Page 61 - The Social Animal

Conformity 43

the experimenter instructs the teacher to increase the voltage and de-
liver the next shock by throwing the next switch.
The participants in this experiment were a random sample of
businessmen, professional men, white-collar workers, and blue-col-
lar workers. What percentage of these people continued to adminis-
ter shocks to the very end of the experiment? How long would you
have continued? Every year in my social psychology class, I pose
these questions, and every year some 99 percent of the 240 students
in the class indicate that they would not continue to administer
shocks after the learner began to pound on the wall. The guesses
made by my students are consistent with the results of Milgram’s sur-
vey of 40 psychiatrists at a leading medical school. The psychiatrists
predicted that most participants would quit at 150 volts, when the
victim first asks to be freed. They also predicted that only about 4
percent of the participants would continue to shock the victim after
he refused to respond (at 300 volts), and that less than 1 percent
would administer the highest shock on the generator.
How do people respond when they are actually in the situation?
Milgram found, in the typical study described above, that the great
majority of participants—some 67 percent—continued to adminis-
ter shocks to the very end of the experiment, although some of them
required a degree of prodding from the experimenter. The obedient
individuals did not continue administering shocks because they were
particularly sadistic or cruel people. Indeed, when Milgram and Alan
Elms compared participants’ scores on a series of standardized per-
sonality tests, they discovered no differences between individuals
who were fully obedient and those who successfully resisted the pres-
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sure to obey. Nor were obedient people insensitive to the apparent
plight of the victim. Some protested; many sweated, trembled, stut-
tered, and showed other signs of tension. Some burst out in fits of
nervous laughter. But they continued to obey to the very end.
This behavior is not limited to American men living in Con-
necticut. Wherever the Milgram procedure has been tried, it has pro-
duced a significant degree of obedience. For example, several
replications of the experiment have demonstrated that people in
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Australia, Jordan, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands react in
much the same way as the people in Milgram’s original experiment.
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Similarly, women are just as obedient as men. And a replication of
the basic Milgram procedure conducted in 2007 by Jerry Burger