40 Fun Facts About Milgram Experiment

Which Stanford prison experiment psychologist was Stanley Milgram's high school classmate in New York?

Philip Zimbardo sat in Milgram's class at James Monroe High School. The two also shared a love of the hidden-camera show Candid Camera and admired its creator, Allen Funt.

Which animal received real shocks in Sheridan and King's follow-up to Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment?

A puppy took real but apparently harmless shocks, because the researchers suspected some of Milgram's volunteers had guessed the victim was faking. Some subjects openly wept, yet most obeyed to the end.

A 2010 French documentary restaged Milgram's obedience experiment disguised as what kind of TV program?

A game show pilot was the cover story in Le Jeu de la Mort (The Game of Death), made as a critique of reality television. Only 16 of 80 contestants quit before the highest-voltage penalty.

Which Star Trek actor played a professor based on Stanley Milgram in the 1970s TV drama The Tenth Level?

William Shatner played Professor Stephen Turner, a thinly disguised Milgram. The drama also gave a young John Travolta an uncredited part as a student.

In Stanley Milgram's first obedience experiment, what share of the 40 volunteers delivered the maximum shock?

65% went all the way to the last switch. Every one of the 40 paused at least once to question what was happening, and most carried on once the man in charge reassured them.

Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment began in 1961, months after which Nazi's trial opened in Jerusalem?

Adolf Eichmann, an organizer of the Holocaust, went on trial in April 1961. Milgram wanted to know whether ordinary people would really harm a stranger simply because they were told to.

Which former Genesis member recorded a song about Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment for his 1986 album So?

Peter Gabriel titled it We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37). He had first recorded the track for his 1980 album, six years before it finally appeared.

Stanley Milgram's small-world experiment, mailing folders between strangers, is linked to which famous idea?

Six degrees of separation matches his finding that folders reached a Boston stockbroker through a median of five go-betweens. Milgram himself never used the phrase.

Stanley Milgram planned his American volunteers as a control group before testing people in which country?

Germany was where he expected to find unusually compliant people. The American results were so startling that he never ran the comparison.

What was the highest voltage marked on the shock generator in Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment?

450 volts was the top of a row of switches that climbed in 15-volt steps. No current ever reached the learner, an actor who only pretended to be in pain.

At which Ivy League university did Stanley Milgram run his obedience experiment in the early 1960s?

Yale housed the sessions in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall. Milgram had joined the faculty as an assistant professor only the year before.

Both slips of paper in the rigged draw of Milgram's obedience experiment carried which single word?

Teacher was written on both slips, so the volunteer always landed that role. The actor simply claimed that his own slip read learner.

The stern experimenter in Milgram's obedience experiment wore a technician's lab coat of which color?

Gray was the color of the technician's coat. The stern man wearing it was 31 and, away from the laboratory, taught biology at a school.

In Milgram's obedience experiment, the learner was strapped into a device that looked like what?

An electric chair was the look of the apparatus, and the volunteer watched as the straps went on. The man in charge said they were there to prevent excessive movement during the shocks.

Stanley Milgram designed his shock experiment to test which defense offered by accused Holocaust perpetrators?

Just following orders was the claim Milgram set out to examine in a laboratory. He later wrote that one mental process was at work in both his sessions and the Holocaust, a link many scholars dispute.

What happened to compliance when Stanley Milgram reran his obedience experiment with women instead of men?

It barely changed: the women obeyed at much the same rate as the men. The one difference was that they reported feeling more stress while doing it.

Which odd reaction did 14 of the 40 volunteers show during Stanley Milgram's first obedience experiment?

Nervous laughter or smiling broke out in 14 subjects, a sign of strain rather than amusement. Others sweated, trembled, stuttered or dug their fingernails into their skin.

Volunteers in Milgram's obedience experiment were told the shocks were part of a scientific study of what?

Memory and learning was the cover story, supposedly a test of whether penalties for mistakes help people remember. The real subject was the volunteer's own willingness to obey.

In later versions of Milgram's obedience experiment, the learner cried out about which medical problem?

A heart condition was written into the script for the actor, who would plead for mercy as the voltage rose. In the very first version his protests had been wordless.

The learner's protests in Milgram's obedience experiment were not performed live; what machine produced them?

A tape recorder wired to the shock generator played a pre-recorded sound for each switch, so every volunteer heard exactly the same protests at exactly the same points.

What did the learner in Milgram's obedience experiment have to recall, earning a shock for every mistake?

Word pairs were read out as a list, then the volunteer gave the first word of each with four possible partners. The learner answered by pressing a button, not by speaking.

Which stark label marked the final switches on the shock generator in Milgram's obedience experiment?

XXX was all the top switches said, just past the label Danger: Severe Shock. Psychologist Don Mixon argued the vagueness mattered: compliance fell sharply once the harm was spelled out.

What did Stanley Milgram call the mindset of seeing oneself as merely an instrument of another person's wishes?

The agentic state was Milgram's name for the shift in which people stop feeling responsible for what they do. He set the idea out in his 1974 book on the experiments.

Stanley Milgram worked as an assistant to which psychologist, famous for his conformity experiments?

Solomon Asch employed Milgram at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton while Milgram was finishing his doctorate. Milgram later built peer pressure into some versions of his own study.

In the first version of Milgram's obedience experiment, how did the unseen learner protest at 300 volts?

Banged on the wall is what the volunteers heard him do at 300 and again at 315 volts. After that the learner fell silent, yet most of them kept working up the switches.

Which university at first rejected Stanley Milgram's PhD application because he had never studied psychology?

Harvard turned him down, then relented, and he earned his doctorate there in 1960. His first degree, from Queens College, was in political science.

What name did Stanley Milgram give the four scripted phrases the experimenter used to keep volunteers going?

Prods came in a fixed sequence, starting with a polite request to continue and ending by telling the volunteer there was no other choice. After a fourth refusal the session was halted.

In Stanley Milgram's follow-up survey, how did 84 percent of former volunteers describe having taken part?

Glad or very glad was the answer most gave, and Milgram leaned on it to defend his ethics. Critics reply that many volunteers were never properly told the truth afterwards.

Compliance in Milgram's obedience experiment fell to about 21 percent when the experimenter gave instructions how?

By telephone, with the man in charge out of the room, only about one in five went to the end. Some volunteers pretended to carry on while quietly giving weaker shocks than they were told to.

Before Milgram's obedience experiment, forty psychiatrists predicted what share of people would give the top shock?

0.1% was the experts' guess, about one person in a thousand; they expected most to stop by the tenth shock. The real figure turned out to be hundreds of times higher.

Which researcher of parenting styles wrote an influential 1964 ethical critique of Milgram's obedience experiment?

Diana Baumrind argued that the experimenter should have stepped in as soon as volunteers showed distress. Her article helped trigger a thorough revision of psychology's ethical standards.

To test the pull of a university's prestige, Milgram moved his obedience experiment to a modest office in which city?

Bridgeport, Connecticut, hosted the sessions under the invented name Research Associates of Bridgeport. Full compliance slipped to 47.5 percent, a drop too small to be statistically significant.

Which body delayed Stanley Milgram's membership for a year over ethical doubts about his obedience experiment?

American Psychological Association officials held up his application, then admitted him as a full member. In 1964 the same research won him a behavioral science prize from the AAAS.

Stanley Milgram's obedience findings were later used to help explain which 1968 massacre by American soldiers?

My Lai, the mass killing of Vietnamese villagers by US troops, was examined through Milgram's ideas about military authority training and the depersonalizing of an enemy.

Which Australian psychologist's 2012 book Behind the Shock Machine accused Stanley Milgram of manipulating his results?

Gina Perry dug through Milgram's data and writings and concluded that only half of the volunteers fully believed the shocks were real. Defenders answer that many replications back his findings.

Which horror director hosted a Discovery Channel recreation of Milgram's experiment titled How Evil Are You?

Eli Roth capped the shocks at 165 volts and still got results like the original. When he added an actor who defied the instructions, most volunteers found the nerve to stand up to authority too.

Charles Hofling's 1966 field study echoed Milgram's obedience experiment with a bogus doctor instructing which workers?

Hospital nurses were told by an unknown caller to give twice the labeled maximum dose of a made-up drug. Of the 22 tested, 21 set off to do it before being stopped at the patient's door.

Which British illusionist restaged Milgram's obedience experiment in his 2006 Channel 4 special The Heist?

Derren Brown ran the shock test on nine people who believed they were helping with unfilmed university research. The special's wider aim was to see whether he could steer business people into staging a robbery.

In Milgram's 1962 "Relationship Condition", compliance sank to 15 percent when the learner was the volunteer's what?

Friend against friend proved a much harder ask: just three of the twenty volunteers delivered every shock. Most of those who refused did so before the relatively low 195-volt switch.

Who played Stanley Milgram opposite Winona Ryder in Experimenter, the 2015 film about his obedience experiment?

Peter Sarsgaard starred for director Michael Almereyda, who grew interested in Milgram after his girlfriend took a class on him. The real Sasha Milgram makes a cameo in the final scene.