The experimental method in psychology and obedience to authority experiment
A forgotten branch of psychology is the one that try to answer and explore various question
using the experimental method. What factors influence how we react in
stressing situation?
How do our experiences shape our character? Why do people agree on statements they do not
usually support? These are just a few of the questions that psychologists explore.
Experimental methods
allow researchers to create and empirically test hypotheses. By studying such questions,
researchers can also develop theories that enable them to describe, explain, predict, and
even change human behaviors or they can search for effective ways to help people avoid such
actions or replace unhealthy choices.
In the experimental method, psychologists can determine if there is a cause-and-effect
relationship between different variables. The basics of conducting a psychology experiment
involve:
- Randomly assigning participants to groups
- Operationally defining variables
- Developing a hypothesis
- Manipulating the independent variables
- Measuring the dependent variables
The first psychologist to distinguish psychology as a science, independent from biology and philosophy, was Wilhelm Wundt. He is recognized as the founding father of the discipline and the founder of the first formal laboratory for psychological research in 1879. Thanks to this, he is also recognized as the father of experimental psychology.
Since then, lots of psychologists started to explore this branch of psychology, doing researches and publishing studies: some famous one are the (“Little Albert Experiment”) by John B.Watson, the (conformity experiments) by Solomon Asch and the (“Bobo Doll Experiment”) by Albert Bandura.
Today, I would like to talk about of a very known and controversial experiment: the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority. Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist, became famous for this widely discussed experiment. He was influenced by the trial of Adolf Eichmann in developing his experiment. For instance, Eichmann in the trial was defending himself by saying that he was only following orders. That same year, Milgram began his experiments to see how far people would go in inflicting pain and suffering on fellow humans if given orders to do so.
Milgram organized an experiment on the role of punishments on learning, in which one subject was the teacher who asked questions and another was the student who had to answer. The teacher, the real experimental subject, after having witnessed the student's accommodation, sat in an adjacent room in front of a false electric current generator composed of thirty switches with labels indicating the intensity of the electric shock: from 15 volts to 450 volts.
The teacher felt the shock of the third switch (45volts) in order to personally convince himself that there were no fictions. In fact, that was the only real shock; all the other shocks that the teacher administered to the pupil were fake. The pupil was, for instance, a Milgram’s associate trained to feign pain when the shock was administered.
The teacher’s tasks were to read pairs of words (for example: "blue box") and ask the student what was the correct association between four alternatives (for example: "blue: car, water, box, lamp"). The student had to answer the questions by lowering one of the 4 switches placed in front of him, connected to 4 light signals visible by the teacher. In case of wrong answer, the teacher had to inflict a punishment, increasing the intensity of the shock with each student error.
Different experimental conditions were envisaged with 4 levels of distance, from not being able to observe and hear the moans to pushing the victim's arm directly onto a plate. The conflict between moral conscience and received orders, visible through sweating, lip biting, stammering or nervous laughter, was triggered when the pupil, pretending, expressed his discomfort: at 75 volts the first moans were heard, at 120 loud cries of protest, 150 the request that the experiment be suspended, 270 excruciating cries of agony and from 300 onwards neither voices nor cries were heard, but only silence. When some teacher expressed concern to continue, the experimenter ordered him to continue telling him that his responsibility was not his and reassuring him that although the electric shocks were extremely painful, they did not cause permanent damage. The experiment ceased when the teacher refused to continue or when he administered at least three shocks of maximum intensity.
The results were surprising. While manifesting tension and protesting strongly, the 40 experimental subjects yielded to the authority of the experimenter, silencing their conscience, giving all the shock of 300 volts; 62.5% continued until the 450 volts discharge.
Milgram explained this amazing result by speaking of the heteronomic state: a person inserted in an authoritarian system passes from an autonomous state to a heteronomic state in which he no longer feels free to act, as he must satisfy the requests, expectations and needs of others.
With this experiment Milgram demonstrated that the justifications put forward by Adolf Eichmann and the other criminals of the Nazi concentration camps, that is, that they limited themselves to following the orders of their superiors, anesthetizing their own conscience, were not pretexts. It follows that authority can induce any ordinary person to follow orders, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being.