Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [273]
The teacher’s role, the researcher explained, was to read a list of word pairs (such as blue, sky and dog, cat) to the learner, then test his memory by reading the first word of one pair and four possible second words, one of which was correct. The learner would indicate his choice by pushing a button lighting one of four bulbs in front of the teacher. Whenever he gave a wrong answer, the teacher was to depress a switch giving him a shock, starting at the lowest level. Each time the learner made an error, the teacher was to give him the next stronger shock.
At first the experiment proceeded easily and uneventfully; the learner would give some right answers and some wrong ones, the teacher would administer a mild shock after each wrong answer, and continue. But as the learner made more mistakes and the shocks became greater in intensity—the apparatus was fake, of course, and no shocks were delivered—the situation grew unpleasant. At 75 volts the learner grunted audibly; at 120 he called out that the shocks were becoming painful; at 150 volts he shouted, “Get me out of here. I refuse to go on!” Whenever the teacher wavered, the researcher, standing beside him, said, “Please continue.” At 180 volts the learner called, “I can’t stand the pain!” and at 270 he howled. When the teacher hesitated or balked, the researcher said, “The experiment requires that you continue.” Later, when the learner was banging on the wall, or still later, when he was screaming, the researcher said sternly, “It is absolutely essential that you continue.” Beyond 330, when there was only silence from the next room—to be interpreted as equivalent to an incorrect answer—the experimenter said, “You have no other choice; you must go on.”
Astonishingly—Milgram himself was amazed—63 percent of the teachers did go on, all the way. But not because they were sadists who enjoyed the agony they thought they were inflicting (standard personality tests showed no difference between the fully obedient subjects and those who at some point refused to continue); on the contrary, many of them suffered acutely while obeying the researcher’s orders. As Milgram reported:
In a large number of cases the degree of tension reached extremes that are rarely seen in sociopsychological laboratory studies. Subjects were observed to sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan, and dig their fingernails into their flesh…A mature and initially poised businessman enter[ed] the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse… yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end.34
Milgram did not, alas, report any symptoms he himself may have had while watching his teachers suffer. A spirited, feisty little man, he gave no indication in his otherwise vivid account that he was ever distressed by his subjects’ misery.
His interpretation of the results was that the situation, playing on cultural expectations, produced the phenomenon of obedience to authority. The volunteers entered the experiment in the role of cooperative and willing subjects, and the researcher played the part of the authority. In our society and many others, children are taught to obey authority and not to judge what the person in authority tells them to do. In the experiment, the teachers felt obliged to carry out orders; they could inflict pain and harm on an innocent human being because they felt that the researcher, not they themselves, was responsible for their actions.
In Milgram’s opinion, his series of experiments