What percentage of subjects in Milgrams obedience experiment administered the maximum 450

In the early 1960’s, Stanley Milgram conducted a study of obedience to authority figures that would eventually impact Social Psychology forever. He was particularly interested in how and why Nazi workers were willing to kill thousands of innocent people.  This helped him create an experiment that looked at obedience to authority figures.

The Experiment

Milgram had 40 participants, all male, and ages that ranged from 20 to 50 years. The participants would be paired with another ‘participant’, who was actually a confederate that knew the purpose of the experiment. The confederate would always be the learner, and the participant would always be the teacher.

The learners job was to ‘memorize’ a list of word pairs. The learner was  placed in a room separate from the teacher, and was strapped to a chair with electrodes (see picture). The teacher was placed in front of a switch board apparatus, which would administer shocks at different levels to the learner. The board had increasing voltage from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 volts (danger-severe shock).

The teacher would list a word, and the learners objective was to answer with the words correct pairing. When the learner answered incorrectly, the teacher was ordered to give a shock, and increasing the amount of voltage each time. While the learner wasn’t actually feeling any shocks whatsoever, the teacher believed he was experiencing this pain. There was also an actor in the room with the teacher who was dressed as an experimenter in a lab coat, telling them that they must continue and that they have no choice but to continue.

The Results

Surprisingly, 2/3 of the participants continued to the highest shock, 450 volts. 100% of the participants continued to at least 300 volts.

These results suggest than when people are given orders, even when they believe it is causing someone else pain, they are likely to obey. This is true especially when the orders are coming from someone who they perceive as an authority figure.

Additional Resources

There were many different variations of this experiment conducted by Milgram. See below for some videos and helpful links/sources to learn more!

• Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378.
• http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some things never change. Scientists said on Friday they had replicated an experiment in which people obediently delivered painful shocks to others if encouraged to do so by authority figures.

A U.S. soldeir walks between cells at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad in a 2004 photo. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj

Seventy percent of volunteers continued to administer electrical shocks -- or at least they believed they were doing so -- even after an actor claimed they were painful, Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University in California found.

“What we found is validation of the same argument -- if you put people into certain situations, they will act in surprising, and maybe often even disturbing, ways,” Burger said in a telephone interview. “This research is still relevant.”

Burger was replicating an experiment published in 1961 by Yale University professor Stanley Milgram, in which volunteers were asked to deliver electric “shocks” to other people if they answered certain questions incorrectly.

Milgram found that, after hearing an actor cry out in pain at 150 volts, 82.5 percent of participants continued administering shocks, most to the maximum 450 volts.

The experiment surprised psychologists and no one has tried to replicate it because of the distress suffered by many of the volunteers who believed they were shocking another person.

“When you hear the man scream and say, ‘let me out, I can’t stand it,’ that is the point when the real stress that people criticized Milgram for kicked in,” Burger said.

“It was a very, very, very stressful experience for many of the participants. That is the reason no one can ethically replicate the experiment today.”

‘SURPRISING AND DISAPPOINTING’

Burger modified the experiment, by stopping at the 150 volt point for the 29 men and 41 women in his experiment. He measured how many of his volunteers began to deliver another shock when prompted by the experiment’s leader -- but instead of letting them do so, stopped them.

In Milgram’s original experiment, 150 volts seemed to be the turning point.

In Burger’s modified experiment, 70 percent of the volunteers were willing to give shocks greater than 150 volts.

At one point, researchers brought in a volunteer who knew what was going on and refused to administer shocks beyond 150 volts. Despite the example, 63 percent of the participants continued administering shocks past 150 volts.

“That was surprising and disappointing,” Burger said.

Burger found no differences among his volunteers, aged 20 to 81, and carefully screened them to be average representatives of the U.S. public.

Burger said the experiment, published in the American Psychologist, can only partly explain the widely reported prisoner abuse at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or events during World War Two.

“Although one must be cautious when making the leap from laboratory studies to complex social behaviors such as genocide, understanding the social psychological factors that contribute to people acting in unexpected and unsettling ways is important,” he wrote.

“It is not that there is something wrong with the people,” Burger said. “The idea has been somehow there was this characteristic that people had back in the early 1960s that they were somehow more prone to obedience.”