and decreased for any external demonstration) and the loss of the direction of the responsibility . It notes also a redefinition of the situation in the sense that the subjected individual “is inclined to accept the definitions of the action provided by the legitimate authority”.
causes maintaining in obedience: the most interesting phenomenon among those raised is the anxiety, which plays the part of valve of safety; it makes it possible the individual to be proven with itself by emotional demonstrations which he is in dissension with the order carried out.

A contrario , Stanley Milgram is strongly opposed to interpretations which would like to explain the experimental results by the internal aggressiveness of the subjects. Besides an alternative highlights that, where the subject was free to define the level of intensity. Here, only a person on the forty used the maximum level.

He also proposes a series of factual arguments to refute the three critics who are generally addressed to him: the not-representativeness of its subjects, their conviction in this experimental protocol, and impossibility of generalizing the experiment with real situations.

Role of obedience in the company

Obedience with an authority and the integration of the individual within a hierarchy are one of the bases of any company. This obedience with rules, and consequently with an authority, makes it possible to the individuals to live together and prevents that their needs and desires enter in conflict and put at evil the structure of the company.

On the basis of that, Stanley Milgram does not regard obedience as an evil. Where obedience becomes dangerous, it is when it enters in conflict with the conscience of the individual. To summarize, which is dangerous, it is blind obedience.

Another engine of obedience is the Conformisme. When the individual obeys an authority, it is conscious of carrying out the desires of the authority. With conformism, the individual is persuaded that its motivations are clean for him and that he does not imitate the behavior of the group. This imitation is a way for the individual of not dissociating a group.

Conformism was highlighted by the social psychologist Solomon Asch in a experiment which it carried out in the Années 1950.

The alternatives with several pars showed that if obedience enters in conflict with the conscience of the individual and that conformism " impose" with the individual not to obey, it often lines up side of the group. Thus, if one wants to make sure of the blind obedience of a group, it should be made so that the majority of its members adheres to the goals of the authority.

Process of obedience at the individual

The Man is a social being, but that does not prevent it from having a certain autonomy. When it is autonomous, the Man obeys his own needs, desires and with his conscience.

State agentic

When the individual obeys, he delegates his responsibility to the authority and passes in the state that Stanley Milgram calls agentic . The individual is not autonomous any more, it is one executive agent of a foreign will .

Role of the tension

The maintenance of the individual in a state agentic lasts as a long time as the capacity of the authority is exerted and that it does not enter in conflict with the behavior of the group (conformism) and a certain level of tension or anxiety.

The tension which the individual feels who obeys is the sign of its disapproval to an order of the authority. The individual makes very to lower this level of tension, most radical would be disobedience, but the fact that it agreed to subject obliges it to continue to obey. It thus makes very cause a drop in this tension, without disobeying. In the experiment of Milgram, subjects emit sniggers, disapprove the orders of the experimenter aloud, avoid looking at the pupil, help it while insisting on the good answer or when the experimenter is not there they do not give the suitable discharge required. All these actions aim at cause a drop in the level of tension. But when it is not possible any more to make it decrease with these subterfuges, the subject disobeys purely and simply.

Examples

In its book, Stanley Milgram does not seek to cut its scientific step of the contemporary company. Without to mix the kinds, it frequently refers as well to the situations of obedience of the daily life as to the great events. The Second world war and in particular the Shoah thus played a great part in the choice of Stanley Milgram to be interested in obedience. It often mentions the lawsuit of Adolf Eichmann. It supports the journalist and philosopher Hannah Arendt who, in discussed reports, saw in this war criminal plus a bureaucrat that cruel a anti-semite. The epilog of its book Soumission with the authority for a good portion is devoted to the war of the Vietnam and the Massacre of My Lai.

He insists on the fact that the situations of authority of the fascistic modes are not absent from our Western companies: The requirements of the authority promoted by the democratic way can they also enter in conflict with the conscience. Immigration and the Slavery of million Blacks, the extermination of the Indian of America, the internment of the American citizens of Japanese origin, the use of the Napalm against the civil populations of Vietnam represent as many pitiless policies which were designed by the authorities of a country democratic and carried out by the whole of the nation with the tender escomptée. It finishes its book besides by endorsing a quotation of Harold Laski: … civilization is characterized, above all, by the will not to make suffer our similar free. According to the terms of this definition, those among us who subject ourselves blindly to the requirements authority cannot claim with the statute of men civilisés.

Later experiment

Mel Slater reproduced the experiment to be interested in the statute of virtual reality. It set up two groups: participants punished a so-called pupil, whom they did not see, while others punished a virtual character. The group which faced a virtual character ceased much earlier punishing this “pupil”.

Criticisms and comments

On the validity of the results

Milgram said it itself, the first criticism of its experiment related to the validity of its results and their portability with real situations; the reproduction of the experiment in other countries with results very close and the production to experiments of the same order, like the Expérience of Stanford, which showed the facility with which a majority of people takes up the duty of “of torture legal” (and legitimates), invalidated this first criticism.

On the validity of the protocol

But the principal criticism of the experiment, which comes essentially from the academic world of North America (the United States and Canada), is much more consistent: that of at the same time moral and scientific acceptability of the protocol set up. In both cases, criticism is of order deontologic and ethical.

The experiment of Milgram takes part of questions which one puts much in this area of the world, and much less in Europe for example, if not Germany for historical reasons, on the validity of the protocols (scientific point of view) and on their quality (moral point of view). The question is: is an experiment resting on the fraud (in English, disappointment , translated in the text quoted by “deception”) scientifically valid and morally acceptable? Daphne Maurer, professor of psychology to the Université McMaster exposes the most discussed problematic points thus: One had thus misled the subjects on the following points:

the “victim” did not receive actually shocks;
the “victim” was actually an accomplice;
the subjects could actually cease in any time (what was not truly the case since the person in charge of the experiment gave precise instructions to continue in spite of the hesitation of the subjects and, consequently, did not leave on the subjects the possibility of stopping).

He does not make the shade of a doubt that this kind of method raises important questions of ethics the such respect of the people and of their right to make voluntary choices when they take part in experiments. When a choice is based on untrue allegations, one cannot say that it is voluntary. Another aspect of the ethics which the recourse to deception raises is the rupture of the bond of confidence between the researcher and the subject.

The corollary of these interrogations is the scientific validity of the results of an experiment of this type, subject which gives place to an abundant academic literature in English language, essentially of North-American origin.

In spite of that Yvon Pesqueux estimates that “the rather broad study. It is thus difficult to bring founded objections there and we must then recognize the range of this work. Many configurations were imagined, of multiple variables were tested to try to include/understand what influenced the tender with the authority. In addition, because a very low number of methodological criticisms seem acceptable. In my eyes, only the use of cybernetics to study a human behavior is doubtful. ”

Others critical relate more specifically to certain effects being able to influence the course of the experiment. Indeed, the subjects being able to be conscious of taking part in a test would influence their behavior as described by Elton Mayo which theorized the Effet Hawthorne. The Effet Pygmalion is also to take into account being very close to the conditions described by Milgram.

The experiment of Milgram like topos

This experiment became a topos in the speeches on obedience and the voluntary tender with the authority, and in more abstract discussions, on the limits of the concept of free will.

In academic fields, it is often used of model or example in Sociologie, experimental Psychologie and social Psychologie, like in Philosophie, in particular in Philosophie of the right. In social psychology particularly, the experiment of Milgram is often used to discuss or present certain concepts released by this field, such as the Conformisme, the normative Influence, and of course the tender with the authority and the state agentic, two concepts in the middle of work of Milgram in this experiment.

In the public debate, the recourse to this experiment as an explanatory principle of certain behaviors or a certain state of the company, under this name or in reference to its use in the fiction (in particular in the film I like Icare ). It is here generally about a use in Commonplace in the pejorative meaning of the expression of “ideas many times repeated, used and hollow”, use often close to the Argument of authority (“As the experiment of Milgram shows it… ”) or of the false obviousness (“It is as for the experiment of Milgram” or more vaguely, “That makes me think of the experiment of Milgram” - or “of I like Icare” ).

Around the experiment of Milgram

This experiment was put in scene in the film I like Icare of Henri Verneuil, fiction inspired of the Assassinat of John F. Kennedy, where the actor Roger Planchon plays professor David Naggara (in addition, professor in film at the university of Bush-hammered, anagram of Yale), fictitious version of Stanley Milgram, which presents its experiment to the main character played by Yves Montand.

In its album of 1986 So , the musician Peter Gabriel wrote a song, We C what we' Re told (Milgram' S 37) ( We do what one says to us (37 of Milgram)) , referring to the alternative of the experiment of Milgram where 37 people out of 40 take part by their inaction in the administration of the maximum electric shocks.

References

Source

See too

Conditioning
Experiment of Stanford, known as also experiment of Zimbardo.
Obedience

External bonds

'' the Experiment of Milgram and the Panopticon of Bentham '' on Caute@LautreNet
Synthesis: '' Soumission with the authority '' of Stanley Milgram
Experiments of social psychology
Reconstitution in Hidden camera .

Random links: