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50 years later, one of the most controversial experiments in history is still producing results

Credits: Wikimedia Commons

Psychologists have reproduced Stanley Milgram’s famous electric shock experiments, one of the most controversial experiments of the last fifty years. So, to obey or to resist? Half a century later, and the results are still the same.

To what extent can humans be manipulated? Stanley Milgram’s psychology experiments, carried out between 1960 and 1963 in the University of Yale in New Haven, United States, aimed to understand and measure how humans would obey orders that went against their own morals. The goal was to explain how civilised human beings could have committed such atrocious acts during the Second World War, by docilely obeying the orders of their superiors.

During the course of the experiment, Milgram divided the subjects into two groups. After dividing them, one person was given the role of teacher and the other the role of student. The goal was to understand the psychological processes by which normal people could be brought to torturing their peers, by naturally handing over responsibility to a superior authority. The person taking on the role of “teacher” was to teach the “student” to memorise words in the presence of an experimenter administering electric shocks for mistakes. Each incorrect response let to stronger and stronger electric shocks, going from 15 to 450 volts (the intensity being increased with every mistake).

In reality, the “students” were confederates in the study, and the shocks were not real. Throughout the course of the exercise, despite the terrible screams and pained faces of the person subjected to the ‘shocks’, the teachers would continue with the ‘torture’, to the point of administering voltages that could in reality lead to death. The experiment showed that 63% of subjects obeyed the orders, and administered up to 450 volts to their “victims”. Debriefed a month later and in justifying their actions, the majority of participants claimed to have obeyed their instincts, placing confidence in “scientific authority”.

This experiment, proving that the majority of people are prepared to harm innocent people under orders from a superior, has long been considered controversial, with some people claiming that this test would have different results in a country that never had totalitarian rule (such as the United States) and in countries that have recently been in the grip of totalitarianism (such as Poland). To try and verify the experiment, Tomasz Grzyb and his colleagues from the SWPS University of social and human sciences in Poland recruited 80 participants (40 men and 40 women) aged from 18 to 69. The results were published in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

As with the Milgram’s experiments, the volunteers were encouraged by an examiner to provide increasing intensities of shock to someone in another room, depending on errors in the responses provided. The researchers observed that 90% of the volunteers followed orders to inflict the highest level of shock available -levels that were very similar to those observed in the Milgram’s experiments: “When people learn about the Milgram’s experiments, they always say: I’d never do that”, says Tomasz Grzyb. “Our study once again illustrates the phenomenal power of the situation that the subjects face, and the ease with which they agree to do things they find unpleasant”. 

A half century after the original Milgram’s experiments on obedience and authority, and the majority of people are still willing to electrocute a defenseless person.

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