“Stanley Milgram’s 1960s obedience to authority experiments, in which a majority of participants applied an apparently fatal electric shock to an innocent ‘learner’, are probably the most famous in psychology, and their findings still appall and intrigue to this day. Now, in a hunt for fresh clues as to why ordinary people were so ready to harm another, Nestar Russell, at Victoria University of Wellington, has reviewed Milgram’s personal notes and project applications, which are housed at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library.
Milgram trained under Solomon Asch, author of the famous conformity experiments, and the obedience project was originally conceived as an extension of Asch’s work. Milgram was going to see how the behaviour of a group of cooperating participants (actually confederates working for the researcher) influenced the naive participants’ willingness to harm another. A condition in which single participants followed the experimenter’s orders on their own was planned as a mere control condition.
It was during Milgram’s extensive pilot work that he discovered the remarkable willingness for participants to obey instructions, without the need for group coercion, thus changing the direction of his project. The focus shifted to lone participants and Milgram began a process of trial and error pilot work to identify the perfect conditions for inducing obedience – what he described as ‘the strongest obedience situation’.”
Read more at BPS Research Digest
this is always fascinating stuff. and it’s amazing how often & how widely his work is cited!
i didnt realize milgram prevented em from hearing the shockee at one time. that would certainly encourage subjects to kill him–even video games have some kind of negative feedback when characters die! but pounding on the wall sounds like a pretty definitive clue after he resumed the audio.
Is this what politicians base there policies And there actions on then?
You know the more they hurt us the more we want to vote for them?
Just a thought.