New Milgram replication finds 90 per cent of Polish participants willing to deliver highest shock

By guest blogger Ginny Smith Fifty years ago, in Connecticut, a series of infamous experiments were taking place. The volunteers believed they were involved in an investigation into learning and memory, and that they would be administering shocks to a test subject whenever he answered questions incorrectly. But despite pretences, the scientist behind the research, Stanley Milgram, wasn’t actually interested in learning. The real topic of study? Obedience. Milgram recorded how far his participants were willing to go when told to deliver larger and larger shocks. In one version of the study, 26 out of 40 participants continued to the highest shock level – two steps beyond the button labelled ‘Danger: severe shock’. But this was 50 years ago – surely the same wouldn’t happen if the experiment were conducted today? That’s what a group of researchers from SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Poland aimed to find out, in a “partial replication” of Milgram published recently in Social Psychological and Personality Science. Today’s ethical guidelines meant Dariusz Doliński and his colleagues couldn’t recreate Milgram’s experiment completely. However, they took advantage of the fact that in the original experiments, the 10th shock level seemed especially important, a kind of “point of no return”. The overwhelming majority of the participants who went this far continued to the end of the experiment, administering the 30th and final ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: guest blogger Morality Social Source Type: blogs