Milgram’s Research

• Milgram designed a baseline procedure that could be used to assess obedience levels. 40 American men volunteered to take part in a study at Yale University on memory. When each volunteer arrived they were introduced to another participant -a confederate. They drew lots to decide who would be the student and who would be the teacher. The draw was manipulated so the participant would always be the teacher.
• An experimentor - a confederate in a grey lab coat- was present during the procedure. In the baseline procedure the teacher couldn't see the learner but could hear him. The teacher had to give the learner an electric shock everytime the learner made a mistake on the memory task. With each mistake, the shocks increused in voltage by 15v up to 950 volts. The shocks were fake but labelled to be increasingly dangerous.
• Every participant delivered up to 300 volts. 5 participants (12.5%) stopped at 300 volts (intense shock) - 65% continued to the highest level of 450 volts (they were fully obedient). Milgram also collected qualtative data including observations; participants showed signs of extreme tension; sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, dig fingernails into their hands, three had full blown uncontrollable seizures.
• Prior to the study, Milgram asked 14 pychology students to predict the participants behaviour. The students estimated that no more than 3% of the participants would continue to 450 volts; the findings were unexpected since the students underestimated how obedient people actually are. All participants in the study were debriefed and assured their behaviour was normal. They were sent a follow-up questionaine in which 84% said they were glad they participated.
• Migram concluded that German people aren't diferent: The Amerian participants in his study were willing to obey orders even when they might harm another person. He suspected there were certain factors in the situation that encouraged obedience so decided to conduct further studies to investigate these.