This video, we're going to be talking about obedience. So obedience is essentially a change in behavior that we do in order to comply with the demands of an authority figure. And this is a very common behavior because in many contexts, authority figures define norms. So especially when we are in kind of uncertain or new situations, we often look to authority figures to tell us how to behave and how it's okay to behave. Now obedience was famously demonstrated by a series of experiments done by Stanley Milgram back in the nineteen sixties.
And to give you some historical context, Milgram was kind of inspired to do this because of the Nazi trials that followed World War II, and he was noticing repeatedly that many of the Nazis were just saying, you know, I was following orders. I was doing what I was told. And Milgram began to wonder, you know, is obedience that strong of a driving factor that it would, you know, lead humans to commit these terrible atrocities and incredibly amoral acts just to be obedient to their commanding officers? So that's kind of the mindset that he went into this research with, that that kind of question. So, we're going to go over the procedure and results of one of his original obedience studies.
So, to introduce all of the players here, we have, of course, the participants. So, they were recruited, they came into the lab, and they were introduced to a confederate. So this person was a trained actor who worked for Milgram, but they were introduced as another participant. And then, of course, we have the experimenter who, importantly in this context, is acting as the authority figure. So this person was always dressed very professionally in like a crisp white lab coat.
They carried a clipboard and they always kind of projected an air of like authority and confidence. So getting into the procedure now. So the participant was assigned the role of a teacher, and then the confederate ended up taking the role of a learner. And the teacher and learner were seated in different rooms. They could not actually see each other.
So it looked a little bit something like this. So they were completely separated, and the teacher, the participant, basically had to read words to the learner or the confederate over an intercom. And then the learner had to repeat the words back. So what would happen is if the learner was to make a mistake and the mistakes were all pre-planned, then the teacher was told to deliver an electric shock to the learner, and they did this using Milgram's famous shock box. So there was this box in front of the participant that looked something like this.
It had all these knobs and dials and switches, looked very fancy, and it had all of these shocks that basically progressed higher and higher, and they were labeled from beginning to end slight shock, moderate shock, strong shock, very strong, and then written in red intense shock and the ominous triple x. Now, to be clear, this box was fake. It did nothing. The Confederate was never harmed. The participant never actually hurt anybody.
But the participant obviously did not know that. This was all presented in a very convincing way. So what would happen is the more mistakes the learner made, the higher the shock they were instructed to deliver. And over time, the learners, the Confederates, they would cry out in pain, they would scream things like help, please get me out of here, and eventually, when the shocks became more severe, they would become completely unresponsive. Now if the teachers, the participants, hesitated at any point, the experimenter would just calmly stand over them and say things like please continue.
The experiment requires that you continue. Importantly, the experimenters were never rude. They were never, like, mean to the participant. They just acted very calm and authoritative the entire time. So, to get into the results, participants in the study were shockingly obedient with about eighty percent continuing to shock learners after they had started screaming and sixty two percent, so about two-thirds, went on to deliver the highest possible voltage.
So we saw a very, very high level of obedience here. Now if you have your critical thinking cap on, you might be thinking, well, maybe they just recruited really aggressive people for the study. It is a very aggressive study design and that is a good thought, but the experimenters actually did control for that. So this study was advertised as a learning and memory study. So theoretically, the participants that were recruited shouldn't have particularly high aggression levels.
They should be about average similar to the general population on that variable. And interestingly, this has been replicated many, many times across different countries even and with much more diverse samples than they were using back in the 1960s when all participants were typically white men. This has been replicated as recently as February 2017 and we typically see very similar results when we do replications of this. So it seems to be a pretty strong, and powerful effect. Now one thing worth noting that you may be thinking of is that, well, people aren't always obedient. And you are correct, and in our next videos, we're going to go over a few factors that can decrease obedience.
So I will see you there.
