Debunking Popular Psychology Myths #4: Milgram's Obedience Experiments

Issue 140: We discuss the myth of obedience in Stanley Milgram's shocking experiments

This is our latest column in a series where we debunk popular psychology myths. You can read the first column that reinterprets the Bystander Effect (both the story of Kitty Genovese and the wrong impression that many have received from the original bystander studies), our second that discusses the Stanford Prison Experiment, and our third that discusses Groupthink. Please check them out and share them with anyone who wants a fresh take on these famous studies.

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Imagine this: You’ve signed up to participate in a psychological study and when you arrive at the researcher’s lab, they pull you aside and say, "Before we begin the study, can you please unlock your phone and hand it to me? I'll just need to take your phone outside of the room for a moment to check for some things."

What would you do? Would you hand over your phone? Or tell the researcher to get lost?

When social psychologist Vanessa Bohns posed precisely this hypothetical question to approximately 100 research participants, 72% said that they would refuse to give the researcher their phones and 86% said that a reasonable person wouldn’t hand it over. (We previously interviewed Dr. Bohns for our newsletter here).

Yet, when Dr. Bohns ditched the hypothetical and actually asked another roughly 100 participants to unlock and provide their phones, the results were radically different.

In reality, a startling 97% complied with her request!

To anyone who has ever taken an introduction to psychology course, Dr. Bohn’s study may seem reminiscent of a well-known demonstration of compliance. It is, in some ways, a mild analogue of Stanley Milgram’s (in)famous obedience to authority experiments.

In those experiments, participants arrived at a Yale University laboratory to take part in what they believed was a study about the effects of punishment on learning. They started the experiment with another participant and were assigned to the role of teacher or learner. But unbeknownst to participants (the “Subject” in the image below), the situation was rigged so that they would always end up as the teacher. The learner, their ostensible fellow participant, was actually an actor who was trained to carefully follow a script created by the experimenter (the “Fake Test Subject” in the image below).

The set-up was elaborate. Subjects who were playing the role of teacher were seated in front of an imposing machine apparently capable of delivering electric shocks in 15 volt increments to the learner in the next room whenever they made a mistake. To help ensure that teachers realized the consequences of their actions, the experimenter administered a 45 volt shock to their forearm — not dangerous, but not comfortable either. Enough to make them realize the painful stakes of the procedure.

The experiment started off well enough, but over time the learner began to make more and more mistakes. After every error, the experimenter asked the teacher to deliver a higher level of shock. The shocks started mild at 15 volts and escalated up to a possible 450 volts. To illustrate the gravity of higher voltages, the shock machine included written descriptors: strong shock, very strong shock, intense shock, danger: severe shock — ultimately ending with an ominous three letters, X X X.

As teachers administered higher and higher shocks, the actor playing the learner also followed an escalating script — emitting increasingly agonized grunts of pain, demanding to be released, and ultimately falling strangely silent. To the subject, it was unclear what had happened to the learner in the other room. (To be clear, they were not actually being shocked.)

Before he began these studies, Stanley Milgram asked a group of psychologists to estimate how many people, ordinary Americans off the street, would fully comply with his directive to deliver painful and harmful electric shocks to another person. The psychologists, like participants in Vanessa Bohn’s cell phone study, thought that compliance would be rare. On average, they estimated that just one in a thousand people would deliver the full 450 volt shock. After all, the only thing compelling them to continue was directives from the experimenter. “Please continue.” “The experiment must go on.” Subjects could easily just walk away.

Their estimates were, of course, wildly wrong. In the canonical version of Milgram’s experiment, 65% of participants were fully obedient to the experimenter, delivering the maximum voltage to someone they believed was a fellow participant just because he had answered a few memory questions incorrectly.

Revisiting Milgram

Initially, Milgram’s results were hugely surprising. In the 1950s and 60s, so soon after the Second World War, people around the world were asking whether what had happened in Germany to give rise to the Nazis could occur elsewhere. Could it happen here? If “it” was large numbers of people following instructions to harm others, Milgram’s disturbing answer was yes, absolutely it could happen here — even in the United States.

But ideas change, and these findings quickly went from shocking revelations to common wisdom—and eventually mythology—at least among social scientists. The lessons seemed clear: People are highly conformist. We are sheep-like in the face of even mild pressure from authorities. Humans are susceptible to a blind obedience to even the most malevolent of leaders.

In textbooks and a thousand psychology classrooms, these are often still the lessons drawn from these studies over a half century later. But expert understanding of obedience has continued to evolve, and social scientists interpret these effects differently today. New analyses reveal the myth of obedience that has been passed down and shared to generations of students.

What follows is the story of our journey to a radically different understanding of what went down in Stanley Milgram’s lab at Yale (as told in The Power of Us)…