Milgram Experiment

 

Stanley Milgram in 1960s conducted an experiment to prove that people behave in two ways when they are in a social situation. The first way is the autonomous state where people take responsibility of their own actions. The second way is when people obey the orders of someone in authority with the expectation that they won’t have to take the responsibility for it, Stanley termed this state as ‘agentic’ state (McLeod, 2007).

In this experiment, Stanley selected male participants between 20-50 years. These participants along with Mr. Wallace who was disguised as a participant were given the roles of ‘learner’ and ‘teacher’; such that Mr. Wallace was always the learner. The experiment was conducted in two rooms: the learner was kept in a room with the wires attached to his arm and the teacher along with an experimenter was kept in a room with the shocking machine marked with 15 volts to 450 volts. The learner was given a list of word pairs to learn. The teacher asked the learner the word and when the learner failed to give an answer, the experimenter asked the teacher to give a shock. All the participants continued the shocking till 300 volts and about two third went to 450 volts (Badhwar, 2009). Through this experiment, Milgram explained how people are ingrained with obedience to authority.