Compare methods

	Milgram Obedience Paradigm	Cover Story Deception
Field	Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1963	1959
Originator	Stanley Milgram	Classic experimental social psychology
Type	Experimental paradigm for obedience to authority	Methodological design controlling participant expectations
Seminal source	Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378.	Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2), 203-210.
Aliases	Obedience to Authority Experiment, Milgram Shock Experiment, Destructive Obedience Paradigm	Deception Design, Cover Story Method, Experimental Deception
Related	3	3
Summary	The Milgram obedience paradigm, devised by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s, measures the extent to which ordinary people will obey an authority figure's commands to harm another person. A naive participant is assigned the role of teacher and instructed by an experimenter to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to a learner (a confederate) for errors on a memory task, with a switchboard labeled up to 450 volts and ominous warnings. No real shocks are delivered, but the participant believes they are, and the learner's scripted protests escalate to screams, then silence. When participants hesitate, the experimenter issues standardized prods to continue. Milgram found that a majority of participants obeyed to the maximum voltage despite visible distress, a result that overturned assumptions about individual conscience and became one of the most influential and controversial demonstrations in the history of psychology.	Cover story and deception design is the methodological practice of concealing a study's true purpose behind a plausible false rationale so that participants behave spontaneously rather than in line with what they think the experimenter wants. Because people who guess a study's hypothesis may consciously or unconsciously alter their behavior -- the problem of demand characteristics -- social psychologists often present a cover story that misdirects attention, embed the real dependent measure within an apparently unrelated task, and, when necessary, use additional deceptions such as confederates or false feedback. This approach made possible many of the field's classic findings on conformity, obedience, helping, and dissonance, where awareness of the true question would have destroyed the phenomenon. Deception carries serious ethical obligations, requiring justification, minimization of harm, suspicion probing, and thorough debriefing, which contemporary practice and ethics codes strictly govern.