Rethinking the Infamous Milgram Experiment in Authoritarian Times about:reader?url=https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/rethi...

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Rethinking the Infamous Milgram

Experiment in Authoritarian Times
Jacob M. Appel
2-3 minutos

It’s usually cited as showing that people will follow dubious orders
under social pressure—but a more important lesson may be that
some people will refuse

Credit: Daniel Grizelj Getty Images

Ever since social psychologist Stanley Milgram published his

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“Behavioral Study of Obedience” in 1963, it has become almost de

rigueur to reinterpret the validity and significance of his findings
every few years. The experiment has woven itself into the American
cultural fabric; its macabre setup and unsettling results likely remain
well-known to a wide swath of educated laypersons who can
describe no other work in the field.

In brief, Milgram, at the time a 26-year-old assistant professor at

Yale University, recruited subjects to participate “in a study of
memory and learning,” which entailed administering an associative
learning task to another subject (actually an accomplice in the
study) and then administering painful shocks of substantially higher
voltage for each incorrect answer. The purported goal was to study
human obedience in the wake of the atrocities of Nazi Germany
when, as Milgram described it, “millions of innocent persons were
systematically slaughtered on command.” The results proved
“surprising” in “the sheer strength of obedient tendencies”; in this
first reported experiment, 26 of 40 American subjects shocked the
victims at the highest level. Twenty variations with more than 600
additional subjects yielded similar outcomes.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not
necessarily those of Scientific American.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Jacob M. Appel

Jacob M. Appel is assistant professor of psychiatry and medical

education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he
teaches bioethics. His latest book is Who Says You're Dead?
Medical and Ethical Dilemmas for the Curious and Concerned.

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