Milgram

• Milgram


  Psychology professor at Yale University during the 1960s, received PhD in social psychology from Harvard in 1961
• Milgram was interested in understanding why and how Nazi soldiers and their accomplices were capable of committing the atrocities of the Holocaust
• One of the common defenses provided by the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials was that they were merely following orders and obeyed the will of their superiors rather than carrying out the acts of their own free will
• Milgram's theory


  The Holocaust was carried out due to a cascade of obedience that ran through the Nazi hierarchy, and Nazi soldiers were simply normal people who followed orders that many of us in their position would have been capable of
• Milgram: 'These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders'
• Sample


  40 male participants aged 20-50 from a variety of occupations and educational backgrounds, excluding students
• Methodology


  Independent measures design, controlled observation in a laboratory setting, collected quantitative data (maximum shock level) and qualitative data (participant comments)
• Procedure


  Participant told they would be a 'teacher', introduced to a 'learner' (confederate), asked to administer electric shocks to learner for wrong answers, shock generator not real but created realistic sounds, researcher gave verbal prods to continue if participant refused
• Before revealing results, Milgram asked 14 Yale psychology majors to predict the outcome, and they estimated only around 3% would continue to the highest 450V shock level
• 14 out of 40 participants defied the experimenter at various shock levels, with comments like "I don't think this is very humane" and "I can't go on with this"
• Participants displayed extreme tension, with symptoms like sweating, trembling, and even uncontrollable seizures in some cases