Demystifying Psychology

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Milgram's 'Shocking' Experiments on Obedience to Authority

It would be difficult to discuss ethics in psychological research without introducing the infamous experiments conducted by Milgram in the 1960's.  


Following World War II, Milgram became very interested in what led people to commit such atrocious acts as those witnessed in Nazi Germany. He aptly hypothesized that the presence of authority (or perceived authority) played a key role. It is my understanding that this hypothesis may have been strongly influenced by the results of the Nuremberg trials. During these trails, many men claimed that they were good people who were driven to do terrible things by the orders of Nazi authority figures.

About the Experiments
Milgram set out to test obedience to authority in a series of laboratory experiments.
In the first experiment (and perhaps the most well known), adult working men were invited to participate in a "study of memory and learning"at Yale for $4 in compensation. Here is a copy of the study advertisement, which I find to be particularly interesting: