'It was jaw-dropping': The shocking lessons from an infamous experiment in obedience
BBC/ Serenity StrullModern-day replications of one of history's most disturbing social psychology experiments, the Milgram study, reveal what makes ordinary people obey an immoral order – and how to resist.
In June 1961, a newspaper advert appeared in the Connecticut newspaper the New Haven Register, recruiting people for an innocent-sounding experiment at Yale University: "We will pay you $4.00 for one hour of your time. Persons needed for a study of memory."
Factory workers, barbers, businessmen and a wide range of other professionals were all wanted, the flyer said. No special education or experience needed. Those interested should mail their details to Stanley Milgram, a professor at Yale's Department of Psychology.
Forty men ended up joining the initial trial run of the experiment. They entered a lab, and under the guise of a word-learning task, were asked to deliver electric shocks to a stranger – up to a potentially lethal level. A majority of the men – 26 out of 40, or 65% – ended up delivering the maximum, lethal shock. In follow-up studies with other volunteers, a majority delivered the maximum shock even if the victim was presented as having a heart condition, or if he could be heard begging to be released.
The men had no idea that the shocks were actually fake, and the entire study was rigged. It was not about memory at all. Instead, it was a study of obedience, and cruelty – and it would become one of the most famous examples of ordinary people doing unthinkably brutal things when ordered to do so in a laboratory setting.
Since then, researchers have used modified, milder versions of the Milgram experiment to study one of the most disturbing aspects of human nature: how, why and when we obey an immoral order. Their findings, along with details from Milgram's original experiments, not only shed light on some of humanity's worst impulses – but also give surprising insights into what can help us resist.
'We were just gasping'
It's hard to imagine an ordinary person inflicting extreme harm on a fellow human being. Most people are convinced they themselves would not do so, and that they would resist in a Milgram-type experiment. Even psychologists who research this behaviour can still find it startling when it happens before their eyes.
"It was kind of jaw-dropping to see these people, who seemed like perfectly normal, happy, wonderful individuals, press those levers and not object," says Jerry Burger, professor emeritus in social psychology at Santa Clara University in California.
In 2009, Burger ran a modified version of Milgram's study, stopping the volunteer at a lower (fake) shock. He had expected his results to be roughly the same as Milgram's. But watching the participants on a monitor, he and his team were still taken aback. "At first we were just gasping: I can't believe this person is doing this!" he says.
In Burger's 2009 study, 70% of participants obeyed to the end of the experiment. Unlike Milgram, Burger tested both men and women and found no major difference.
"We like to think of ourselves as independent, moral people who would resist an order if it conflicted with our values," says Tomasz Grzyb, a professor in social psychology at SWPS University in Poland, who ran a partial replication study in 2015. "But the evidence suggests that we should be much less certain of that. Under sufficient pressure, in the right social situation, people can find themselves doing things they do not actually want to do."
In Grzyb's replication study, which also involved lower maximum shock levels than Milgram's study, 90% of the participants obeyed to the end. There was no significant difference between men and women.
After the experiment, a psychologist talked to the volunteers about their experience to ensure they were OK. One young woman "began to cry very intensely", Grzyb says. "Through her tears, she said something like: 'This is just the kind of person I am. I do what people tell me to do. And only now, after taking part in this experiment, have I realised it. This is why things in my life happen the way they do.'"
What explains such obedience, even when it conflicts with our inner values?
'Disobeying uses more brain resources'
Emilie Caspar, a professor in experimental psychology at Ghent University in Belgium, studies how obedience influences human brain activity. In her studies, volunteers give real, mild electric shocks to another volunteer.
Caspar and her team use brain imaging methods, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to observe what happens in the volunteer's brain when they deliver a shock under order; and, separately, when they deliver a shock because they freely decide to do so.
"The shocks are real, it's not fake like in Milgram, but they're calibrated based on the pain threshold of the victim," she says. "It's real and painful but tolerable for the victim."
Caspar and her team have found that several brain processes are different when a person obeys an order, compared to when they choose freely.
For example, when people deliver the shocks under order, the regions associated with empathy, guilt and a sense of agency or responsibility are less active, compared to when they deliver the shocks freely. When under order, they also consider the shocks they're delivering to be less painful. This may explain how obedience blurs morality and allows people to harm others, Caspar suggests.
In fact, in her own experiments, "people are extremely obedient", Caspar says. Out of around 800 volunteers in her studies, across different countries, only 21 (2.6%) refused to give the shocks. She recalls one participant who gave zero shocks when he had a free choice, but fully complied with all of her orders: "He said, 'When you started giving me orders, it was just so easy to obey the order.'"
"That's actually one of the key things [about obedience]," she says, referring to the volunteer's feeling that it was easier than disobedience. She points out that empathy, guilt and agency are all brain processes that require energy. When we follow orders, and these feelings are reduced, it may feel less effortful than disobeying.
"The brain is an organ that doesn't like to spend too much resources when it's not necessary," she explains. "Disobeying uses more brain resources than just following orders."
While we may think that individual personality traits, such as empathy, would help resist an evil order, the research tells a different story.
"Personality and temperament are surprisingly poor predictors of who will obey and who will refuse in a particular situation," says Grzyb.
Empathy can in fact be a double-edged sword, research suggests: people may empathise with the person giving immoral orders, and not want to disappoint them.
There is, however, one thing we can do to help us make better moral choices, research suggests: understand the powerful social and environmental factors that influence our decisions, not just in a lab, but in everyday life.
BBC/ Serenity Strull'If we get sued, who's responsible?'
Burger highlights four specific aspects of Milgram's study – and especially, the way it was set up – that help explain why so many people obeyed.
Milgram's set-up was simple. Walking into the lab, each volunteer was welcomed by an "experimenter", a scientist in a lab coat (in reality, an assistant acting the role). The volunteer was asked to draw (rigged) lots, and given the role of a "teacher" in a memory-learning task. He was instructed to test a "learner" (another assistant acting the role), who was sitting in another room, seemingly connected to an electric shock machine. The teacher was told to give the learner a shock every time he gave a wrong answer, by pressing a series of buttons.
In both the original study and the replications, the experimenter assumed full responsibility for anything that happened to the victim.
This – the experimenter taking responsibility – was crucial, says Burger.
"We now know from research that if you make people anonymous, or say it's someone else's responsibility, they can engage in some very bad behaviours," he says.
In Burger's own study, one female participant turned to the experimenter and said: "There's not going to be any lawsuit, right?" The experimenter replied: "If anything happens to him, I'm responsible." The woman then said, "That's what I needed to hear!"
"And she turned around and pressed the buttons," says Burger.
"People say and do all kinds of horrible things [online]," Burger points out. "If you sat face to face with somebody, and took the consequences of your words, you would be less likely to do that. Anonymity allows getting rid of personal responsibility."
In Milgram's study, the volunteers were asked after the experiment whose responsibility it was that the person had been given the shocks.
Those who obeyed tended to give the main responsibility to the experimenter. Those who refused tended to say that the main responsibility lay with themselves.
Milgram also tested what happened when the victim was in the same room as the volunteer. In that situation, only 40% obeyed the order to the end; and when the victim's hand was touching that of the volunteer, only 30% obeyed. Milgram suggested that the proximity may have made the electric shocks less abstract. As Burger says, it's harder to say, or do, vicious things when face to face with a person.
'Am I the kind of person who does this?'
Burger highlights two other factors: in Milgram's set-up, people were put into a situation most of them had never faced before. And they then had no time to reflect on what to do. Whenever they hesitated, the experimenter egged them on with phrases like: "You have no other choice, you must go on."
When we have to make a decision in a novel situation, we tend to look for somebody nearby with more experience and take cues from their behaviour, Burger explains. In the Milgram study, the only other person in the room was the experimenter – who insisted on continuing. This, along with the brisk pace, made it hard for the volunteers to make up their own minds, Burger says.
If the experimenter had said, "why don't you take 10 minutes to think about what to do?", there would probably have been more disobedience, Burger believes. A pause would have given volunteers the chance to ask themselves: "Is this right or wrong, am I the kind of person who does this?", he says.
The gradual escalation of the shock levels was also a factor, Burger adds. If a person says yes to a small request, they are more likely to then also agree to larger requests, he says – a phenomenon known as the "foot in the door" effect.
In real life, one way to counter these effects can be to think through a situation ahead of time, Burger suggests – and in a novel situation, try and take time to reflect.
Grzyb suggests cultivating certain mental habits can be helpful, such as "creating psychological distance from the authority figure, recognising when responsibility is being shifted away from us, asking whether an instruction is legitimate, and giving ourselves permission to stop".
But one key lesson is that "we should build systems that make abuse of authority more difficult", Grzyb says. "If one person is given unchecked power over another, sooner or later there is a serious risk that this power will be misused."
'We can always choose another option'
There is another powerful source of moral courage: seeing others act morally.
Caspar has carried out research on former real-life perpetrators, bystanders and rescuers in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi community in Rwanda.
"One of the main factors that distinguishes rescuers from genocide perpetrators is the presence of role models in their early childhood," she says, based on her team's research. "So, for instance, rescuers are more likely to have witnessed their parents or other relatives helping other human beings."
She points out that even if a tiny minority disobey an immoral order, or rescue people in a real-life genocide, it shows that it can be done.
"Rescuers are a good reminder that we can always choose another option," she says.
In fact, even in Milgram's original study, there were those who resisted.
"No, this isn't right. It's a hell of an experiment. The guy is suffering in there. No, I don't want to go on," said one disobedient volunteer. When told that he had no other choice but to continue, another resister snapped back: "If this were Russia maybe, but not in America."
Joe Dimow, a disobedient participant in Milgram's original study, wrote a 2016 essay on his experience. He said his upbringing in a family that questioned authority, as well as his own political activism and clashes with authorities, probably helped him resist the experimenter's orders.
"I had an unorthodox understanding of authority and was not likely to be impressed by a white lab coat," he wrote.
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Caspar's research also shines a light on the crucial phases where we might make a moral choice, long before we actually find ourselves in a situation where obedience seems the only way out.
This fills an important gap left by Milgram. Milgram argued that his findings could help explain how seemingly ordinary people ended up committing atrocities, in particular, how so many Germans colluded in and carried out the murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust. But as many have pointed out, blind obedience does not even to begin to explain the complexities of real-life genocide. In the Holocaust, for example, the persecution happened widely without direct orders and involved acts of sheer cruelty and greed.
"Genocide is often described as a process of stages, where you have discrimination, categorisation, dehumanisation [in an escalating sequence]," says Caspar. "The obedience part is more in the final phase, the extermination phase. It's like a trigger, telling people, you can go ahead now [with the killing]."
Refusing to demonise a group of people, and cultivating a belief in shared humanity, may help fight persecution in those early stages, she says.
A line from Milgram's transcripts, quoting one of the disobedient volunteers, perhaps puts it best: "I'm sorry, I can't do that to a man," the volunteer said, and stopped.
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