Chapter 1. Milgram’s Obedience Studies

Short Description

This clip contains original footage of the most famous research in psychology—Stanley Milgram’s studies of obedience.

Long Description

This clip contains original footage of the most famous research in psychology—Stanley Milgram’s studies of obedience. In these studies, participants were asked to serve as “teachers” in what they thought was pioneering research on the effect of punishment on learning. However, Milgram was actually interested in the extent to which the participants would obey authority by delivering supposedly traumatizing electric shocks to a screaming, innocent victim in an adjacent room.

The opening scene pans the shock generator with switches ranging from 15 volts to 450 volts, in 15-volt increments. In administering the task to the learner, the teacher will be instructed to “move one level higher on the shock generator” each time the learner gives a wrong answer.

The “learner” (the experimenter’s confederate) is ushered into an adjacent room and, as the teacher looks on, the experimenter straps the learner into a chair and attaches an electrode to his wrist.

The rest of the video focuses on one of the “participant-teachers” as he administers the learning task. On the orders of the experimenter, he delivers increasingly higher levels of shock to the learner for each error. The learner’s protests become increasingly strident. At 300 and 315 volts he screams his refusal to answer. After 330 volts, he falls silent. In answer to the teacher’s distress and inquiries, the experimenter instructs the teacher to “continue” and to treat nonresponses as errors. Reluctantly, this teacher (as do the majority of other participants in this study) fully obeys the experimenter’s commands.

Questions