Milgram, explanations for obedience

• Milgram


  Interested in why the German people had followed the orders of Nazi leadership in carrying out a holocaust and in killing so many people and not rebelling against these orders
• Milgram's experiment

  1. Gained a sample of 40 male 20 to 50 year-old volunteers

  2. Volunteers were deceived into thinking it was a study on memory

  3. Participant was introduced to a Confederate

  4. One participant was assigned the role of teacher, the other the role of student

  5. The true participant always got the role of teacher

  6. Another Confederate dressed in a lab coat played the role of experimenter

  7. Experimenter took the participants into a side room

  8. Strapped the learner (Confederate) to a chair and attached electrodes

  9. Participant (teacher) and experimenter went to a different room

  10. Shown a machine with switches from 15V to 450V

  11. Told the teacher to deliver shocks to the learner for wrong answers

  12. As shocks increased, the learner made noise and refused to continue

  13. Experimenter encouraged the teacher to continue the experiment
• Every single participant continued up to 300 volts despite the loud shouts of pain from the other room
• Only 12.5% of participants stopped at the 300 volts point where the learner had refused to continue
• The majority, about two-thirds of participants, continued all the way to 450 volts (the "severe shock" level)
• Milgram's findings


  The Germans weren't a particularly different group of people, Americans were just as likely to obey extreme orders