Milgram's experiment

In 1963, Stanley Milgram, a professor at Yale University, decided to conduct an experiment. He wanted to find out how, during the Second World War, German citizens, in fact, against their will, solely on orders from above, could kill millions of people in concentration camps. Milgram assumed that the people of Germany were initially prone to obedience, therefore, despite moral suffering, they would always obey.



Before traveling to Germany, Milgram decided to conduct one pilot experiment in the United States. His results showed that you can no longer go to Germany ...



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Experiment Description

The experiment involved the 3rd person - one test subject and two actors. For the experiment, the most "average", the most "normal" people were selected - representatives of the middle class, healthy both physically and mentally, who had no connections with the police, who were not observed by a psychologist, etc.



The subject was told that the purpose of the experiment was to study how pain affects a person’s memory. It was stated that one of the participants (student) should memorize a pair of words from a long list until he remembers each pair, and the other (teacher) - to check the memory of the first and punish him for every mistake with an increasingly strong electrical discharge.



At the beginning of the experiment, the roles of the teacher and the student were distributed between the subject and the actor allegedly by lot. Of course, the subject always had the role of a teacher. Then, both the student and the teacher received a demonstration strike with a voltage of 45 V. After that, the student was tied to a chair with electrodes. The teacher went to another room, began to give the student simple memorization tasks, and with each mistake the student pressed a button that supposedly punished the student with a shock. Naturally the actor who played the student only pretended to receive blows. Starting from 45 V, the teacher with each new error had to increase the voltage by 15 V up to 450 V.







At the same time at 150 V the student began to ask to stop the experiment. The experimenter told the subject that the experiment should be continued. As the voltage increases, the actor plays out more and more discomfort; then severe pain; then he began to say that he had a bad heart and that he was feeling bad; and, finally, shouted stupidly, to stop the experiment. If the subject showed fluctuations, the experimenter assured him that he took full responsibility both for the experiment and for the safety of the student and that the experiment should be continued. At the same time, however, the experimenter did not threaten the doubting teachers and did not promise any reward for participating in this experiment.

Forecasts

A few days before the start of his experiment, Milgram asked several undergraduate and graduate students of the university to give a forecast of how many percent of the subjects would reach the end. They agreed that from one to two percent of all subjects will act in this way.



Also, 39 different psychiatrists and professors were interviewed. They said that no more than 20% of the subjects will continue the experiment to half the voltage (225 V) and only one in a thousand will increase the voltage to the limit.

results

The results impressed everyone, most of all, Milgram himself. A total of 40 experiments were conducted in the series. The results looked like this: out of forty people, only one subject stopped at voltage up to 300 V, five stopped at 300 V, four after 315 V, two after 330 V, one after 345 V, one after 360 V and one after 375 V; the remaining 26 of 40 reached 450 V.







One of the professors described what was happening: “A man of forty came into the room - with a firm gait, in a suit, confident in himself. After 10 minutes in front of me sat a red, sweaty man, with shaking hands. There is no trace of the former man. He muttered: “Lord, what am I doing, what am I doing ?!”, then he hit his head with a fist, but the button pressed anyway. ”

Assumptions

To explain the brutality shown by the subjects, several assumptions were made, for each of which additional experiments were conducted:

one.

The subjects were subject to the authority of Yale University (which, by the way, now occupies the 6th place in the ranking of universities in the world).



Milgram repeated the experiment, having rented a room in Bridgeport on behalf of a certain commercial organization, the Bridgeport Research Association, without mentioning Yale University at all. The results did not change much: 48% of the subjects agreed to reach the end of the scale.

2

All subjects were men, so they had a biological tendency to aggressive actions.



In another experiment, only women were tested. They behaved exactly the same way.

3

The subjects simply had a tendency to sadism and enjoyed the opportunity to cause suffering.



As I said, they chose the most ordinary people. But even after that, some of the subjects passed special tests to assess their personality. These tests showed that these people were quite normal and had a fairly stable psyche. In fact, they were no different from ordinary people or, as Milgram said, “they are you and me”.



But another additional experiment showed a rather interesting result: when the experimenter left, and his “assistant” remained in the room, only 20% agreed to continue the experiment.

Afterword

Subsequently, Milgram's experiment was repeated in Germany, Spain, Italy, Holland, Austria and Jordan. Results were similar. What do you think,%% username, what results would be in Russia, eh?