• Understanding the Milgram Experiment in Psychology (13 August 2024)
• Why (almost) everything you know about Milgram is wrong: Ella Rhodes reports from a Stephen Reicher keynote at the Society’s Annual Conference in Nottingham. (15 May 2018)

• Rethinking One of Psychology’s Most Infamous Experiments (28 January 2015)

• The Case Against Milgram 

What Rhodes reports is:

First, while his baseline study would back up the agentic state theory he actually did around 30 studies and obedience varied between 0 and 100 per cent… overall 58 per cent of people actually disobeyed the pushy experimenter. How can we understand this variability, Reicher asked, if the agentic state is true?

Second, when we consider the goings-on during the actual experiment and look at the experimenter’s four prods to encourage participants to continue, they reveal that people really do not like following orders. The four prods used were: ‘please continue’, ‘the experiment requires you to continue’, ‘It’s essential you continue’ and ‘you have no other choice – you must go on’. Reicher pointed out that only the final one of these phrases is a direct order, and in fact none of Milgram’s participants continued with the study after hearing this order. As Reicher said – Milgram’s own research here is emphatically not showing that people have a tendency to obey orders.

Finally, Milgram’s work did not account for the role of participants hearing the learner’s voice shouting in pain. While agentic state theory would suggest we are bound into the voice of the experimenter, deferentially following orders, this is not revealed in Milgram’s own archived materials – Reicher and Haslam found 40 per cent of participants dropped out when the learner spoke for the first time and mentioned the pain he was in.

In the “Case Against Milgram,” fellow psychologist Diana Baumrind was critical.

In Baumrind’s view, and in the view of numerous others, the levels of anxiety experienced by participants were enough to warrant halting the experiment. What is more, just because someone volunteers to take part in the study (i.e. gives informed consent at the start of the study), it does not mean that the researcher no longer has responsibilities towards them and their wellbeing. On the principle of cost–benefit, Baumrind challenged the view that the scientific worth of the study balanced out the distress caused to the participants. She acknowledged that some harm to participants might be a necessary part of some research – for example, when testing out new medical procedures – as in those cases results cannot be achieved in any other way.

In the Kendra Cherry’s “Understanding the Milgram Experiment,” psychologist Gina Perry that we only know part of the story. Perry listened to the audiotapes.

While Milgram’s reports of his process report methodical and uniform procedures, the audiotapes reveal something different. During the experimental sessions, the experimenters often went off-script and coerced the subjects into continuing the shocks.

“The slavish obedience to authority we have come to associate with Milgram’s experiments comes to sound much more like bullying and coercion when you listen to these recordings,” Perry suggested in an article for Discover Magazine.

Cherry concludes:

Milgram’s experiment has become a classic in psychology, demonstrating the dangers of obedience. The research suggests that situational variables have a stronger sway than personality factors in determining whether people will obey an authority figure. However, other psychologists argue that both external and internal factors heavily influence obedience, such as personal beliefs and overall temperament.

The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment on Delayed Gratification

Year: 1970

Lead Researcher: Walter Mischel

School: Stanford

First experiment was with with Ebbe B. Ebbesen. A child was offered a single marshmallow. The researcher left the room for 15 minutes. If the child did not eat the marshmallow, the reward was either another marshmallow or a pretzel stick. The researchers concluded that the children who could wait for the reward would have better lives as measured by SAT scores, educational levels, body mass index, etc. The children were 3 years and six months to five years and eight months. The median age was 4.5 years old. In all 32 children participated (16 girls and 16 boys).

There was a 1972 follow up study by Mischel, Ebbesen and Zeiss in 1972 which used marshmallows. There were three experiments. The Stanford marshmallow experiment demonstrated that the successful children used suppressive and avoidance mechanisms that reduce frustration.

Mischel participated in a more recent study (“New Study Disavows Marshmallow Test’s Predictive Powers,” 24 February 2021), but died before its completion.

But the latest Bing follow-up study, by a team of researchers that included Mischel, casts doubt that a preschooler’s response to a marshmallow test can predict anything at all about her future.

Following the Bing children into their 40s, the new study finds that kids who quickly gave in to the marshmallow temptation are generally no more or less financially secure, educated or physically healthy than their more patient peers. The amount of time the child waited to eat the treat failed to forecast roughly a dozen adult outcomes the researchers tested, including net worth, social standing, high interest-rate debt, diet and exercise habits, smoking, procrastination tendencies and preventative dental care, according to the study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

“With the marshmallow waiting times, we found no statistically meaningful relationships with any of the outcomes that we studied,” UCLA Anderson’s Daniel Benjamin, who brings expertise to the study that includes behavioral economics and statistical methodology, says in an interview.

Co-authors of the study include Mischel and his former graduate students, Yuichi Shoda from University of Washington and Philip K. Peake from Smith College, who collaborated with him for decades on follow-up projects. David Laibson from Harvard University, Alexandra Steiny Wellsjo from University of California-Berkeley and Nicole L. Wilson from University of Oregon are also co-authors on the JEBO study.

What other studies found were economics influenced behavior.

In 2018, a major marshmallow test study gained fame for failing to find strong correlations between wait times and adolescent outcomes. Published in Psychological Science and led by Tyler W. Watts (now at Columbia University), the study followed a much more diverse group of 900 preschoolers into their teens. Controlling for differences such as household income and cognitive abilities, they found only weak relationships to academic outcomes and no significant correlations to later behaviors, such as anti-social tendencies.

The Watts study findings support a common criticism of the marshmallow test: that waiting out temptation for a later reward is largely a middle or upper class behavior. If you come from a place of shortages and broken promises, eating the treat in front of you now might be the better bet than trusting there will be more later.

It’s important to note that Mischel in 2015 felt:

If you exhibit self-control at an early age, “you have a much better chance of taking the future into account and likely to have better economic outcomes,” he says. “But the idea that your child is doomed if she chooses not to wait for her marshmallows is really just a serious misinterpretation.”

According to the UCLA article, Mischel supported “teaching kids delay of gratification skills” and worked with charter schools to teach “the importance of resisting immediate temptations to get something better later” because he felt “anyone can learn this willpower” including those who didn’t resist eating that first marshmallow.

By 2024, however, another person, psychologist Yuko Munakata had asked how culture might affect the Marshmallow test. Besides a socio-economic bias, he felt there was a cultural bias.

• “How Culture Affects the ‘Marshmallow Test’: A Classic Test of Self-Control Can Carry Complex Cultural Biases” (14 July 2023)