A new look at the results of a famous experiment

Who should be spared pain, injury or disappointment and who should be harmed? This inner dilemma accompanied the participants of the Milgram experiment, say experts from SWPS University. They have re-examined the causes of obedience in this famous study and shown that the physical proximity of the experimenter promotes the obedience of the subjects, while the physical proximity of the learner reduces it. The research was published in The Journal of Social Psychology.

The American social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s demonstration of the human tendency towards extreme obedience to authority was one of the most important discoveries in the field of social psychology.

The power of authority

In the early 1960s, Milgram developed an experiment that measured the willingness to obey an authority figure. Throughout the history of science, the experiment has been repeated many times on different social groups, both by Milgram himself and by other scientists.

The experiments in their original version, developed by the Americans, were stopped in the 1970s for ethical reasons. In recent years, the experiment has been repeated in a milder form, since the knowledge about human behavior gained from studies of authoritarian regimes is of great importance.

In the original version of the experiment, participants (40 people) were told that the experiment was to examine the effect of punishment on a subject’s ability to remember content. They were told that two people would participate, one acting as a teacher and the other as a learner.

The test subject was assigned the role of the teacher. The test subjects did not know that the entire experiment was staged and that the supposed learner was an actor. The test subjects’ task was to give the learner an electric shock every time he or she made a mistake in the learning process.

The experimenter instructed the experimenter to administer successively stronger electric shocks to the student each time he gave an incorrect answer. When the shock was administered, the students made specific sounds that indicated the pain they were feeling.

Most of the subjects (more than 60%, depending on the test variant) followed all of the experimenter’s instructions and finally pressed the 450 V button, the highest setting of the electric shock generator.

Where does obedience come from?

“Milgram offered a simple and telling explanation for these results. He suggested that the participants took on the role of people subordinate to the experimenter and did not feel fully responsible for their actions. Although they experienced strong stress and tension, they were aware of the fact that they were causing serious harm to another person, unable to escape the situation and refusing to continue the experiment,” said Professor Dariusz Doliński, a psychologist at SWPS University.

For many years, scientists have been looking for other mechanisms that could explain the obedience of the participants in the famous experiment. Researchers from SWPS University, Professors Dariusz Doliński and Tomasz Grzyb, proposed a research-backed theoretical model that should shed new light on the reasons for the behavior of the subjects in the Milgram experiment.

“Our approach is based on the assumption that one must take into account, on the one hand, the participant’s relationship with the experimenter and, on the other hand, his relationship with the learner. Participants are in a state of classic avoidance conflict, when we are faced with two undesirable incentives and are forced to make a choice. The conflict is of such a nature that none of the choices is obvious and none is better than the other,” says Professor Tomasz Grzyb, a psychologist at SWPS University.

A tragic conflict in a classic experiment

On the one hand, the participants in Milgram’s experiments did not want to harm the learners, which was reflected in their extreme stress, their hesitation before pressing successive buttons and their questioning of whether they really had to do so.

On the other hand, they did not want to harm the experimenter who, according to their knowledge, had prepared the studies, hoped to collect interesting data and had invested time in conducting the experiment. In addition, the participants received money from the experimenter for participating in the study immediately after arriving at the laboratory, which could strongly motivate them to return the favor.

“So the participant had to resolve this conflict somehow. If he decided not to harm the learner, he would harm the experimenter, and if he decided not to harm the experimenter, he would have to harm the learner,” says Professor Dariusz Doliński.

The researchers assumed that the relationship between the subject and the learner, as well as between the subject and the experimenter, was significantly influenced by the staging of the experiment, which varied depending on the variant. A situation in which the experimenter and the subject are in the same room and the learner is in another room promotes obedience.

Proximity promotes empathy

Analysis of different versions of the Milgram experiment and other studies on the role of physical distance in responding to the suffering of others confirms this assumption. They have shown, among other things, that the parts of the brain responsible for experiencing empathy (especially the anterior cingulate cortex) become more active when the physical distance between the participant and the person in distress is smaller.

To confirm the model pointing to the importance of staging in the Milgram experiment, researchers at SWPS University decided to conduct their own study.

“Milgram did not conduct his research under conditions where the participant was placed in one room with the learner while the experimenter remained in another room. Such conditions are crucial from the perspective of our proposed model, because participants’ obedience should be the lowest under these circumstances,” said Professor Tomasz Grzyb.

“Second, the Milgram experiments discussed here involved only male participants. Finally, Milgram conducted separate experiments at different times and then compared their results. Our intention was to conduct a single experiment in which we could manipulate factors related to its spatial organization.”

The proposed study could also clarify whether the differences in subjects’ obedience observed in the various Milgram experiments were actually a result of physical distance or were due to other differences between the conditions created.

Proximity to authority promotes obedience

In the study by Professors Dariusz Doliński and Tomasz Grzyb, participants (160 people in total) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions. In each condition, 20 women and 20 men were studied. For ethical reasons, the researchers used the obedience-lite procedure, in which the experiment is stopped if the participant obeys the tenth command of the experimenter, that is, presses the button marked 150 V.

In the first condition, the participant (teacher) and the experimenter who gave them instructions were in the same room, while the supposed learner sat behind a wall. In the second condition, all three people were in the same room, and in the third condition, each of them was in a different room. In the fourth condition, the participant and the learner were in the same room, while the experimenter sat in an adjacent room.

In the two conditions in which the experimenter was in the same room as the study participant, 69 of 80 people followed all of the experimenter’s instructions. In the conditions in which the experimenter was absent, 59 of 80 people were completely obedient.

In conditions where the learner was in the same room as the study participant, 57 out of 80 people followed all of the experimenter’s instructions. In conditions where the learner was absent, 70 out of 80 people were completely obedient.

The level of obedience was highest in the group in which the participant was in the same room as the experimenter and the putative learner was in a different room. It reached a value of over 9.8 on a 10-point scale, which meant that all instructions from the experimenter were followed.

“Our experiment has shown that the presumed avoidance-avoidance conflict is more often resolved in a way that avoids injury to the learner when the learner is physically present (i.e., in the same room as the participant). This is especially true when at the same time the experimenter is not physically present,” said Professor Dariusz Doliński.

“The results we obtained suggest the importance of considering the distances between participant and learner on the one hand and between participant and experimenter on the other simultaneously. This approach sheds light on the interconnected nature of these distances and highlights their collective impact on the behavior of participants in Milgram’s experiments.”

The researchers emphasize that although the reactions of Milgram’s subjects were influenced by various situational and personality factors, the model they propose, together with empirical verification, represents another important step toward expanding our knowledge of one of the most fascinating phenomena in social psychology: obedience to authority.

Provided by SWPS University