INTIMIDATION AND MANIPULATION

Question 1

What is Intimidation?

Answer 1

Psychological process of (attempting to) change somebody’s behaviour thru appeals to authority, dominance, threats, social status, or harm to the target itself.

Question 2

What are the components of intimidation?

Answer 2

Source, Content, Target (SCT)

Question 3

How does CONTENT in intimidation differ from content in persuasion?

Answer 3

Unlike persuasion, the CONTENT is NOT trying to strictly change a belief/ attitude (though it can do this), but instead to FORCE a particular behaviour even if it conflicts attitudes and beliefs of the target.

Question 4

What are the two ways/ methods of intimidation?

Answer 4

DIRECT: target knows they are being unwillingly forced in a situation where they have to behave in a way they normally wouldn’t

INDIRECT: sources can rely on creating dissonance that appeals to social schemas or roles in order to manipulate behavior w/o the target recognizing it as intimidation.

Question 5

What is Milgram’s Obedience Experiments?

Answer 5

Experiments focused on how obedience can make people seemingly hurt/ even kill another person.

Most famous, and by far most controversial experiment

Question 6

What was the reasoning behind Milgram’s experiment?

Answer 6

Stanley Milgram reasoned that anybody ordered to harm another person under the guise of AUTHORITY would obey.

Question 7

Explain Milgram’s experiment set up

Answer 7

Participants had the chance to harm another person while the researcher (authority figure dressed in lab coat), urged them to GO ON.

Question 8

How does Milgram’s original experimental condition work?

Answer 8

1. Two people are brought into lab and told by experimenter they are in an experiment looking at learning after punishment. One becomes the TEACHER, the other the LEARNER.
2. Whole experiment is fake:
   - TEACHER is real
   - Experimenter and Learners are actors
3. Learner is in a room by themselves strapped to a shock generator that shoots electricity to their arm. They must memorize word pairs (“lemon=rain, bike=bottle ,etc)
4. TEACHER has shock generator machine, goes from 10volts- 450 volts (110V cam kill a person). Machine is labelled from “mild shock”, “dangerous shock”, to “XXX”.
5. TEACHER administers shock when LEARNER gets memory question wrong. (actor gets many wrong purposefully)
6. With every additional time LEARNER gets question wrong, TEACHER must increase voltage and shock again. (no one is actually getting shocked)
7. At 150V, LEARNER starts to complain of sever pain and wants to stop experiment. By 200V, they complain of heart condition.
8. Experimenter urges TEACHER to go with specific prompts.
9. After 300V, LEARNER stops responding. TEACHER must continue shocking.
10. TEACHER demands experiment be stopped even after all prompts from experimenter. Experiment stops and they are debriefed.
11. if they don’t and reach 450V, experimenter ends experiment and debriefs them.

Question 9

What is the DEPENDENT variable in Milgram’s experimt?

Answer 9

TIME OF STOPPING (i.e. at what Voltage did experiment stop)

Question 10

What % of of participants (TEACHERS) administered lethal shock bc experimenter told them to? (in Milgram’s experimt)

Answer 10

65%

see graph of actual vs predicted

Question 11

Why do so many people comply in Milgram’s Experment?

Answer 11

Authority, Blame, Gradual Increase (ABG)

Authority: experimenter is an authority figure that tells them to go on. They are expert in the room who can define what is/ is not appropriate.

Blame: experimenter claims he will take responsibility. Participant therefore believes that they are NOT responsible for what happens.

Gradual Increase: level of harm is increased little by little so people can justify “just 1 more thing” (notice similarity to foot-in- the- door technique).

Question 12

Is Milgram’s experiment direct or indirect intimidation?

Answer 12

DIRECT intimidation

Question 13

How many different manipulations did Milgram experiment ran to explore the context in which compliance might grow/ shrink? What are some examples?

Answer 13

23 different manipulations

🢝 No Feedback: Learner never cries out in pain (65% go to max Voltg)

🢝 Conflict: Learner says keep going but Experimenter says STOP (100% go to max Voltg)

🢝 Distant Researcher: Experimenter is NOT in the room, communicates remotely (38%)

🢝 Touch: Teacher has to physically push Learner’s hand onto a shock plate (30%)

🢝 Two Experimenters: one says keep going while the other one says stop (20%)

🢝 Known Learner: Learner is somebody the Teacher knows, like a friend or colleague that was instructed to act for the study (15%)

🢝 Two Teachers: a second Teacher (an actor) says they want to stop (10%)

🢝 Teacher’s choice: Teacher can choose any voltage they want (2.5%)

Question 14

In Milgram’s experiment, what do the various conditions reveal about the reasons why compliance rates bolster or diminish?

Answer 14

Doubts of authority: in every condition where Experimenter’s authority is not as obvious (e.g., they are inconsistent, they are not there, there is disagreement amongst them), obedience rates drop moderately.

Increased probability of blame: in every condition where Teacher would take more blame (e.g., they choose the shock level, they keep going even through another teacher quit), obedience rates drop strongly.

Intimacy between teacher and learner: the more close to each Teacher and Learner, both physically (as in the touch condition) and emotionally (in situations they know each other), obedience rates most significantly drop

Question 15

Was Milgram’s experiment accused of doing unethical research?

Answer 15

YES, after publishing his experiments Milgram was accused doing unethical research that was deeply harmful to his participants. TODAY is impossible to run replications of his work.

Question 16

What are some replications of MIlgram’s expt?

Answer 16

NURSE STUDY: 1966, real life nurses were called by experimenter pretender to be Doctor and asked to administer leather dose of (fake) medication that was planted in their offices. 95% nurses did as instructed

2009 REPLICATION: by limiting the shocks only to below 150v (the point at which Learner begins protesting). 2009 study was able to replicate most of the original Milgram study. Found that 70% of participants would keep going beyond 150v

Question 17

How was Milgram’s experiment subject to potential ethical breaches and data manipulation?

Answer 17

2017 re-analysis of post-experiment interview data showed most people who obeyed believed that they were not administering shocks at all, and kept going bc they wanted to earn monetary compensation from experiment.

Milgram was found to be SELECTIVE in which conditions he published: eg when he found less women were less likely than man to obey, he changed how many teacher protests are required to count as ‘not obeying’ to make women seem + similar to men.

Altho these issues are deeply problematic, most social psychologists believe that there is enough data to show obedience rates are higher than expected, though perhaps not as universally high as Milgram originally reported.

Question 18

How can people’s behavior be manipulated?

Answer 18

By simply putting them into social situations where the social schemas – including the behaviours they think are appropriate or inappropriate in this context – are radically different.

In situations where we are asked to act in accordance with a particular SOCIAL ROLE (e.g., the role of a police officer), people often assume the norms of that role and act in accordance with it (for better or for worse).

Question 19

What did Zimbardo Prison Experiment show?

Answer 19

Demonstrated how following social schemas can radically and rapidly alter one’s behaviour for the worse.

One of the most infamous experiments in social psychology

Question 20

Is Zimbardo’s experiment direct or indirect intimidation?

Answer 20

INDIRECT intimidation

Question 21

What was Zimbardo’s experiment about?

Answer 21

Group of men joined a 2-week experiment where half would act as prisoners in a mock prison and the other half would act as guards.

Prisoners were made anonymous and given numbers as names.

Guards were free to do whatever they wanted with the prisoners, whether act nicely or poorly towards them.

Within 2 days, everybody assumed their social roles of pretending to be guards or helpless prisoners. The experiment stopped for ethical reasons after 6 days.

Question 22

Why were there concerns about the validity of Zimbrado’s experiment?

Answer 22

Later interviews with the guards revealed Zimbardo actively encouraged them to act in corrupt and aggressive ways.

Zimbardo was highly SELECTIVE in recruiting for this study, choosing students he believed were the most susceptible to the situation.

Question 23

What are today’s opinions on Zimbardo’s experiment?

Answer 23

Most social psychologists are skeptical about experiment.

They believe that while there is some evidence about social roles affecting behaviours, they are not as clear-cut nor as universal as Zimbardo made them out to be.

Question 24

What are the lessons that Zimbardo and Milgram teach us about the potential for direct and indirect intimidation?

Answer 24

When you are asked to do something that makes you feel uncomfortable and may harm another person, ask yourself:

🢝 Would I be comfortable doing this if the person was right in front of me, or somebody I knew personally?

🢝 Is this person really an expert and somebody I can really trust?

🢝 What would other people do in this situation