Book Reading #35: Obedience to Authority

Chapters 1-8
Summary
In chapter 1 Stanley Milgram discusses obedience and sites the Nazi experimentation as an example of obedience gone bad. He discusses the goal of the experiment (to explore adults’ willingness to obey authority and under what circumstances they do and do not obey) and discusses possible explanations for obeying and disobeying.

In chapter 2 Milgram writes about how he performed the study. He discusses  how they obtained participants, the location of the experiment, the procedure of the experiment, the learning task involved, the shock generator and instructions provided by the experimenter, the experimenter feedback, the feedback from the subject, the data they focused on and the interview and debriefing of the subject

In chapter 3 Milgram discusses the expected behavior and the predictions made by psychiatrists, college students and middle-class adults with various jobs. They predicted that nearly all subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter and that only a very small percentage would be expected to proceed to the strongest voltage.

In chapter 4 Milgram provides data and information about the effect of the proximity of the victim to the teacher (subject). In Experiment 1 the teacher got no feedback from the victim other than a pounding on the walls at 300 volts. In Experiment 2 vocal protests were used. In Experiment 3 the victim was placed in the same room as the teacher. In Experiment 4 the victim only got shocked when he put his hand on a shock plate. When the victim refused (at 150 volts) the teacher was ordered to force the victim to put his hand on the shock plate.

In chapter 5 Milgram presents the readers with information about several of the subjects. Milgram includes their observations of the subject as the experiment was performed, background information received during an interview after the experiment and information they gave in a survey months after the experiment.

In chapter 6 Milgram describes seven other experiments that he did to see how his results changed. Some of the variations in the experiments include changing the location of the experiment, trying the experiment with a new victim and experimenter, including women in the studies, using a contract, performing the study under a different name and allowing the subject to choose the shock level.

In chapter 7 Milgram provides data and information similar to what was presented in chapter 5 but about the subjects who participated in the experiments described in chapter 6. One of the subjects was from Germany, and at 210 volts she decided to stop. Milgram attributes this to her exposure to Nazi propaganda.

Chapter 8 provides information on six more experiments that Milgram performed. In these experiments he changed the position (whether the subject is giving, receiving or ordering the shock), status (whether the person is presented as an authority or ordinary man) and action (the conduct of the people in their positions) to see how his results would change.

Discussion
I had no idea Milgram performed so many experiments. He considered a lot more variables than I knew about. While I did appreciate how thorough he has been in his studies so far, it did get a little old since the results were all similar: people generally obey the authority to the point of “hurting” the learner. I also want to note that he was mainly watching for proof that we obey authority, and while I agree with the overall findings of the study, some of the stuff did start to sound bias. Going by what I’ve been taught, in many studies nowadays, they usually have researchers unrelated to the study perform it to avoid such bias, but that wasn’t an option here. On page 47 Milgram seemed almost to be forcing an answer out of a subject when he says, “He does not seem to grasp the concept. The interviewer simplifies the question. Finally the subject assigns major responsibility to the experimenter.” While I know they were trying to get the subject to discuss responsibility, I don’t know how hard they tried to lead him there.

Still, all the different experiments were interesting and well thought out. I’m curious to know how he decided which subjects to include in chapters 5 and 7.