The Milgram Experiment (1961)
Yale University Manuscripts and ArchivesA participant in one of Stanley Milgram’s psychology experiments.
Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram was fascinated by the defense of Nazi official and SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, who claimed that he was not a “responsible actor” in regard to his crimes against humanity during World War II. Eichmann insisted he was “only following orders.”
Milgram wanted to put Eichmann’s defense to the test: Could a regular person be driven to murder simply because they were ordered to do so?
Initially, Milgram conducted a poll, with the general consensus agreeing that most people would not willingly kill a stranger just because someone had ordered them to. But Milgram wanted more conclusive data.
So, in July 1961, he devised a study now known as the Milgram Experiment. The psychology experiment involved a test subject who believed they were taking part in a memorization test. They would sit on one side of a wall and administer an electric shock to a person on the other side of the wall, when that person failed to correctly answer a question.
This second person, however, was privy to the real nature of the test. The electric shock wasn’t real, and memorization was not the point of the psychology experiment. In the other room, this second person had tapes featuring recordings of screams and shouts, which they would play when the test subject administered the “electric shock.”
A third participant sat behind the test subject in a lab coat and pretended to conduct the exam with the person on the other side of the wall.
With each incorrect answer, the person in the lab coat would instruct the test subject to raise the voltage of the shock that they were administering. The final three switches were each marked with high voltage warning signs.
As the test went on, the tapes played increasingly desperate and agonizing audio recordings of screams. The “test-taker” would also pound on the wall, beg to be let out, and deliver scripted lines about having a heart condition. After the seventh shock, however, they would fall completely silent, implying that they were unconscious — or maybe even dead.
Still, the person in the lab coat encouraged the subject to continue administering higher and higher shocks to the test-taker, up to the last switch, which was labeled “450 volts” and “potentially lethal.”
In the end, Milgram felt he had found proof that the average person could indeed be coerced into heinous acts of violence if instructed by an authority figure. After all, 26 of the 40 subjects went up to 450 volts, and all of them went up to 300 volts. However, others in the field criticized his technique and argued that he may have instead discovered a concerning truth about the sorts of people who participate in experiments at Yale.
This argument was later strengthened when the results were found to be difficult to replicate when using more diverse sample groups.
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