Milgram's obedience study

• Milgram's original obedience study - procedure pt1

  Milgram recruited 40 male participants through volunteer sampling. The ad said he was looking for participants for a memory study.

  The participants were aged between 20 and 50 years, in jobs ranging from unskilled to professional. They were given $4.50 for just turning up.
• Milgram's original obedience study - main procedure (pt2)

  Participants drew lots for their role. A confederate was always the 'learner' while the naive participant was the 'teacher'. An experimenter would wear a lab coat. Participants were also told they could leave the study at any time (ethics).

  The learner was strapped to a chair in another room and wired with electrodes. The teacher had to give the learner an increasingly severe electric shock each time he made a mistake on the task.

  • Voltage of the shocks ranged from 15 to 450.
• Milgram's original obedience study - procedure pt3

  When the teacher turned to the experimenter for guidance, he gave a standard instruction: 'Absence of a response should be treated as a wrong answer'.

  If the teacher felt unsure about continuing, the experimenter use a sequence of four standard 'prods':

  1. Please continue.
  2. The experiment requires that you continue.
  3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
  4. You have no other choice, you must go on.
• Milgram's original obedience study - findings

  No participant stopped below 300v (only 5 stopped here.)

  65% continued to 450v.

  Observations indicated that participants showed signs of extreme tension; many were seen to 'sweat, tremble, bite their lips, groan and dig their fingernails into their hands'. Three had stress-induced seizures.
• Milgram's original obedience study - conclusion

  Prior to the study Milgram, asked 14 psychology students to predict the naive participants behaviour. They estimated no more than 3% of them would continue to 450v. Therefore the findings were unexpected.

  The participants were debriefed, and assured that their behaviour was normal. In a follow-up questionnaire, 84% reported they felt glad to have participated. 74% felt they had learned something of personal importance.
• A strength of Milgram's research is that it had good external validity.


  Milgram argued that the lab-based relationship between experimenter and participant reflected wider real-life authority relationships. Hofling found that levels of obedience in nurses on a hospital ward to unjustified demands by doctors were very high. Therefore the process of obedience in Milgram's study can be generalised.
• A limitation of Milgram's study is that it lacked internal validity. 


  Orne and Hollands suggest the participants guessed the electric shocks were fake. So Milgram was not testing what he intended to test. However Sheridan's participants gave real shocks to a puppy; 54% of males ad 100% of females delivered what they thought was a fatal shock. So, the obedience in Milgram's study may be genuine as 70% of the participants believed the shocks were real.
• Another limitation of Milgram's obedience study is there are ethical issues associated with it. 


  Baumrind criticised Milgram's deceptions. Participants believed the allocation of roles was randomly assigned, but it was fixed. The most significant deception was that participants believed the electric shocks were real. Baumrind objected because deception is a betrayal of trust that damages the reputation of psychologists and their research. Deception of participants make also make them less likely to apply for future research.