Psych, Lies, and Audiotape: The Tarnished Legacy of the Milgram Shock Experiments

Milgram experiment

780 subjects from New Haven

Inspired by the nazi "just following orders" argument and to study if compliance could be farmed out of individuals by an authority

Book reference: Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments

Changes in criteria

Refusing four times would classify a subject as disobedient in the original run of the trials. However, later runs of the experiment relaxed this requirement and continued to pressure the subject until they relented.

The subject who played the person being shocked was later allowed to ham up the performance and make other demands of the subjects to coerce compliance

In one cycle the women were no longer subject to a limit of four "refusals" to equal a disobedience and were instead allowed to be pressured over twenty times before compliance was obtained

The forms of coersion used changed over time

At one point subjects were told they needed to obey to help Yale perform important research

Notes seem to suggest that the actual research project was to figure out how to stage an environment to elicit compliance out of people so Milgram could make his report.

The 65% compliance dropped to 15% in the trial where friends and family were made to turn on one another

Subjects were not informed that no actual shocks had been performed during the experiment debriefings

Milgram appears to have just written down what people wanted to hear at various stages of auditing and made no mention otherwise, except within his research notes and conversations with other contemporary researchers.

Ethics boards have stunted attempts to replicate the original experiments.

Replicators were not allowed to use the full voltages when attempting to induce compliance, which has made it difficult to assess subject resiliance in the same ways that Milgram didl.

Nontheless, replications showed that his studies were correct if to a less extreme degree as Milgram's claims.