1. Four Famous Social Psychology
Experiments
John Bradford, Ph.D.

2. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
• One of the most famous
experiments of the 20th century.
• What explains the Holocaust? Are
Germans just inherently more
obedient than other people?
• The Milgram experiment measured
the willingness to obey an
authority figure who instructed
them to perform acts that
conflicted with their personal
conscience.

3. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
Experiment:
• Three roles:
– an experimenter (man in white lab coat);
– a volunteer (the ‘teacher’);
– and the shockee (the ‘learner’). All are
actors except the volunteer.
• Responding to a newspaper ad, a volunteer
was told he would be participating in an
experiment testing the effects of negative
reinforcement (punishment) on learning.
The volunteer was told that a ‘teacher’
(giving electric shocks) and ‘learner’
(receiving electric shocks) were to be picked
at random.

4. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
Experiment:
• In reality, the experiment was to see how
much electroshock the teacher would give as
punishment, when told it was part of an
experiment. Everyone but the ‘teacher’ was
acting and knew the true purpose of the
experiment. No electric shocks were actually
administered, but the volunteer believed he
was administering them.
• The ‘learner’ would go into another room and
a tape recording was played of scripted
answers. For each wrong answer, the teacher
was supposed to give a shock to the learner,
with the voltage increasing in 15-volt
increments for each wrong answer.

5. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
Findings:
• BASELINE STUDY (most famous):
65% of volunteers ‘go all the way’
and are willing to shock the subject
to death!
• Milgram also studied 20-40
variants of this experiment with
different results:

6. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
Findings:
• Experiment #3: The Shockee is placed
in the same room so that the volunteer
can see him; obedience drops to 40%.
• Experiment #4: The volunteer must
physically restrain the shockee;
obedience drops to 30%.
• Experiment #14 : If experimenter is
not a scientist in a white lab coat, then
obedience drops to 20%.
• Experiment #17: Volunteer and two
other participants (both actors); if
other actors refuse to continue the
experiment, obedience drops to 10%

7. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
Findings:
• Experiment #15: *If there are two
other experimenters in white lab
coats (both actors) who disagree
about what to do, then obedience
drops to ZERO!
• As soon as participants are told
that they “have no choice”,
obedience drops to ZERO!
• These results were confirmed in
2006.

8. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
QUESTION: What does all this mean?
Why did so many people go along
with the experiment, if they only did
so long as they were NOT ordered
to do so?

9. Stanley Milgram and Obedience
• This study does NOT show that
people ‘obey orders’!
• They are participating because they
believe they are promoting the
common good, a noble cause:
science.
• They are shocking innocent
strangers not because they believe
they have to, but because they
believe they ought to.

10. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison
Experiments
Experiment:
• 70 volunteers selected;
• by flip of coin, half are chosen
as guards, other half as
prisoners
• Participants make up their own
rules; not pre-determined
• Each participant was paid $15 a
day

11. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison
Experiments
• Findings:
• Experiment ended after 6 days!
• Could no longer distinguish reality (the
experiment) from the roles they
adopted as prisoners and guards
• “There were dramatic changes in
virtually every aspect of their behavior,
thinking and feeling…. We were
horrified because we saw some boys
(guards) treat others as if they were
despicable animals, taking pleasure in
cruelty, while other boys (prisoners)
became servile, dehumanized robots….”
(141)

12. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison
Experiments
• Findings:
• About 1/3 of guards became
‘corrupted by the power of their
roles’ (142)
• “*T+he mere act of assigning
labels to people and putting them
into a situation where those
labels acquire validity and
meaning is sufficient to elicit
pathological behavior”
(Zimbardo, pg. 143)

13. ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’
• Can we always distinguish
‘normal’ from ‘abnormal’
people? The ‘sane’ from the
‘insane’?
• How objective are these labels?
1. Are ‘insane’ behaviors caused
by innate characteristics of
these individuals or are they
elicited from external
environments?
2. Do observers see the ‘same’
behavior differently in different
Scene from One Flew
circumstances? Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
(1975)

14. ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’
• Rosenhan undertakes groundbreaking study:
will sane people (‘pseudo-patients’) be
recognized as sane by hospital staff in a
psychiatric ward?
• Experiment
– 8 sane people admitted into 12 hospitals; 3
women, 5 men
– Initially complained of ‘hearing voices’ of an
‘existential nature’:
D. L. Rosenhan
– Symptoms chosen because there were zero
reports of ‘existential psychoses in the literature’
– After being admitted, pseudo-patients behaved
normally
– Length of stay ranges from 7 to 52 days, average
of 19 days

15. ‘On Being Sane in Insane Places’
• Findings: The normal are not
detectably sane!
– Pseudo-patients were never detected
• Other patients (but not doctors and staff)
sometimes detected that they were not
insane.
– Each was discharged with a diagnosis
D. L. Rosenhan
of schizophrenia “in remission”
– Normal behaviors were often
interpreted as abnormal because of the
diagnosis!

16. Labels and Perception
• “Once a person is
designated abnormal, all
of his other behaviors and
characteristics are
colored by that label”
Perception (280).
Label 1. Observers perceive
of normal behavior as crazy;
(diagnosis)
behavior our expectations thus
reinforce our initial
impressions
2. Patients can even begin
to see themselves as
‘crazy’, and thus act crazy
(self-fulfilling prophecy)

17. Asch’s Conformity Experiments
• Question: Which of the lines
on the second card (A, B, or C)
is the same length as the line
on the first card?
• “That we have found the
tendency to conformity in our
society so strong that Solomon Asch
reasonably intelligent and (1907 – 1996)
well-meaning young people
are willing to call White Black
is a matter of concern. It
raises questions about out
ways of education and about
the values that guide out
conduct” (95)