The Milgram Experiment: Theory, Results, & Ethical Issues​

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
The Milgram experiments are some of the most foundational—and controversial—psychology research studies ever conducted. Let’s look at what makes them important.
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What are the sensations you experience when somebody tells you to do something you feel is wrong? Is it a churning in your belly? A tension in your upper back or your jaw? Does your skin turn hot and clammy? I hope for your sake that these moments are few and far between. When they happen to me, I often freeze up; I feel tight in the chest and my breathing gets shallow. I know something is wrong, but I’m not sure how to get out of the situation.
Throughout human history, people have put each other in situations like this, pitting one person’s demands against another person’s morals. When atrocities happen on a large scale, we wonder if the people committing them participated readily. Did they have doubts? Did they resist? What made them bow to authority and do things they likely knew on some level were quite wrong?

In the middle of the 20th century, one psychologist designed a study that aimed to understand how ordinary people could end up engaging in violent and seemingly heartless behaviors, often at the cost of other human lives. For example, were all the members of the Nazi party naturally hateful and eager for blood? Probably not, so what else could have driven them to do what they did? Let’s see how the psychology experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s and 1970s sought and found answers to these questions.​
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What Is the Milgram Experiment? (A Definition)​

The original and classic Milgram experiment was described by Stanley Milgram in an academic paper he wrote sixty years ago. Milgram was a young, Harvard-trained social psychologist working at Yale University when he initiated the first in a series of very similar experiments. The experiments were designed to understand how people could be made to obey orders that would involve causing another person considerable pain or even death. Here is the general outline of how the typical Milgram experiment went (Milgram, 1963); for the sake of keeping things interesting, I am going to write it in the second person, as if you, the reader, are participating in the experiment yourself:
 
You walk into a psychology laboratory where the experimenter greets you, pays you in advance for your participation, and introduces you to another person who is going to be participating in the study at the same time. (You don’t know it, but this person is actually a confederate, or colleague, of the experimenter whose job is to play a certain role in the study.) The experimenter “randomly” assigns you the role of Teacher and the other participant the role of Learner. Soon you learn what your role means: You are shown a list of word pairs, and your job is to read out the first word in each pair, one at a time, while the Learner repeats back to you the second word in each pair. The experimenter shows you a second room, where the Learner will be strapped into a chair that can provide them with electric shocks. It is your job as the Teacher to pull a lever that delivers those electric shocks and to gradually increase the intensity of the shocks if the Learner performs badly. You notice that the highest amount of voltage you can deliver is 450 volts, which is labeled with “danger—severe shock.”
 
You return to the first room and sit down in a chair by the shock administration machine. At first the shocks you deliver are so low that they barely register for the Learner, but eventually the Learner starts to complain when you deliver the shocks. You start to grow uneasy, but your orders are clear: increase the voltage each time a mistake is made, then deliver the shock. Eventually you can hear the Learner in the other room howling and begging for the experiment to end. When you tell the experimenter you don’t want to do this anymore, he insists that you continue. As you start to really sweat and feel terrible about what you’re doing, the experimenter keeps telling you how incredibly important it is that you continue with the experiment. Somehow you’ve reached the levels of shock you think must be harmful to the other person, who isn’t even making any noise or responding to prompts anymore. If you’re like most participants in that first study, you make it all the way to the top of the shocks, delivering 450 volts of electricity to the Learner (Milgram, 1963).
 
Then, shaken and worried sick, you are told that the experiment is over and that it was just a ruse. The Learner reappears, seeming totally fine, and says that no shocks were ever administered; you were just the subject in a research study to see how far people will go in obeying orders when it means harming others. The experimenter thanks you for your time, pays you for your participation, and sends you back out in the world.
 
How do you feel now, walking out into the streets of New Haven? You feel tricked, angry, a little sick to your stomach. You remember how firm the experimenter was with his commands, how tall and stern he appeared in his lab coat and with his clipboard. You wonder why you got so wrapped up in something that was clearly fake.
 
If you’d like some visuals for the experience I just described, I recommend watching the video below:​

Video: Milgram's Obedience Experiment​

Why Is the Milgram Experiment Important?

You might be thinking to yourself, “No way would I actually obey in that situation; I’d definitely walk away.” But fully two thirds of participants in Milgram’s first shock study ended up delivering the full 450 volts, and all participants made it to 300 volts (Milgram, 1963). The participants in that study, and in the many follow-up variations on the study that Milgram conducted, consistently shocked other people at very high rates. There is little reason to believe that you or I would behave much differently. What Milgram had demonstrated was that when faced with an insistent authority figure, we are all susceptible to compromising on our morals (Milgram, 1974). Almost none of his subjects were fully immune to this influence.

People of Milgram’s generation had grown up trying to understand the atrocities of World War II. How could ordinary citizens be involved in genocidal acts? If simply being bossed around by somebody you’d never met who seemed like an authoritative scientist could get most people to inflict apparently serious pain on others, then suddenly the participation of regular people in carrying out the Holocaust seemed a little more understandable.

The importance of Milgram’s experiments also lies in the realm of research ethics (Brannigan, 2013). For example, Milgram’s participants had no idea, going into the study, that they were going to be deceived; it is inconceivable today that a research subject would be expected to enter so blindly into such an experiment.

Finally, Milgram’s experiments drew the field of psychology’s attention to the contextual nature of human behavior (Brannigan, 2013). Social psychologists grew even more invested in manipulating the situational factors that might determine people’s behaviors. Milgram’s experiments are always afforded lots of space in general and social psychology textbooks; interestingly, when his experiments are discussed, their controversial nature has been less and less of a focus over time (Stam et al., 1998).

Milgram Experiment Theory

Milgram (1974) saw his experiments as demonstrating the power of authority. People in positions of authority are naturally seen as exercising social control because society affords them special privileges. In fact, Milgram argued that an authority figure can go so far as to define reality for others should they grant that power to the authority figure. In the case of his studies, the experimenter established his authority by wearing a lab coat, showing the participant around and explaining everything, and speaking strongly and firmly when compelling the participant to continue administering shocks.

Milgram’s theory was that when we align ourselves with an authority figure, we give ourselves permission to freely do what the authority tells us to because we have decided the authority figure, and not ourselves, now bears the responsibility for our actions. In support of this notion, when the experimenter used more “we” language (for example, “We must continue the study”), which suggests that they are part of a team, participants were more obedient (Laurens & Ballot, 2021). This abandonment of our moral reasoning opens us up to all sorts of cruel, callous, and irresponsible behaviors (Badhwar, 2009).​

The Psychology of the Milgram Experiment

Milgram (1974) continued his explanation by describing us as acting autonomously—directing our own actions and taking responsibility for them—and then choosing to abdicate that responsibility when we choose to act on the behalf of an authority figure. It is not that we do this for just anyone; Milgram reasoned that we must perceive the authority figure to be qualified for their role and to be willing to take responsibility for what we do.

Ethical Issues in the Milgram Experiment​

Just two years before Milgram began his experiments, the American Psychological Association (APA) updated its code of ethics, which included the expectation that researchers would “respect the integrity and protect the welfare of the person or group with whom he is working” (APA, 1959, p. 280). Milgram’s experiments generated controversy because in several key ways they did not conform to this expectation (Nicholson, 2011). Primarily, participants were not warned about how psychologically stressful they might find the experiment, and many showed obvious signs of physical discomfort while engaged in the study. Another hallmark of modern-day research is the ability to stop participating at any time; many have argued that the experimenter in Milgram’s study sent the opposite message by repeatedly insisting that the participant continue delivering shocks.
 
Additionally, Milgram’s debriefing procedures were not as thorough as many would hope; indeed, in the present day, it is hard to imagine such a study ending without a trained therapist on hand to counsel the participant. Milgram (1974) followed up with many of his participants as long as a year after the study and found that very few of them were upset about having participated; based on this evidence, he argued that the short-term distress he caused his participants was well worth it to have gained this kind of scientific knowledge.​

Milgram Experiment Results

Milgram conducted many follow-up studies in which he varied different aspects of the obedience setup. He found that at least eight different factors influenced how long participants continued delivering shocks (Haslam et al., 2014). These include how much authority the experimenter seemed to have; whether other “participants” encouraged the participant to disobey; how much physical proximity there was between the Teacher and the Learner; and the proximity between the Teacher and the experimenter. When the appearance of authority was weakened or the distance between the Teacher and experimenter was increased, obedience generally decreased. But across all of these conditions, obedience rates were very high.

Milgram Experiment & Obedience to Authority

The fact that nearly all participants delivered intense shocks does not mean that they did so without resistance (Hollander & Maynard, 2016). Most participants resisted with the justification that they would not treat others in ways they would not want to be treated, and nearly all participants resisted in some way (Miller, 2009).

Milgram Experiment Participants

Typically, participants in Milgram’s experiments were men; only one study featured female participants, and interestingly, they resisted more than the male subjects (Blass, 1999). Perhaps most intriguingly, in one version of the study, Milgram asked people to bring a friend to the study. When participants had to be the Teacher to their friend who was the Learner, very few of them were willing to see the study through (Russell, 2014).

Articles Related to the Milgram Experiment​

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to the Milgram Experiment​

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on the Milgram Experiment​

Believe it or not, rates of obedience in Milgram’s experiments, and similar experiments conducted by other researchers, have been pretty consistent over the years (Blass, 1999; Grzyb & Dolinski, 2017). It simply does not seem to be very hard to create the conditions in which we will bow to authority and do harm to others. What should we do with this information? Perhaps we should all be generally skeptical of authority and of blindly trusting people who seem like experts, especially if they ask us to do things that go against our moral codes. If nothing else, these studies show us how much power social influences can exert over our behaviors.

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