GoKawiilReassessing one of the most famous psychological experiments in history, a recent analysis of audio recordings reveals that subjects who seemingly obeyed orders to administer severe electric shocks actually broke the rules of the scientific study most of the time. The authors suggest that this routine violation of experimental procedures transformed the laboratory into a scene of unauthorized violence, altering our understanding of compliance and coercion. The research was published in the journal Political Psychology.
In the early 1960s, American social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments to understand how ordinary people could be directed to commit violent acts. Volunteers were recruited for what they were told was a study on memory and learning at Yale University. Upon arriving, they were assigned the role of a teacher and introduced to a learner, who was actually an actor working for the researchers.
The teacher was instructed to read a list of word pairs to the learner and test their memory. For every incorrect answer, the teacher had to administer an electric shock, increasing the voltage steadily up to a supposedly lethal level. As the shocks grew stronger, the learner would begin to grunt, shout protests, and eventually scream in simulated agony.
For decades, psychologists have generally accepted that the participants who went all the way to the maximum voltage did so because they believed in the scientific validity of the enterprise. The assumption has been that the presence of a lab-coated authority figure gave the violent actions a sense of legitimacy. Theoretical explanations for the high rates of obedience rely heavily on the idea that the volunteers willingly participated in a structured, orderly scientific protocol.
Lead author David Kaposi, a researcher at The Open University in the United Kingdom, and his colleague David Sumeghy wanted to test whether this assumption matched the reality of the sessions. Kaposi and Sumeghy questioned whether the obedient participants actually followed the specific instructions that made up the memory test cover story. If the volunteers ignored the scientific procedures, the theoretical justification for their violence would be drawn into question.
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To investigate this, the researchers turned to the original audio tapes preserved at the Yale University Library. They secured recordings from four experimental conditions that closely resembled the standard baseline setup. After excluding sessions with missing data or technical irregularities, the sample yielded 136 full audio recordings of individual sessions.
The research team broke down the participants into two populations based on their ultimate actions in the lab. Obedient individuals were those who administered all the shocks up to the theoretical maximum. Disobedient individuals were those who refused to continue at some point and formally ended their participation.
Kaposi and Sumeghy then evaluated how well each participant adhered to the explicit rules of the memory and learning study. According to the original directions, the teacher was required to complete a strict five-step sequence for every single shock. This cycle involved reading a test question, evaluating the learner’s answer, announcing the shock voltage, pressing the shock lever, and finally reading the correct answer aloud.
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