What did Milgram's obedience experiments actually show?

In the early 1960s, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram found that most ordinary people would follow an experimenter's instructions to give what they believed were painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to a stranger. In the baseline condition, 26 of 40 participants, or 65 percent, went to the maximum of 450 volts. The wider lesson, according to Scientific American, is that small features of a situation could reverse behavior, so the studies concern disobedience as well as obedience. [1] [2]

Participants were told the study was about the effect of punishment on learning. They played the role of teacher and gave a memory test to a learner. For each wrong answer they pressed a switch on a shock generator with 30 levers, rising in 15-volt steps from 15 volts to 450 volts, the highest labeled "XXX." The learner was an actor and no shocks were delivered, but participants did not know that. The learner cried out, begged to be released, and at one point complained of heart trouble. When participants hesitated, the experimenter told them to continue. [1] [3] [4]

Popular accounts often mention only the 65 percent figure, but Milgram ran many variations; his 1974 book describes 18. Moving the study to an office building off campus lowered full obedience to 48 percent (another source gives 47.5). With the learner in the same room it fell to 40 percent, and with the teacher's hand touching the learner's, to 30 percent. When the experimenter gave orders by phone, it fell to 23 percent. It dropped below 20 percent when two other apparent participants refused to continue. In three conditions nobody reached 450 volts: when the learner demanded the shocks, when the authority was the one being shocked, and when two authorities gave conflicting instructions. [3] [1] [5]

The traditional reading, reflected in the APA and textbook accounts, is that healthy people will obey destructive orders that conflict with their morals. Milgram argued that once people accept an authority's right to direct them, they hand over responsibility and let that person define right and wrong. He was influenced by the trial of Adolf Eichmann and his defense of "just following orders." [4] [3]

Psychologists Stephen Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam challenge the idea of mindless obedience. They point out that obedience fell when the experimenter's authority weakened, and that participants stopped when they were ordered around directly. In their view, whatever participants did, they were not simply obeying orders. The search results do not say which reading most specialists now hold, and they do not cover later criticisms of the studies' methods. [1]