The Milgram Experiment
Stanley Milgram (1963)
Experiment: Focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.
Investigate: Whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.
Milgram selected participants for his experiment by advertising for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University. The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher’. The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s confederates (pretending to be a real participant).
The learner (a confederate called Mr. Wallace) was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arms, and the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX).
Milgram's Experiment
Aim:
Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities for example, Germans in WWII.
Procedure:
Volunteers were recruited for a lab experiment investigating “learning” (ethics: deception). Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, (bias: All male) whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional.
At the beginning of the experiment they were introduced to another participant, who was