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Milgram's Obedience to Authority: Its Origins, Controversies, and Replications

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H Perlstadt Obedience to Authority: Origins Controversies Theoretical & Applied Ethics 2013, 2(2), 53-77

Milgram's Obedience to Authority:

Its Origins, Controversies, and Replications

Harry Perlstadt
Michigan State University

Theoretical & Applied Ethics 2013, 2(2), 53-77

ABSTRACT
Milgram's study of obedience to authority has been the center of a debate over research
ethics in the social and behavioral sciences since it was first published fifty years ago.
Most learn about the study and its ethical problems through required tutorials for the
responsible conduct of research. But these tutorials do not describe the origins of the
study and the subsequent controversy surrounding it. This paper presents a detailed
historical account of both. Written from a social behavioral science rather than a
philosophical perspective, the paper will shed a different light on both Milgram and his
chief critic Baumrind.For example, Milgram attempted tof ollow the somewhat
ambiguous 1953 APA ethical standards and Baumrind realized that revising research
ethics was a normative process. Replications include a 1966 study that involved hospital
nurses following doctors' order to administer a drug and a 2009 truncated replication that
was carried out with IRB approval. A real-world incident took place at a McDonald's in
2004 in which a supervisor followed the orders of someone claiming to be a policeman
investigating a stolen purse. Future research should explore how this type of behavior
occurs and how a person can act altruistically to prevent bullying and hazing.

Contact:
Harry Perlstadt
Department of Sociology
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824 USA
Email perlstad@msu.edu

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Introduction

Obedience to Authority (Milgram, 1974) is a landmark study that deserves careful

reconsideration from a historical and ethical perspective. Stanley Milgram (1963) first published

his findings in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, reporting that 65 percent of

naive participants were persuaded to administer increasingly painful electrical shocks up to and

including a lethal dose to a person after that person gave incorrect answers in a memory learning

study. The next year the American Psychologist, the official journal of the American

Psychological Association published a critique by Diana Baumrind (1964) and Milgram's

(1964a) rebuttal. This ignited a controversy over research methods and ethics, specifically the

deception of participants (Elms, 1982; Clarke, 1999). Many institutional review boards ( IRBs)

require researchers and students to take tutorials on human research protections that include

Milgram's experiment as a negative exemplar of social science research.

The tutorials summarize a study in two or three paragraphs and then identify one or two

key ethical criteria which the study failed to meet. This is a form of casuistry or argument by

cases to identify an ethical, moral, or legal problem and then judge it against similar cases.

Herrera (2001) has expressed misgivings about the way IRBs perceive and possibly apply the

Milgram experiment and has called for a more in-depth analysis of issues raised beyond

deception, given that empirical research on Milgram's experiment found no significant harmful

effects of deception (Fisher & Fryberg, 1994; Korn, 1997). But as Lindemann Nelson (2004)

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pointed out, this narrative approach to ethics often fails to raise more complex issues that should

be examined, and while the summary may be true, it may not be full or accurate. Chambers

(1999) went further, arguing that moral narratives be considered as fictions, like Aesop's Fables,

which are told in such a way as to persuade the audience to take a specific position or learn a

preferred lesson.

Moral entrepreneurship is the business of persuading society to make policy from a

particular moral position and then enforcing it. Becker (1963) argued that some moral

entrepreneurs crusade for a rule that would right what they perceive to be a social evil, but once

the new rules are in place, other moral entrepreneurs selectively enforce some or all of the rules

and identify outsiders and deviants. This suggests that moral entrepreneurs, including those who

write about violations of research ethics, exercise a fair amount of discretion.

Sumner (1906) held that proper ways of acting start as folkways and some evolve into

customs. With the addition of a philosophy of welfare specifying right and wrong behaviors for

both the individual and society, customs are transformed into social mores. Over time, social

mores are often codified and some are enacted into law. Milgram and Baumrind were

protagonists sparking a transition within psychology and behavioral science from customary

research practices to research codes of ethics. To some degree, examining the origins and

controversies surrounding the Milgram experiment in a social and historical context implies

ethical relativism that values and standards change over time. In this paper I attempt to present a

more comprehensive account or narrative concerning the controversy and enable us to better

understand Milgram’s actions and impact on social scientific research ethics. I will leave the

debate over the merits of ethical relativism to others.

Project Design, Funding, and Approval

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The study began in the fall of 1960 as a project in Milgram's “Psychology of Small Groups”

class at Yale (Blass, 2004, pp. 67ff). He wanted them to have some hands-on experience in a

social psychology laboratory with a one-way mirror that allowed others to observe the

interactions. The class developed several possible experiments, and the students voted to do what

would become the pilot for the obedience to authority study. Twenty Yale undergraduates

served as subjects for the class experiment, which was conducted in five different sessions in late

November and early December 1960. The class experiment revealed that the student participants

readily accepted the reality of the situation. They believed they were giving extremely painful

electric shocks to another person, but they refused to receive a sample shock. The student

participants would obey commands, even when these went against accepted standards of

behavior. They exhibited signs of nervousness and anxiety―one pulled on his hair, another

wiped his sweating palms and shook his head in dismay as he administered the shock. Milgram

observed that during the class experiment the student participants were often reluctant to look at

the Learner and turned their head to avoid seeing the painful consequences of their actions

(Blass, 2004, p. 93).

Milgram used the class experiment as the basis for an application to the National Science

Foundation (NSF) that he submitted in early 1961. Milgram knew from the class project that

participants experienced sufficient tension and stress and he therefore included a special section

in the proposal on “Responsibility to Participants” approximately ten years before the US

Department of Health, Education, and Welfare issued guidelines in 1971 that were codified into

Federal Regulations 45 CFR 46 in 1974. In order to ensure the well-being of the research

participant before leaving the laboratory, Milgram planned to make every effort to set the

participant at ease by debriefing them after the experiment (Blass, 2004, pp. 70–71).

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The NSF grant proposal included a description of the pilot research and its findings,

accompanied by photographs depicting some of the participants' behavior (Blass, 2004, p. 69).

Out of concern for the research participants, the NSF decided to make a site visit, which was not

always a part of the grant review process (Blass, 2004, p. 71). In April 1961 a site visit team of

three, consisting of Henry Riecken (head of the NSF Office of Social Sciences, and co-author of

When Prophecy Fails (Festinger, Riecken and Schacter, 1956), social psychologist Richard

Christie, co-editor of Studies in the Scope and Method of the Authoritarian Personality (Christie

& Jahoda, 1954), and sociologist James Coleman, co-author of Union Democracy (Lipset, Trow

& Coleman, 1956), met with Milgram and others at Yale. Milgram was able to convince the

committee that he would adequately debrief the participants and make sure they were

comfortable with the decisions they had made and the actions they had taken during the

experiment. Yale's general counsel assured the committee that Yale would be legally responsible

for any negative effects the participants might suffer. In essence, the proposal underwent the

equivalent of a human subjects review and was approved by the university's legal counsel.

Although later vilified, Milgram was ahead of this time, preceding both the Declaration

of Helsinki in 1964, which called for a clearly formulated review of proposed biomedical

research by an independent research ethics committee, and the 1966 statement by US surgeon

general William Stewart, which required prior review by institutional associates to ensure an

independent determination of the protection of the rights and welfare of the participants in order

to receive a Public Health Service (PHS) grant. In his statement, Stewart specifically included the

behavioral and social sciences, although no mention was made of Milgram's experiment,

possibly because it was funded by the NSF and not the PHS.

The NSF review committee commented on the scientific content of the proposal, writing

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that it was clear that Milgram neither has, nor plans to have, an elaborate a priori theory. This

lack of theory would form the basis for the Journal of Personality to reject the manuscript. Its

editor, Edward E. Jones, dismissed the whole study as "a kind of triumph of social engineering"

(Blass, 2004, p. 114). It appears that Milgram was more interested in documenting what happens

and how often it happens rather than using theory and previous studies to explain why it happens.

For Milgram, "obedience was an obvious and observable social fact that is a direct, ubiquitous

and indispensable feature of social life" (1963, p. 372). It did not require a lot of theory or an

extensive literature review. In a few sentences Milgram quickly cites a series of relevant studies

by, among others, Weber, Binet, and Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Stanford without

bothering to comment on them. For example, Weber's (1947) legal-rational authority rests in a

particular office or role that allows an individual to give certain orders and expect a high

probability of having them carried out. Weber's assumption that obedience is probabilistic could

provide a theoretical underpinning for Milgram's findings.

Binet's experiment on memory is mentioned by Durkheim (1925/ 1961, p 864) in a

lecture on the learning of discipline. Binet and Henri (1894) briefly showed 150 French

schoolchildren of different ages a straight line on a blackboard. In the first or memory condition

they covered the blackboard and presented a second blackboard containing that line mixed in

with others of different lengths and asked the child to identify the line from the first blackboard.

In the second or direct comparison condition, the first blackboard was left uncovered and the

child could look at both when making his decision. When the child believed he had found the

designated line, the experimenter asked in a soft and quiet tone, without raising his voice,

without making gestures, and without insisting, "Are you really sure? Is it not the next line?"

This simple suggestion induced most grammar school and middle grade children (89

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percent and 80 percent) and more than half (54 percent) of superior grade children to change

their answer in the memory condition, while in the direct comparison condition about three-

fourths of the elementary and middle grade children (74 percent and 73 percent) but just less

than half (48 percent) of the upper grade children changed theirs. In what appears to be a

straightforward adaptation from the Binet and Henri study, Milgram told his subjects "to please

continue," and "the experiment requires you to continue," when they wanted to quit.

Finally, Milgram cites The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950) but does not

discuss several key concepts and findings that relate to his experiments. The study, sponsored by

the American Jewish Committee to explore fascism and anti-Semitism, found that authoritarians

disliked weakness of any kind and tended to believe in strict discipline. This was thought to

result from early childhood socialization characterized by hierarchical parent-child relationships.

Milgram assumed the reader knew the link between The Authoritarian Personality study and the

Holocaust, and the conclusion that authoritarian personalities submit to higher authority while

expecting obedience from their subordinates.

Milgram's research was funded and he conducted twenty-four experimental conditions

(Perry, 2013, p 304-310). Most involved the proximity between the teacher (naive subject) and

Learner (a research confederate), the relationship between the teacher and the experimenter

(authority figure), or group dynamics with a naive teacher/subject and one or more teacher

confederates. A forty-seven-year-old "mild-mannered and likable" accountant was trained to play

the role of Learner (Milgram, 1974). Unlike the class project, the participants in the study were

recruited from the general adult population via ads in local newspapers that read, "We Will Pay

You $4.00 for One Hour of Your Time. Persons Needed for a Study of Memory" (Slater, 2004).

The original set of participants was recruited from the New Haven area with the

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experiments taking place on the Yale University campus. Subjects were between the ages of

twenty and fifty, and high school and college students were not recruited. Later, a second set of

participants was recruited from the Bridgeport area with the experiment taking place in a

rundown office building in the downtown shopping district rather than on the Yale campus.

The mechanism for administering the shocks had thirty levels or settings ranging from 15

volts marked slight shock to 450 volts marked XXX. Milgram devised a set of four "prods" that

the experimenter gave to participants who asked whether they should continue to administer

shocks: (1) "please continue," (2) "the experiment requires you to continue," (3) "it is absolutely

essential that you continue," and (4) "you have no other choice, you must go on" (Milgram, 1974,

p. 21). These prods were made in sequence, and if the participant refused to obey after prod 4,

the experiment was terminated.

Milgram (1974, p. 194-195) claimed he designed a careful post-experimental debriefing

that all participants received. They were told that the Learner had not, in fact, received dangerous

electric shocks, and all had a friendly reconciliation with the unharmed Learner. Milgram held

extended discussions with the participants, but the content of the debriefings, or dehoaxing as he

termed it, differed according to the participant's behavior. Obedient participants were assured

that their behavior was entirely normal and that their feelings of conflict or tension were shared

by other participants. In his debriefings with defiant participants who refused to continue to

administer shocks, Milgram supported their decision to disobey the experimenter.

Harris (1988, pp195-197) and Perry (2013, p78) noted that Milgram was following the

APA 1953 Ethical Standards of Psychologists. Harris wrote that after the Baumrind / Milgram

exchange, psychologists formed sides on whether deception was to be avoided or could be used

if it did no lasting harm to subjects. In order to understand the controversy that arose, it is

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important to see exactly what the APA said about ethical standards in research:

Principle 4.31-1. Only when a problem is significant and can be investigated in no other
way is the psychologist justified in exposing research subjects to emotional stress. He
must seriously consider the possible harmful after-effects and should be prepared to
remove them as soon as permitted by the design of the experiment. Where the danger of
serious after-effects exists, research should be conducted only when the subjects or their
responsible agents are fully informed of this possibility and volunteer nevertheless.

Principle 4.31-2. The psychologist is justified in withholding information from or giving

misinformation to research subjects only when in his judgment this is clearly required by
his research problem and when the provisions of the above principle regarding the
protection of subjects are adhered to. (APA, 1953, p 122).

In Harris’ view, the 1953APA standards did not recommend the routine revealing of

deception to subjects. Harris (1988, p195) pointed out that in 1963 Milgram was one of the few

who described his efforts to mitigate possible harmful after-effects in his section on “Interview

and Dehoaxing.” and that Milgram (1964b) was the first to use the term debrief in a published

psychology paper when he replaced dehoaxing with debriefing. Previously debriefing was a

military term for interrogating pilots after their bombing missions.

Perry concluded from her examination of Milgram’s research files at Yale and interviews

with former participants and Milgram’s students nearly fifty years later that he did not explicitly

inform them during the debriefing that no shocks were ever administered. She suspected that

Milgram did not end the deception during the debriefings because he did not want potential

subjects to hear about the real purpose of the research until all trials were completed. Subjects

first learned the whole truth when they received a written report and a ten-item follow up

questionnaire from Milgram in July 1962

Initial Publication and Public Reaction

The findings were and still are highly controversial. Milgram first submitted a paper on

Experiment 1 in December 1961 to the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. It was

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summarily rejected, but in July 1962 the journal changed its mind and accepted the paper for

publication. The article, "Behavioral Study of Obedience," would appear fifteen months later, in

October 1963. Within days of publication (see Blass, 2004, p. 21), the study was reported in the

New York Times (26 October 1963) and newspapers around the world, culminating in a scathing

editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (2 November 1963). The editorial chastised both

Milgram and Yale University, included a vivid description of the suffering among participants,

and concluded that the experiment was nothing but "open-eyed torture" (Blass, 2004, p. 212). On

16 November 1963 the Post-Dispatch published Milgram's rebuttal letter, and he was on the

defensive from then on.

Milgram's (1963) initial publication reported only on Experiment 1, involving the remote

condition in which the Learner was in an adjacent room and the subjects received no feedback

from the Learner until the Learner pounded on the wall at 300 volts. At that point five

teacher/subjects refused to administer further shocks. After that the Learner did not respond to

the questions or make any other attempt to communicate with the teacher/subject. Overall,

twenty-six (65.0 percent) of the participants in Experiment 1 obeyed the orders to the end and

administered all thirty shocks, including the one marked "XXX" at 450 volts.

Milgram published other articles on the experiments (1964b, 1964c, 1965a, 1965b), and

produced a film Obedience (1965c). The first comprehensive account of eighteen of the twenty-

four experimental conditions was finally published ten years later in 1974 as Obedience to

Authority: An Experimental View. In addition to the remote condition, Milgram brought the

Learner psychologically and physically closer to the teacher. In Experiment 2, the voice

feedback condition, the Learner was in the adjacent room but the teacher heard prerecorded

complaints that increased as the voltage increased. Under this condition, 62.5 percent

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administered all thirty shocks, compared to the 65 percent in the remote condition. In Experiment

3, the proximity condition, the Learner was seated a few feet away from the teacher, who could

both hear and observe the Learner's reactions to the shocks. Now only 40.0 percent administered

all thirty shocks. Finally, in Experiment 4, the touch-proximity condition, the Learner sat near

the teacher and would only receive a shock when his hand rested on the shock plate. Beginning

at the 150-volt level (the tenth shock), the experimenter would order the teacher to physically

force the Learner's hand on the plate. In this condition almost a third (30.0 percent) administered

all the shocks.

Milgram carried out additional trials to discover under what conditions subjects would

defy or deceive the experimenter. In Experiment 7, closeness of authority, in which the

experimenter gave his orders by telephone rather than face to face, several participants

administered lower shocks than were required and either never informed the experimenter or

specifically assured the experimenter that they were raising the shock level when in reality they

repeatedly used the lowest shock on the board. In Experiment 11, participants were free to

administer any shock level for any wrong answer. All but two participants administered shocks

at or below level 10 at 120 volts. One participant went to level 25 at 375 volts, and one

administered the maximum level 30 at 450 volts. Milgram argued that this condition

demonstrated that what leads to shocking the Learner at the highest level is not the result of

autonomously generated aggression but rather the transformation of behavior that comes about

through obedience to orders (Milgram, 1974, p. 72).

In July 1963, six weeks after the end of the experiment, Milgram sent 856 participants a

detailed five-page report on the experiment, including its procedures, its rationale, some of the

main findings, and the causes of the tension they may have experienced. He also sent a ten-item

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multiple-choice questionnaire asking them to reflect back on their experiences (Milgram, 1974,

p. 195, Blass, 2004, p. 124-126). With two follow-ups he achieved a 92 percent return rate for

the mailed survey. The survey revealed that 83.7 percent endorsed the statement that they were

very glad or glad to have been in the experiments, while only 1.3 percent were sorry or very

sorry. Overall, about 64 percent of 653 participants reported not being bothered at all, 30 percent

reported being bothered a little, and 7 percent reported being bothered quite a bit.

Milgram (1974, p. 172) found one significant difference between participants who were

defiant and those who had complied and continued to administer shocks. A little less than half (

47.9 percent) of the obedient participants claimed that during the experiment they fully believed

the Learner was getting painful shocks, compared with almost two-thirds (62.5 percent) of the

defiant participants who may have more honestly acknowledged their concerns about inflicting

pain during the experiment (Milgram, 1974 p. 172).

Baumrind's Critique
In their tutorial module on History & Ethics, Bankert, Cohen, Cooper, Davis, and Hicks (2009)

identified the key ethical problems in the Milgram experiment as unanticipated psychological

harms that resulted from their participation and the deception of subjects. Subjects could have

suffered harm during the actual conduct of the experiment and/or experienced short- or long-

term harm as a result of their participation. A Harvard (2002) tutorial mentioned that some

thought the participants had been harmed, if not through the stress of the experiment itself, then

through the "inflicted insight" into their own personalities. The IRB Member Handbook (Amdur,

2003) similarly claimed that many of the participants experienced extreme psychological distress

after understanding the level of cruelty of their actions, and the CITI tutorial (Bankert et al., 2009)

stated that after being "debriefed" some of the subjects experienced serious emotional crises.

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Finally, Cave and Holm (2003) asserted that a harm is a harm and that any harm, however

temporary, still needs to be justified. In addition, they pointed out that Milgram's participants

were deceived and did not consent to being harmed.

These statements directly or indirectly reflect the arguments of Baumrind (1964) in her

critique titled "Some Thoughts on Ethics of Research: After Reading Milgram's 'Behavioral

Study of Obedience.'" From her opening paragraphs it is clear that Baumrind, a clinical and

developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, had a strong moral

compass and was ahead of the curve on research ethics. Published the same month that the

World Medical Assembly approved the Declaration of Helsinki, which established ethical

principles for biomedical research for the international medical profession, Baumrind (1964, p.

421) wrote that in psychological research the experimenter is often required to balance his or her

career and scientific interests against the interests of his or her prospective subjects. The

experimenter is to do the least possible harm to the subjects, but if the experimental conditions

cause the subjects pain or loss of dignity or offer the subject nothing of value, then the

experimenter must consider the reasons why the subject volunteered including the possibility that

subjects often participate unwilling in experiments in order to satisfy a course requirement.

Here Baumrind is expanding on the 1953 APA ethical standards which only called for the

researcher to removed harmful after-effects as soon as permitted by the experimental design.

She is concerned with the motivation for participating in such experiments including coercion of

students in a class. Except for the pilot study, none of Milgram’s subjects were high school or

college students.

Two years later, Baumrind (1966) would publish "Effects of Authorative Parental

Control on Child Behavior." She had observed thirty-two white middle-class preschoolers and

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identified three parenting styles based on measures of parental responsiveness (fulfilling needs)

and demandingness (behavioral control). Permissive parents were high on responsiveness and

low on demandingness. Permissive parenting was based on Freudian theory and popularized by

Benjamin Spock (1946) in The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. Authoritative

parents, whom she favored, were high on both responsiveness and demandingness. They attempt

to direct the child's activity, but in a rational manner, sharing the reasons for rules but soliciting

objections when the child refuses to conform.

In contrast, authoritarian child-rearing practices featured low responsiveness and high

demandingness. Most communication was from parent to child, with low child-to-parent

communication. Children raised by authoritarian parents were obedient, conformist, and norm

abiding. Authoritarian parenting was linked to the behaviorist school of J. B. Watson (1928),

who dedicated his book Psychological Care of Infant and Child to "the first mother who brings

up a happy child." Watson had previously conducted the infamous "Little Albert" experiments in

which he conditioned an eleven-month-old boy to fear a white laboratory rat that he had been

playing with by repeatedly making a loud banging sound when the rat was subsequently given to

the boy.

Baumrind argued that Milgram's subjects were put through an emotionally disturbing

experience, that the experiment could affect an alteration in their self-image or ability to trust

adult authorities in the future, and that his subjects were entrapped by a trusted individual into

committing acts that they would consider unworthy (Baumrind, 1964, p. 422; Blass, 2004, pp.

123–124). During Experiments 1 through 4, Milgram asked participants during the debriefing

how nervous or tense they felt at the point of maximum tension on a fourteen-point scale. More

than 75 percent of 137 participants reported they felt moderately or extremely tense and nervous

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(Milgram, 1974, pp. 41–42). His 1963 follow-up questionnaire asked whether during the

experiment participants were extremely upset, somewhat nervous, relatively calm, or completely

calm. Several months after the experiment, only 10 percent of 658 participants recalled being

extremely upset, and 50 percent somewhat nervous.

Based on Milgram's slides and film, one can readily accept Baumrind's arguments that

during the experiment the participants experienced stress ranging from moderate to high and that

they found themselves in a social situation in which they were encouraged by the experimenter

to commit acts to which they would normally object. But, Alan Elms (1972, 150–51), who

assisted Milgram and interviewed a substantial sample of the participants after the conclusion of

the experiment, noted that her comments about ability to trust adults in the future suggested she

viewed the subjects as children or minors whereas all of Milgram's subject were competent male

adults between twenty and fifty years of age.

Further, she asserted that their self-image could be altered as a result of participating in

the experiment and that the subject's personal responsibility for his or her actions is not erased

because the experimenter reveals to him or her the means which he used to stimulate these

actions. Milgram (1964a p. 849) did not cite the APA 1953 standards but claimed that the

debriefing and assessment procedures were carried out as a matter of course and not in response

to any observation of special risk. He also summarized the post-experiment self-report survey,

the validity of which Baumrind (1985) questioned, calling for behavioral evidence to determine

the psychological impact of the experimental conditions.

Taking on the role of moral entrepreneur, Baumrind worked behind the scenes

developing and presenting her argument against deception and other ethical issues at meetings,

and, after serving as a resource person to the APA drafting committee, publishing two pieces

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criticizing the proposed revisions (Baumrind, 1971, 1972). She believed that the experimenter

should be morally obliged to bring his or her behavior into conformity with clearly stated

principles of conduct, but acknowledged that the diversity of opinions within the APA made it

impossible to issue a definitive statement of normative ethics. She knew of no ethical system that

condones deceit, lie telling, and breaking of contracts, and asserted that deceptive instructions

prevent informed consent. The APA revised its ethical principles in 1973.

Milgram’s Obedience to Authority was published in 1974, the same year that Congress

passed the National Research Act in response to a series of revelations about unethical

biomedical and behavioral research in the US. This culminated in July 1972 when an Associate

Press story reported on the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment in which rural African American men

who had previously contracted syphilis were followed for forty years, but were never told they

had syphilis and never received proper treatment. The Act created the National Commission for

the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research to identify basic

ethical principles and to develop guidelines for the conduct of biomedical and behavioral

research. The Commission asked experts and specialists to submit background papers that would

help it explore and understand the issues before it. Baumrind (1978) wrote one of four papers on

informed consent which was published in an Appendix to the Commission’s Belmont Report.

In her background paper she presented her case against the use of deception in the social

behavioral research. She mentioned Milgram several times but at one point descended into what

borders on an ad hominem argument.

In the practice of their profession, these scientists use deceitful practices openly, publish
their procedures without apology and indeed with prideful exhibition of ingenuity (e.g.,
Milgram, 1963), teach their students to copy their example and reward them when they
do, and vigorously defend their procedures when attacked. (Baumrind, 1978, p. 23-10).

She reinforced her position by citing Ring, Wallston and Corey (1970), who conducted a

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study on deception and debriefing after a Milgram-type obedience experiment. Ninety-two

percent of 57 female psychology college students were completely obedient in a Milgram remote

condition in which they administered auditory stimuli to an unseen confederate. In their

discussion section, Ring et al, (1970) claimed that many of the compliant subjects reported they

might experience difficulty in trusting adult authorities in the future. But Baumrind failed to

mention that none of the obedient subjects who were informed of the deception during a

debriefing resented having been deceived or thought it involved anything unethical or should be

discontinued. Just like Milgram’s subjects, properly debriefed subjects in the Ring et al

experiment were upset by the procedure itself but valued the experiment and their participation

in it. However, one negative finding was that about half of the twenty subjects interviewed said

in the future they would be more suspicious of psychological experiments.

It was the Belmont Report's (1979) principle of respect for person and the subsequent

requirements for education of both investigators and IRB members in research ethics that turned

the spotlight on, among other things, informed consent and deception, and made the Milgram

experiment an exemplar of unethical research.

Milgram's Rebuttal and Assessment of Harm

The Code of Federal Regulations (45 CFR 46.102(i)) known as the Common Rule governing

human research protections defines minimal risk as “the probability and magnitude of harm or

discomfort anticipated in the research that are not greater in and of themselves than those

ordinarily encountered in daily life” (DHHS, 2009). In an excerpt from a debriefing interview,

one of Milgram’s male participants who had recently been discharged from the US Army was, in

his own words, “really sweating bullets,” and “hysterically laughing.” He described himself as

“an emotional wreck,” and “a basket case” during the experiment. After he left the lab he

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H Perlstadt Obedience to Authority: Origins Controversies Theoretical & Applied Ethics 2013, 2(2), 53-77

realized that somebody could get me to do that stuff (Blass, 2004, p. 114-115).

In his rebuttal published five months after Baumrind's critique, Milgram argued:

It is true that after a reasonable number of subjects had been exposed to the procedures, it
became evident that some would go to the end of the shock board, and some would
experience stress. That point, it seems to me, is the first legitimate juncture at which one
could even start to wonder whether or not to abandon the study. But momentary
excitement is not the same as harm. As the experiment progressed there was no indication
of injurious effects in the subjects; and as the subjects themselves strongly endorsed the
experiment, the judgment I made was to continue the investigation. (1964a, p. 849)

Milgram's use of the phrase "momentary excitement" appears to understate what might better be

called a deeply distressing experience, as some participants sought to break off the experiment

but were persuaded to continue. Milgram also claimed that "relatively few participants

experienced greater tension than a nail-biting patron at a good Hitchcock thriller" (Blass, 2004,

p. 115). Without mentioning Milgram, Baumrind (1971) noted that investigators are

insufficiently sensitive to subtle ethical and psychological consequences and thus unknowingly

inflict harm. Perhaps Milgram's labeling the stress he observed as “momentary excitement” or

viewing a psychological thriller is an example of self deception.

Milgram challenged Baumrind's contention that after the experiment, the subject cannot

justify his behavior and must bear the full brunt of his actions. Without citing The Authoritarian

Personality, he argued that the same mechanism that allowed the subject to obey and continue to

administer the shocks would carry over and allow him to rationalize his actions afterward. The

subject simply obeyed the person in authority. Further, he thought that the people who hear of

the experiment and find the idea of shocking the victim to be repugnant will say "people will not

do it," and that "if they do it, they will not be able to live with themselves afterwards" (Milgram,

1964a, p 850). But he overlooked the possibility that, like his subject who had been recently

discharged from the army, people who learn about the experiment for the first time might realize

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H Perlstadt Obedience to Authority: Origins Controversies Theoretical & Applied Ethics 2013, 2(2), 53-77

that "somebody could get me to do that stuff."

While a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the mid-1960s, I attended a

presentation by Milgram in which he showed slides of his experiment. It was obvious that

several of the subjects were under high stress, but he also had a slide showing the teacher and

Learner in a friendly pose after the experiment. What astonished me were the highly emotional

displays of moral indignation by several people in the audience during the question-and-answer

session. I interpreted this as an overidentification with the passively obedient subject who

willingly continued to administer shocks. They realized that if they were subjects, they too might

have willingly obeyed.

Fred Strodtbeck (1973), who was the lead social psychologist in the 1954 Wichita Jury

Study where real juries were audiotaped without their knowledge, thought that the subjects in

Milgram's remote condition, in which the Learner was in an adjacent room and only objected

once by pounding on the wall, were in a situation similar to bomber pilots who are far removed

from their targets which could include civilian populations. Strodtbeck believed that while

Milgram's experiments could discover ways in which a person can resist authority on behalf of a

victim, it nevertheless revealed a capacity for evil in the subjects. It is this fear of the evil within

us that we do not want to confront which triggers the strong emotional reactions to Milgram

personally as well as to his research.

Baumrind also mentioned evil. In her critique of the proposed drafts by the APA

committee on ethical standards, she presented her own principles of ethical conduct in the

treatment of subjects. Her second principle is “Although for everything there is a season and a

time for every purpose under heaven, for a given season and time an action can be judged as

evil,” and she continues “…There is a time and place for deceit, inflicting pain, and putting other

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H Perlstadt Obedience to Authority: Origins Controversies Theoretical & Applied Ethics 2013, 2(2), 53-77

people down. But the psychologist's laboratory is not the place, and this is certainly not the

time,” (Baumrind 1971, p 890). Without ever mentioning Milgram, she moved on to her third

principle: “Scientific ends, however laudable these may be, do not by themselves justify the use

of means that in ordinary transactions would be regarded as reprehensible,” (Baumrind 1971, p

890).

Or, as philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1982, p. 178) put it, “moral harm is inflicted on

someone when some course of action produces in that person a greater propensity to commit

wrong.” He also thought that if one classified a social scientific experiment as involving the

doing of a wrong to someone, then one could argue that this experiment ought not to be done.

Obeying Outside the Laboratory

Baumrind (1964, 1978) believed that obedience could not be meaningfully studied in a

laboratory setting, because, first, the subject is prone to behave in an obedient manner and follow

experimenter suggestions, and second, that the baseline for such behavior is probably higher in

the laboratory than in most other settings. In his rebuttal, Milgram (1964a) thought that the real

task is to learn more about the general problem of destructive behavior and that such inquiry will

stimulate insight and yield knowledge that can be applied to a variety of situations.

Milgram had the experimenter don a gray technician's coat, which was a visible symbol

of scientific expertise and authority. But in Experiment 7 after giving initial instructions, the

experimenter left the room and gave his orders by telephone rather than in person. Milgram

found that the subjects were likely to disobey and administer lower shocks than were called for.

Hofling, Brotzman, Dalrymple, Graves, and Pierce (1966) tested the use of the telephone to give

medical orders. Would nurses obey what appears to be a reasonable request from an authoritative

source that cannot be seen or verified? Using the pseudonym Dr. Smith, the experimenter called

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H Perlstadt Obedience to Authority: Origins Controversies Theoretical & Applied Ethics 2013, 2(2), 53-77

twenty-two nurses on night duty at a nursing station in a psychiatric hospital and ordered them to

administer 20 milligrams of Astroten, a fictional drug that was not on the hospital's approved

drug list. A bottle labeled Astroten had been placed in the drug cabinet, and the label clearly

stated that 10 milligrams was the maximum daily dose. Dr. Smith told the nurses that he would

do the paperwork as soon as he got to the hospital.

Not one of the nurses questioned the telephone request, and all but one of the twenty-two

nurses entered the request on the patient's chart and went to the patient's room to administer the

drug, where a senior nurse stopped them. Nurses were expected to follow doctors' orders, and did

so in an ambiguous situation. On a subsequent questionnaire, ten of the twenty-two nurses

admitted they had actually done this, but with a different drug.

A reprehensible real-world incident occurred early one evening in April 2004 when a

caller claiming to be a policeman asked a female supervisor at a McDonald's to question a small

female employee about stealing a purse from a customer (abc Primetime, 2005; Wolfson, 2005).

In response, the supervisor asked an employee fitting this description to come back to her office.

The caller then told the supervisor to have the young woman, who happened to be eighteen years

old, empty her pockets and surrender her car keys and cell phone. Both complied. The caller then

demanded that the supervisor have the young woman remove all her clothes to see if she was

hiding anything. When the young woman did so, the supervisor gave her a small apron to cover

herself with.

The supervisor then told the caller that she had to leave the room to check on the

restaurant. The caller, however, demanded that another employee be brought in to watch the

young woman until the police arrived. The supervisor sent in a male employee, who refused to

follow the caller's orders to have the young woman drop her apron and do certain things. He

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H Perlstadt Obedience to Authority: Origins Controversies Theoretical & Applied Ethics 2013, 2(2), 53-77

walked out but did not hang up the phone. The supervisor returned to the room, and the caller

persuaded her to have her fiancé come over to watch the young woman. When the fiancé arrived,

the supervisor left the room. For the next two hours, the fiancé obeyed the caller's commands,

ordering the young woman to drop her apron and do jumping jacks. During this time, the

supervisor came back into the room periodically, but the fiancé had the young woman put the

apron back on and told her to say nothing. The young woman reported that she begged the

supervisor to get her out of there.

Eventually the caller told the fiancé to give the phone back to the supervisor, who was

asked to bring in someone else. An older maintenance man was brought in, but he refused to

comply with the caller's wishes to have the young woman drop the apron. He told the supervisor

that something was not right, and then left. At that point the supervisor finally called the store

manager at home, although the caller claimed the store manager was talking to him on another

line. But the store manager said she had been sleeping. The supervisor finally realized that this

was all a hoax.

The two male employees who were on the phone refused to comply with the orders given

by the caller, who claimed to be a policeman. The fast-food company's employee manual stated:

Under no circumstances should any member of McDonald's management or staff conduct

a search of any employee or customer's person. No legitimate law enforcement agency
would ever ask you to conduct such a search. If someone claiming to be a law
enforcement official requests that a manager or employee conduct a strip search, or any
search of another employee or customer, try to obtain the name and phone number of the
caller and immediately call your local police department to report the incident.
(McDonald's Response, 2005)

But none of the employees that ABC Primetime (2005) spoke with at the McDonald's said

they ever recall seeing the warning. Sociologist Ester Reiter (1996), who was a participant

observer working in a fast-food restaurant, found that loyalty and obedience to authority are the

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H Perlstadt Obedience to Authority: Origins Controversies Theoretical & Applied Ethics 2013, 2(2), 53-77

most valued traits in fast-food workers.

The police investigation eventually uncovered a string of hoax phone calls to least sixty-

eight fast-food restaurants in thirty-two states over a ten-year period (Wolfson, 2005; Zimbardo,

2007, pp. 278ff). Philip Zimbardo, who had conducted the Stanford Prison study in which

students playing guards and prisoners had become so antagonistic that the experiment was called

off after less than a week, speculated that the caller was "was very skilled in human

psychology—he (the caller) may have even read about Milgram" (Wolfson, 2005, pp 7).

Replications
Given the daunting ethical issues immediately surrounding Obedience to Authority and the belief

that no IRB would approve of such a study (Miller, 2009), it may be somewhat surprising to learn

that the Milgram experiments have been replicated in various forms since the late 1960s.

Although the replications used somewhat different methods of recruiting participants, and some

used increasingly loud beeps intead of shocks, the level of obedience was, in most cases, as high

as or even higher than what Milgram had originally found for similar experimental conditions

(Ring, Walston and Corey, 1970; Blass, 1999,p 966).

More recently, after a careful reading of Milgram, psychologist Jerry M. Burger (2009)

discovered that the 150-volt level (the tenth of thirty shocks) was a critical moment in the

experiments (also see Packer, 2008). At that point the Learner vehemently protested and

demanded that the study be ended, and in response nearly every teacher/subject paused and most

indicated either verbally or nonverbally their reluctance to continue. Burger's proposal for a

partial replication of the Milgram experiments was approved by the IRB at Santa Clara, a Jesuit

Catholic university in California. Burger took several steps to ensure that the participants were

treated in a humane and ethical manner. He used a two-step screening process to exclude

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H Perlstadt Obedience to Authority: Origins Controversies Theoretical & Applied Ethics 2013, 2(2), 53-77

individuals who might have a negative reaction to the experience. More than half of the initial

sample of volunteers was dropped from the study, which seems rather high. Miller (2009)

speculated that as a result of the screening, Burger was less likely to observe the higher levels of

emotion or stress that Milgram found as obedience continued past the 150-volt mark.

Participants were told at least three times that they could withdraw from the study at any

time and still receive their $50 for participating. The experimenter running the study was a

clinical psychologist who was instructed to end the study immediately if he saw any signs of

excessive stress. Participants were debriefed and assured of the Learner's well-being within

seconds of the termination of the experiment.

Overall, Burger found that 70 percent of his subjects continued past the 150-volt level,

compared with Milgram's 82.5 percent of participants under similar conditions. He recognized

the possibility that situational variables could overpower individual differences in this setting.

Specifically, participants who were high in empathic concern expressed a reluctance to continue

the procedure earlier than others, but this reluctance did not result in a greater likelihood of

actually refusing to continue; that is, situational variables can overcome feelings of reluctance in

these conditions.

Conclusion
The purpose of the Milgram experiment and its replications was to contribute scientific

knowledge of the conditions under which people were willing to continue to obey the orders of

an authority figure. Milgram's experiment and its several replications encouraged participants to

perform what they and others see as dehumanizing acts. His findings challenge the belief that

only those from the sadistic fringe of society would shock the Learner at the most severe levels.

Milgram's participants consisted of ordinary people drawn from working, managerial, and

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H Perlstadt Obedience to Authority: Origins Controversies Theoretical & Applied Ethics 2013, 2(2), 53-77

professional classes, and, under certain conditions, more than half administered the highest

shock.

The key ethical problems in the Milgram experiment are the unanticipated psychological

harms that resulted from their participation and the deception of subjects (Bankert et al 2009).

However, withholding information from or giving misinformation to research subjects was an

accepted practice in psychological research that increased during the 1950s and 1960s (Nicks,

Korn, & and Mainieri, 1997). The controversy over the Milgram experiment stimulated a re-

examination of research ethics and the American Psychological Association revised its ethical

principles covering research with human subjects in 1973.

Perhaps following Baumrind, Principle 3, stated that if the participant was not given a full

disclosure of “all features of the research that might be expected to influence willingness to

participate,” then the investigator was required “to protect the welfare and dignity of the research

participant.” Principle 4 stated that if deception was used (perhaps borrowing the term from

Milgram), “the investigator is required to ensure the participant’s understanding of the reasons

for this action,” and, perhaps following Baumrind, “to restore the quality of the relationship with

the investigator,” which Milgram claimed he did. Principle 7, apparently addressing the Milgram

experiment, held that “a research procedure could not be used if it is likely to cause serious and

lasting harm to participants.” Finally Principle 8, perhaps following Milgram’s procedure, stated

that after the data are collected, the researcher is required “to provide the participant with a full

clarification of the nature of the study and to remove any misconceptions that may have arisen.”

(APA, 1973: pp1-2)

The Milgram experiment remains controversial since it is still difficult to separate out the

actual content and findings of the study from the evolving guidelines governing the informed

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H Perlstadt Obedience to Authority: Origins Controversies Theoretical & Applied Ethics 2013, 2(2), 53-77

consent, deception, and debriefing of humans participating in psychological and behavioral

science research. Tutorials on the responsible conduct of research still reflect Baumrind’s

position, give a truncated account of the experiment, and present Milgram as a negative exemplar

of research ethics. In these tutorials, Milgram is essentially guilty as charged. However, this is

an ex post facto position, since he operated within the ethical guidelines that existed in the early

1960s. In fact he was one of the first to publish his debriefing procedures and attempted to

document whether or not his subjects experienced harmful after-effects. That some refuse to

accept that he and others (see Fisher & Fryberg, 1994; Korn, 1997) failed to find debilitating

long term harms may reflect a type of cognitive dissonance between their ethical values and the

empirical findings.

It would seem prudent for us to further understand how this type of behavior occurs, and

more importantly how a person can refuse to cooperate with an authority figure in a group

situation and intervene on behalf of a victim, that is, act altruistically. Given the problems of

bullying by an aggressive individual who, in some cases, seeks to exclude the victim from the

group, and hazing by a group of an individual who wants to join it, future research should focus

on exploring Milgram’s group effect conditions in which the naive teacher/subject is joined by

two teacher confederates who either defy the experimenter or blindly follow the experimenter’s

commands (Milgram, 1964c; 1965c).

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