Lesson 5 Obedience to authority Flashcards
What is obedience
Obedience is behaving as instructed to by an authority figure. Authority figures have status and/or power over others.
Milgram (1963) procedure
Milgram (1963) placed an advert in a newspaper asking for male participants to take part in a study about the effect of punishment on learning. 40 participants were invited to the Psychology Department of Yale University and were met by the experimenter, a man in a white laboratory coat, who was really a confederate. They were introduced to a 47-year-old man whom they were told was another participant called Mr. Wallace. Mr. Wallace was also a confederate who pretended to have a weak heart. Mr. Wallace and the participant were asked to pick notes out of a hat to determine whether they would play the role of a teacher or a learner in the experiment. This was set up so that Mr. Wallace was always the learner and the naïve participant was always the teacher. The participant was then told that his role as teacher was to punish the learner if they made a mistake on a memory test by administering an electric shock, increasing the voltage each time the learner made a mistake.
The leaner was taken to a room and hooked up to the electric shock machine. The teacher was placed in an adjoining room with the electric shock machine controls and the experimenter. The electric shock machine and the controls were fake but were very convincing. To administer shocks, the teacher pressed switches on the electric shock machine controls. Each switch was labelled with a voltage rating, starting at 15 volts and rising in increments of 15 volts to a level of 450 volts. Additionally, each group of four switches was labelled with text such as ‘Slight Shock’, ‘Moderate Shock’, all the way up to ‘Danger: Severe Shock’. The final few switches were marked ‘XXX’. As the shocks became more severe Mr Wallace demanded to be released from the experiment, screamed, kicked the wall, complained about his weak heart, refused to answer the questions and finally went silent.
The experimenter ensured that the teacher continued with the experiment. When the teacher showed reluctance to shock the leaner the experimenter prompted him to continue, using one of four statements, ‘please continue’, ‘the experiment requires that you continue’, and ‘it is absolutely essential that you continue ’and ‘you have no choice, you must continue’
Milgram (1963) findings
100% of participants gave shocks up to 300 volts (when Mr Wallace banged on the wall and stopped answering) and 65% of participants gave electric shocks all the way up to the maximum 450 volts. Participants felt a high level of stress during the experiments, they showed symptoms including sweating, trembling, and, in some cases, anxious and hysterical laughter. Despite this, most were obedient and willing to inflict potentially lethal shocks on a man with a weak heart.
Evaluation of Milgram (1963)
- Participants were deceived about the true nature of the experiment as they were told it was about memory when it was really about obedience (this also means they did not give their informed consent to take part). Participants were also led to believe that the electric shocks they were delivering were real and that Mr Wallace was another participant who had a weak heart. However, this deception was necessary to avoid demand characteristics and therefore increase the validity of the study.
- During the experiment the participants became extremely distressed (some became hysterical), and may have even thought that they had killed Mr Wallace, so they were not protected from psychological harm. However, Milgram did not expect his participants to obey and so this psychological harm could not have been anticipated.
- Several participants asked to leave the experiment but were told that they were not allowed; this violates their right to withdraw from the experiment.
- Despite the ethical issues with Milgram’s (1963) study many psychologists feel that after conducting a cost-benefit analysis (weighing the harm a study has done against the valuable knowledge is has provided) the study was worthwhile. We now know that most people could potentially do the same thing, leading to people taking more responsibility and not blindly following orders. The participants did not suffer any true long-term emotional disturbances and most (84%) of them said they were happy to have taken part and that they had learnt something important from the experience.
- The sample is unrepresentative as all of the participants were white American males. Therefore the results cannot be generalised to women (gender bias) or other cultures (cultural bias). However, this study has since been replicatedwith women and the obedience rates was not significantly different.