The experiment began in July of 196 1, that is, one year after Nazi adolf eichmann was arrested, tried and sentenced to death. Milgram designed this experiment to test "Is it possible that Eichmann and millions of other Nazi followers who participated in the Holocaust merely obeyed the orders of their superiors? Can we call them murderers of the Holocaust? " The experimental group advertised in the newspaper and sent out many advertising letters to recruit participants to Yale University to assist in the experiment. The experimental site was chosen in a basement in the old campus of the university. There are two rooms separated by a wall in the basement. According to the advertisement, the experiment will last for about one hour and the reward is $4.50 (about $20 in 2006). Participants range in age from 20 to 50, including all kinds of educational backgrounds from primary school graduation to doctoral degree.
The experimental group told the participants that this was an experiment about the influence of corporal punishment on learning behavior, and told them that he would play the role of "teacher" to teach another participant in the next room-"student", but this student was actually impersonated by the experimenter.
The experimental group told the participants that he was randomly selected as a "teacher" and got an "answer sheet". The experimental group also explained to him that the participants who were selected as "students" next door also got a "topic paper". But in fact, both papers are "answer sheets" and the real participants are "teachers". Teachers and students live in different rooms. They can't see each other, but they can communicate with each other through the wall. One participant was even told in advance that the participant next door had a heart attack.
The "teacher" was given an electric shock controller, which is said to jump from 15 volts. The controller is connected to a generator and told that the controller can shock the "students" next door. The answer sheet given to the "teacher" lists some well-matched words. The teacher's task is to teach the "students" next door. The teacher will read these words to the students one by one. After reading it, the teacher began to take the exam. Each word pair will read four word options for the students to answer, and the students will press the button to point out the correct answer. If the students answer correctly, the teacher will continue to test other words. If the student answers incorrectly, the teacher will give the student an electric shock. Every time the student answers incorrectly, the voltage of the electric shock will increase.
Participants will believe that students will get an electric shock every time they make a mistake, but they don't actually get an electric shock. In the next room, a student pretending to be an experimenter turns on the tape recorder, and the tape recorder will play a pre-recorded scream with the action of the generator. With the increase of electric shock voltage, there will be more amazing screams. When the volt number rises to a certain level, fake students will start knocking on the wall, and after knocking on the wall several times, they will start complaining that they have heart disease. Next, when the number of volts continues to increase to a certain extent, students will suddenly remain silent, stop answering, stop screaming and other reactions. The voltage "student" responded to 75 V muttering 120 V and screaming150 V. He said that he would quit the experiment and shouted at 200 V that "the blood in the blood vessels is frozen." 300 V refused to answer the question. If participants still want to stop after four answers, the experiment will stop. Otherwise, the experiment will continue until the penalty current applied by the participants rises to the maximum value of 450 volts for three times, and then the experiment will stop.
At this time, many participants expressed their wish to suspend the experiment to check the students' condition. Many participants paused when they reached 135 volts and questioned the purpose of this experiment. Some people continue to take exams after being guaranteed that they are irresponsible. The others laughed a little nervously when they heard the students screaming.
If the subject indicated that he wanted to stop the experiment, the experimenter would reply to him in the following order:
Please continue. This experiment needs you to continue, please continue. It is necessary for you to continue. You have no choice, you must continue. If participants still want to stop after four answers, the experiment will stop. Otherwise, the experiment will continue until the penalty current applied by the participants rises to the maximum value of 450 volts for three times, and then the experiment will stop. Milgram recorded a documentary about the whole experiment process and its results. The name of the documentary is Obedience, and the original version of the documentary is hard to find at present. Then, he made five series of social psychology films, which were all influenced by this experiment. These films can be found in the Media Center of Pennsylvania State University.
Before the experiment, milgram once gave his psychologists a test to predict the experimental results. They all thought that only a few people-1 0,1even only1%-would make up their minds to continue to punish until the maximum voltage was reached.
Results In the first experiment in milgram, 60% of the participants reached the highest punishment of 450 volts-although they all showed discomfort; When the number of volts reached a certain level, everyone stopped and questioned the experiment. Some even said that they would return the reward for the experiment. None of the participants insisted on stopping before reaching 300 volts. Later, milgram himself and many psychologists around the world did similar or different experiments, but they all got similar results. In order to confirm this experiment, there are also many experiments that have changed the architecture.
Dr Thomas Brass of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (who is also the author of milgram's biography "Wake Up People in the World with Electricity") obtained the result of meta-analysis after repeated experiments. He found that regardless of the time and place of the experiment, a certain proportion of participants in each experiment were willing to apply lethal voltage, which was about 6 1% to 66.
I don't know much about the situation at the end of the experiment. According to philip zimbardo's recollection, the participants who didn't reach the maximum voltage at that time didn't insist that the experiment itself should end, didn't visit the "students" in the next room, and left without the consent of the experimenter.
Milgram wrote in his article The Danger of Obedience (1974):
The view of obedience in law and philosophy is of great significance, but it rarely talks about what actions people will take when they encounter actual situations. I designed this experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen is willing to cause to another person, just because a scientist who assisted the experiment gave an order. Participants heard more painful screams when the authority in charge of the experiment ordered them to hurt another person. Even if the participant is so strongly disturbed by morality, in most cases, the authority can continue to command him. Experiments show how willing adults are to obey those in power and do almost anything. We must study and explain this phenomenon as soon as possible. The experiment itself is questioned by the ethics of scientific experiments, because it exerts extremely strong emotional pressure on the participants (although this pressure can be said to be caused by their own free operation). Although this experiment has brought valuable discoveries to the study of human psychology, many scientists now regard this experiment as a violation of experimental ethics.
Milgram defended that after investigation, it was found that 84% of the participants said they felt "happy" or "very happy" to participate in the experiment, 15% of the participants chose a neutral attitude (92% of the participants conducted an after-the-fact investigation), and many of them thanked milgram afterwards. In addition, milgram keeps receiving letters from these former participants, saying that they want to assist him in his experiment again, and even want to join his research team.
Six years later (that is, the biggest period of the Vietnam War), one of the former participants contacted milgram and said why they felt "very happy" to participate in the experiment:
"1964 when I was doing an experiment, although I believed I was hurting someone, I had no idea why I did it. When people act according to their own beliefs and obey the authority, few people will realize this ... Please allow me to think that I have been chosen by the authorities, which will make me do some bad things that I will be afraid of ... If my conscientious objector who refuses to perform military service is not approved by the authorities, I am prepared to go to jail for it, which is the only choice for my good heart. My only hope is that my comrades can also show their conscience in this way. "However, experimental experience can't change the life of every participant. Many participants were not told the details according to modern experimental standards, and the interviews they left also showed that many participants still seemed to be ignorant of the real situation of the experiment.
The most important comment caused by the experiment is not the ethical controversy of the experimental method, but the meaning represented by the experiment. A Yale University participant of 196 1 wrote in Jewish Trends magazine that when he wanted to stop to be a "teacher", he suspected that "the whole experiment might just be to test whether ordinary Americans would obey orders and violate their moral conscience-just like the Germans did during the Nazi period", which was one of the original intentions of the experiment. In his book The Danger of Obedience, milgram said: "The problem we are facing is how the environment we created in the laboratory to make people obey power is related to the Nazi era that we deplore."