468 CHAPTER 12
not appear to be some random “fluke” resulting from a large population of cruel peo-
ple residing in the area. These experiments have been repeated at various times, in the
United States and in other countries, and the percentage of participants who went all the
way consistently remained between 61 and 66 percent (Blass, 1999; Slater et al., 2006).
That’s incredible—I just don’t believe that I could do something
like that to someone else.
EVALUATION OF MILGRAM’S RESEARCH Researchers have looked for particular personality
traits that might be associated with high levels of obedience but have not found any one trait
or group of traits that consistently predicts who will obey and who will not in experiments
similar to Milgram’s original studies (Blass, 1991). The people who “went all the way” were
not necessarily more dependent or susceptible to being controlled by others; they were sim-
ply people like most other people, caught in a situation of “obey or disobey” the authority.
Some have suggested that Milgram’s results may have been due to the same kind of foot-in-
the-door technique of compliance as discussed earlier, with participants more likely to go
on with each next demanding step of the experiment because they had already agreed to
the smaller increments of shock (Gilbert, 1981). Gradually increasing the size of follow-up
requests is helpful in changing behavior or attitudes, and participants may have actually
come to see themselves as the type of person that follows the experimenter’s instructions
(Burger, 1999, 2009; Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004).
Milgram’s research also raised a serious ethical question: How far should researchers
be willing to go to answer a question of interest? Some have argued that the participants in
Milgram’s studies may have suffered damaged self-esteem and serious psychological stress
from the realization that they were willing to administer shocks great enough to kill another
person, just on the say-so of an experimenter (Baumrind, 1964). Milgram (1964) responded to
the criticism by citing his follow-up study of the participants, in which he found that 84 per-
cent of the participants were glad to have been a part of the experiment and only 1.3 percent
said that they were sorry they had been in the experiment. A follow-up psychiatric exam 1
year later also found no signs of harm or trauma in the participants. Even so, most psycholo-
gists do agree that under the current ethical rules that exist for such research, this exact study
would never be allowed to happen today. to Learning Objective 1.10.
There has been at least one attempt to replicate Milgram’s study in recent years, although
the shock was limited to only 150 volts (Burger, 2009). In that study, the confederates asked to
end the study at 150 volts and the participants were asked whether they should continue or
not. Regardless of their answer, the study was ended at that point. The results showed that the
participants were only slightly less likely to obey than those in Milgram’s study.
Other research has suggested that these studies may not actually examine “ obedience” as
most often portrayed. A follow-up study to the 2009 replication (Burger et al., 2011) found none
of the participants continued with the experiment when the highest of the four prompts the
experimenter used was reached. This was the only prompt readily seen as an actual order, “You
have no other choice, you must go on.” The more the prompts came across as an order, the
less likely the teachers “obeyed” (Burger et al., 2011). Furthermore, it has been suggested that
instead of obedience, the outcomes of the Milgram paradigm may be more about social identity.
The participants identified themselves more in line with the experimenter than the learner and
acted in a way that demonstrated their commitment to the larger scientific process rather than
to the ordinary community (Reicher et al., 2012). Instead of blindly following orders, the partici-
pants were actively working to reach a goal established by the leader or, in this case, the experi-
menter. The people in this study and others may have obeyed because they came to believe that
what they were doing was right—with help in developing that belief from the authority figure
(Frimer et al., 2014; Haslam & Reicher, 2012; Reicher et al., 2012). They were decent people who
did something terrible because they believed they were doing the right thing in the long run.
These possible reformulations will certainly offer social psychologists additional
ways to further investigate the complex topic of obedience in the future.
