Thankfully for our understanding of human nature, Milgram's experiments do not show quite what he claimed.
Behind the Shock Machine
The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments
Gina Perry 2013
The true story—and revealing legacy—of the controversial experiments on obedience to authority figures, based on previously unpublished material.
https://thenewpress.com/books/behind-shock-machine
"“There may be no studies of the twentieth century more haunting—or more revealing of human beings at their best and worst—than Stanley Milgram’s work. And here, finally, is a book that illuminates Milgram and his research subjects in riveting, compassionate detail.” —Deborah Blum, author of Love at Goon Park
When social psychologist Stanley Milgram invited volunteers to take part in an experiment at Yale in the summer of 1961, none of the participants could have foreseen the worldwide sensation the results would cause. Milgram reported that fully 65 percent of the volunteers had repeatedly administered electric shocks of increasing strength to a man they believed to be in severe pain, even suffering from a life-threatening heart condition, simply because an authority figure had told them to do so. Such behavior was linked to atrocities committed by ordinary people under the Nazi regime and immediately gripped the public imagination. The experiments remain a source of controversy and fascination more than fifty years later.
In Behind the Shock Machine, author and psychologist Gina Perry unearths for the first time the full story of these flawed experiments and their startling, long-lasting repercussions. Interviewing the original participants—many of whom remain haunted to this day about what they did—and delving deep into Milgram’s personal archive, she pieces together a more complex and much more troubling picture of these experiments than was originally presented by Milgram. Uncovering the details of the experiments leads her to question the validity of that 65 percent statistic and the claims that it revealed something essential about human nature. Fleshed out with dramatic transcripts of the tests, the book puts a human face on the unwitting people who confronted the moral test of the shock machine and offers a gripping, unforgettable tale of one man’s ambition and an experiment that defined a generation."
Social psychology textbooks ignore all modern criticisms of Milgram’s "obedience experiments"
The usual, disturbing interpretation is that Milgram showed how readily most people will harm others if they are told to do so by authority.
BPS Journal - 13 October 2015
https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/social-psychology-textbooks-ignore-all-modern-criticisms-milgrams-obedience
Why (almost) everything you know about Milgram is wrong
Ella Rhodes reports from a Stephen Reicher keynote at the Society's Annual Conference in Nottingham.
BPS Journal - 15 May 2018
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/why-almost-everything-you-know-about-milgram-wrong
"Standing in front of a keen psychology audience, Stephen Reicher (University of St Andrews) said he felt like he was at a primary school to tell children why Santa wasn't real. But, in fact, his and Alexander Haslam's extensive research on the 60s researcher Stanley Milgram has only made the man, and his electric shock box, ever-more interesting.
Milgram's 1961 experiments into obedience set out to answer a question that we've been asking for centuries – what makes normal individuals do monstrous things? Milgram's participants were told the experiments were a study of punishment and its effects on learning – they acted as 'teachers' giving electric shocks to 'learners' when they misremembered the second word from a list of word pairs.
Participants were in a separate room to the learners – who, in reality, were confederates of Milgram and received no shocks – but could overhear their shouts of pain as the shocks increased in power. These sessions were overseen by a white-coated experimenter who would coax any struggling participants to continue with the experiment.
Prior to this work Milgram asked colleagues how many people would give a shock of 300 volts or more, and many said only true psychopaths would do so. But in his first baseline study of 40 people, 26 went all the way to 450 volts and beyond – in other words two out of three people would kill someone for making an error in a learning experiment.
From this work Milgram developed a theory that, during obedience, people adopt an agentic state seeing themselves as instruments to carry out the will of another and feel little or no responsibility for their actions. However – and it's a rather big however – there are some key elements from Milgram's studies which undermine the theories he developed from them.
First, while his baseline study would back up the agentic state theory he actually did around 30 studies and obedience varied between 0 and 100 per cent… overall 58 per cent of people actually disobeyed the pushy experimenter. How can we understand this variability, Reicher asked, if the agentic state is true?
Second, when we consider the goings-on during the actual experiment and look at the experimenter's four prods to encourage participants to continue, they reveal that people really do not like following orders. The four prods used were: 'please continue', 'the experiment requires you to continue', 'It's essential you continue' and 'you have no other choice – you must go on'. Reicher pointed out that only the final one of these phrases is a direct order, and in fact none of Milgram's participants continued with the study after hearing this order. As Reicher said – Milgram's own research here is emphatically not showing that people have a tendency to obey orders.
Finally, Milgram's work did not account for the role of participants hearing the learner's voice shouting in pain. While agentic state theory would suggest we are bound into the voice of the experimenter, deferentially following orders, this is not revealed in Milgram's own archived materials – Reicher and Haslam found 40 per cent of participants dropped out when the learner spoke for the first time and mentioned the pain he was in.
All of this flies in the face of the overriding narrative Milgram established after his experiments of obedient people in agentic states blindly following orders. While his findings are in no way artificial, Reicher said, he could have reached the conclusion that people aren't programmed to take orders but rather make choices over which 'voice' to listen to in a given situation, which can vary depending on an individual's relative identification.
Find much more about Milgram and his studies in our archive, including this from Reicher and Haslam, and an exploration of rhetoric and resistance in the studies.
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Note that Ella Rhodes does not report Stephen Reicher giving credit to Gina Perry's 2013 book. I do not know whether this is true or not but the blurb for her book does say, "In Behind the Shock Machine, author and psychologist Gina Perry unearths for the first time the full story of these flawed experiments and their startling, long-lasting repercussions."