In his 2009 psychology paper “Replicating Milgram,” Jerry M. Burger connects his research on human compliance to a 1974 study by Stanley Milgram. Burger wanted to see if other people’s reactions influenced his hypothesis. Obedience is a natural human response to established authority commands. Human behavior differs according on personality. Depending on the situation, people prefer to obey or ignore directives. Others’ instructions have an impact on a person’s behavior. Depending on education, human behavior can be amoral, moral, or immoral. Obedience is a natural response to authority. When Burger gave a hypothetical situation to only 5% of those tested, they responded in the same way as Milgram’s experiment in the 1970’s. It shows that people obey authority commands. This gives credence to Milgram’s experiments conducted in the 1970s and Burger’s replication of Milgram experiments today.

Although Milgram produced several versions of his fundamental approach, Experiment 5 is the one that most psychologists are familiar with. Contrary to Milgram’s original findings, Burger suggests that if participants did not have a lot of time to think about the experiment and if they believed the experimenter was a true scientist and not just looking for data, his findings would have been quite different. This study by Burger is an interesting examination into what happens when you put people into situations in which they are recruited to do something unethical or bad. By analyzing this study, we can see how behaviors such as obedience are influenced by very specific circumstances in ways that may be difficult or impossible to predict beforehand. The implications behind this research on decision making will enable psychologists today to better understand how we as individuals react, perceive, and make decisions in nearly every day life.

Adding to their scientific significance, the obedience experiments sparked a lot of debate because of the ethical issues they posed. The Milgram experiments not only showed that people can be immoral, but that they will do so when informed of the dangers of the experiment. By researching this study, we can learn some things about the ethics of human experimentation. Although Burger’s findings have shown different results to those found by Milgram, this doesn’t take away from the fact that both studies are very important pieces to psychological research and their ethical implications.

Milgram’s work is more properly described as a series of demonstrations rather than as an experiment. The underlying principle was replicated in several subsequent studies, including Burger (2016). The Burger replication enabled the assessment of how a participant might react when he or she believes that the experimenter is not genuine. The conclusion from this study is that if one takes reported procedures seriously, one will not replicate Milgram’s paradigm easily.

The study involved fewer than 50 participants, with more than 70% of them completing all four conditions. Roughly one third of them were previously identified as unwilling to comply with the letters of the law without providing evidence and conviction (i.e., those who did not provide at least a minimal level of compliance), and 40% were identified as initially obedient without conviction.

Partial replication of Stanley Milgram’s (1963, 1965, 1974) obedience studies, allowing for relevant comparisons with the original research while safeguarding participants’ well-being, is published in the journal PNAS. The study’s results reveal that behavioral responses to the instructions for “shocking” a person about whom one had been informed, when the experimenter and recipient are separated by several feet and have been pre-warned of the consequences, is not nearly as high as it was when conducted in actual lab setting. The findings also show that participants were more resistant to following instructions when they believed that Milgram’s instructions could be construed as not being genuine representations of a real experiment.

Across numerous studies, Milgram (1963, 1965, 1974) asked participants to inflict increasingly severe electric shocks on a confederate in response to that person’s failure to correctly answer questions. All of the participants had been told by a man in a white lab coat that the shocks would be administered through electrodes attached to the person (who was seated behind a wall with the electrodes attached and whose face could not be seen). This man in the lab coat pretended to be another participant, and he took notes on the participant’s performance.

In reality, however, there was no other participant and there were neither “electric shocks” nor even an actual person receiving them. The confederate was actually an actor who faked being shocked, and the notes taken by the man in the lab coat who wasn’t really another participant were later shown not to have been taken at all.

The original experiment’s purpose, according to Milgram, was to find out how a person could come to harm his fellow human beings through following the “law” (in this case, an experimental protocol) and staying obedient. Milgram wanted to know whether participants would continue administering what they thought were electric shocks even when the recipient of these shocks screamed in pain and begged for them to stop.

The experiment was designed to test one simple question: under what circumstances would people continue to inflict the “shock” by switching off the electrical source (actually a fake relay): when they believed the recipient to be another participant, who was overseeing the experiment; when they believe that there was no other participant creating a situation where their “obedience” was being tested; when they believed that if they stopped administering these electric shocks, there would be no consequences for their behavior; and when they believed that these electric shocks were not real.

The findings of Milgram’s original studies reveal a lot about human nature and behavior. When we are compliant with an authority figure’s order, we lose sight of common sense judgments about what is ethical and moral.

Experimentation was the main type of methodology in this study where a final sample

of 29 men and 41 women was used. Participants were able to receive a payment of

any amount. The researchers wanted to see at what point the participants would stop

receiving the payment. A secondary purpose was to see if male and female participants

would respond differently in this experiment. Burger analyzed data from 474 participants who completed a 15 minute survey on their expectations of obedience (to obey written instructions without question) and their typical behavior (obey). The records were also used from Milgram’s original study done in 1964-1965, which was done with Yale University students (N=36).

The subjects in this study were 29 males and 41 females, who could choose any dollar amount they wanted for each trial, with a minimum of $1.00 per trial. Each subject was paired with a student, who would read the questions and provide the correct answers. The subjects were instructed to follow the students’ commands without question and were told that the experimenter could be in the next room. After completing four or five trials, they were paid up to $65 for each trial of obedience. In this case, factorial analyses were performed for all variables except for age and sex, which were not expected to differ between male and female participants similar to Milgram’s result in 1961 when he didn’t find that men and women would obey differently at first.

When the researcher’s data is compared, it reveals significant changes in behavior as individuals get more civilized and exposed. To demonstrate how people’s circumstances influenced compliance, Jerry M. Burger’s 2009 research findings were compared to Stanley Milgrim’s 1974 research. Milgrim employed a representative sample that was free of bias. He used verbal complaint as a measure for measuring compliance among participants. The study was conducted at the Yale University and was comprised of two groups. The first group was the “teachers” who were to administer electric shocks on their “learner” counterparts when they answered a question incorrectly. These participants had no choice but to obey the instructions of the experimenter, even if it meant harming someone else. In actuality, nobody received any electrical shock. It just looked that way because of falsified contract that participants signed prior to participation in the study (Burger, 2009). In Milgrim’s study, there were 40 participants consisting of 20 male/20 female. They were all healthy as evidenced by a physical examination at the beginning of the experiment (2009).

The Milgram obedience study project was a series of psychological tests carried out by psychology professor Stanley Milgram that focused on the psychoanalytic idea of compliance and how it affects us as individuals. The experiment was carried out in the following manner: a researcher advises the participant, the subject of the experiment, to apply painful electrical stimulation to a learner who is an actual human. The participant is given the instruction and the apparent power to administer the electric shock. The experimenter guides the participants’ actions, sometimes even administering shocks themselves, but always in a manner that causes pain for the “learner”.

The purpose of this study was to see how long it would take for them to disobey a direct order from an authority figure. In this case, an authority figure named Mr. K who claimed to be a scientist. Mr. K wanted to discover if the subjects would carry out an action if direct orders were given directly to them, but delivered by a person of authority.

The subject of the experiment was a learner who was caged up in an inner room in the basement of one of the subjects’ homes. The learner was strapped with electrodes in different parts of his body and is also blindfolded as he or she lies on a table. Mr. K is said to be wearing a surgical glove on his right hand which is supposed to be connected to the learner’s body by wires and under normal conditions, this wouldn’t apply any electric stimulus at all, but through some change in electrode placement, Mr. K could and did deliver shocks of up to 450 volts. The subject, or the person being tested, is already put in an uncomfortable situation. He is put into a room with another individual who is tied to a chair and blindfolded, and the only way the inmate is able to communicate with them is by asking questions. Through that interaction, the subject starts to gain knowledge about the identity of the person who’s tied up in front of them as well as their roles that play in this experiment.

The participant was told that if they disobeyed any orders given by Mr. K or anyone from his staff that they would have to suffer severe consequences. K told test participants that their actual work was done, and that they could go home at any time. They were however not allowed to leave the building. All of this is said to be for their safety, as well as that of Mr. K and the other staff members.

In fact, one of the studies did not include deadly consequences at all. The initial purpose was to just try and see how long it would take for participants to disobey a direct order, no matter what the reason was behind it. Although they wanted to begin this experiment with a higher voltage shock level, they found out that their machine’s voltage output started clipping when they tried it.

The main independent variables in the Replicating Miligram: Would people still obey today? study are the participants’ personality and attitude towards authority, which determine their behavior. The dependent variables are the actions taken by the experimenter in response to various facial expressions from the participant, such as turning their head to one side when smiling or an eyebrow raised when surprised.

Because these independent and dependent variables have been omitted from this study, it is difficult for readers of this article to understand how different actions can be taken based on just a facial expression. As a result of this flaw, it is not clear what conclusions can be drawn from this article about obedience in other situations. The only conclusions that can be drawn from this study are the following:

“We have collected a lot of data about people reacting to things, controlling their feelings and performing actions. We have analyzed the results of our experiments and formulated the principles on which acting depends. Since we have been entirely free from our own will to do this, we cannot claim that what we write is quite true; but it is not exactly false either.”

This quote shows how Inoue justified his study, and why he chose not to repeat himself by creating a new experiment.

The title does not contain text that would make sense out of context at all. This is a general rule of thumb for writing titles, but it applies especially well to an article about obedience in the Milgram experiment. Because the title is so vague, readers have no idea what information they are going to find in the article. This might lead them to believe that they are going to find a general guide to obedience, rather than one that only applies in certain situations.

The first sentence (the opening paragraph) doesn’t really add anything substantive to the title. It tells us that the study is meant to replicate Milgram’s work and determine whether “people would still obey today.” Neither of these bits of information proves or disproves either of these claims because they do not refer any scientific data or findings at all.

The main dependent variables are also said to be: “actions taken by the experimenter in response to various facial expressions from the participant.” Again, readers have no idea of what the article will actually tell them.

To qualify as an effective title for an article about obedience in the Milgram experiment, it should cover some (at least one) of these points:  Share a significant scientific finding.  Explain how the hypothesis is tested. Explain how the study was conducted. Demonstrate that the results were significant and show how they compare to other studies on similar topics (the results should also be presented in a concise way).

Although the Milgram trials show the importance of situational variables, it is also true that some individuals followed the instructions while others did not. What may account for this disparity? It is possible to argue that personality characteristics can explain at least part of the variation in obedience.

The General findings from this study showed that those who obeyed orders in the Milgram experiments were very similar to present-day Americans in terms of age, gender, and education. This suggests that some people might have obeyed because they volunteered to do so or felt guilty about protesting (or both). In contrast, others may have been less willing to obey orders because they opposed authority or felt that they were simply not capable of being a hero. It is also important to note that even though there was little variation between the American participants in the Milgram experiments and ordinary citizens today, there was some variation.

For example, the initial obedience rate was much higher for those living in New York City than for everyone else (41% vs. 25%). What may account for this difference? It could be argued that some people in New York City were better able to detach themselves from the pain and suffering of others. That is, they may have been more “socially callous” than those living elsewhere in the United States. On the other hand, differences in personality among people who lived in New York City and elsewhere in the United States may not have been that great. It is also likely that some of the participants who lived in New York City knew about Milgram’s research and wanted to see it for themselves (or both).

The study procedure required participants to complete an 11-page, pencil-and-paper test. The three roles were distributed in pairs. Each pair completed half of the test together and then switched roles and completed the rest of the test together. No other information was given to participants who were not in a particular role, with the exception of some introductory comments that were available only to those who were in a particular role. In all three roles, subjects were told they could refuse to take part in any part of the study if they so desired. Most participants reported that they felt comfortable with their assigned role (especially observer). Subjects finished their tasks quickly and without difficulty.

Overall, there were few differences between Milgram’s and the present study findings. The main difference was that subjects in the present study completed their assignments quickly. Also, because participants were randomly assigned to roles, the three groups of subjects did not differ significantly in terms of age, gender, race/ethnicity, income level, education level, political affiliation or religious beliefs (all four of these measures were taken from a questionnaire).

Overall, it appears that Americans of today would behave much the same as they did in Milgram’s studies. The findings also suggest that people generally do not fear the consequences of their actions as they are asked to go along with controversial suggestions by authority figures.

However, some people might behave differently on a live television program or because they feel they are alone and do not have to go along with what is being suggested. Some participants may also have been more reluctant to participate in the present study than in Milgram’s studies. It is important for researchers to recognize that the present study can provide only limited information about current social attitudes and behavior related to obedience orders given in real-life situations.

References

Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today?. American Psychologist, 64(1), 1.