Lesson 6 - Obedience to Authority Flashcards
What is obedience ?
Obedience is behaving as told to by an authority figure.
What was Milgram’s experiment ?
Milgram selected participants through volunteer sampling and he got 40 male participants. They were paid $4 an hour and told that the study was based on memory and learning. The participant was paired with someone else and they drew out names to chose who would be a teacher and who would be a learner. It was fixed to put the participant as the teacher. The learner was then taken into another room and had electrodes tied to his arm and the participant saw this. Participant got taken into another room with the shock generator with 15V to 300V to 450V. Participants started giving shocks. If the participant asked if the experiment should be stopped he would be given encouragement with a series of prods. These prods were made in a sequence.
What were the 4 prods ?
‘Please continue’ or ‘Please go on’
‘The experiment requires that you continue’
‘It is absolutely essential that you continue’
‘You have no other choice, you must go on’
What was the aim of Milgram’s experiment ?
To investigate the level of obedience participants would show when an authority figure tells them to do something harmful to someone else.
What were the results of Milgram’s experiment ?
Milgram predicted only 2% of people would go up to 450V. But it was found that all participants shocked up to 300V and 65% shocked up to 450V. The voltage went up in 15V. During the study participants showed signs of nervousness and tension. They sweated, trembled, stuttered, bit their lips, groaned. Most participants were obedient and willing to inflict potentially lethal shocks on another human.
What are the strengths of Milgram’s experiment ?
There is good external validity. It shows the relationship between the authority figure and the participant. This is supported by Hofling's study where he called up nurses as 'Dr.Smith' and told them to exceed the dose for a patient. 21/22 obeyed. The show (The game of death) accurately reflects the study as it was the same thing but on a game show. In the show the participants showed the same behaviour (nervous laughter) but 80% of the participants still delivered the maximum shock.
What are the weaknesses of Milgram’s experiment ?
There is low internal validity. Orne and Holland argued that the participants behaved the way they did because they didn’t really believed in the setup and thought the shocks weren’t real which means the study was not measuring what it intends to measure.
There were also ethical issues. Milgram lied to his participants by saying the shocks were real when they were fake. He also made them believe the roles were allocated out of pure randomness. Baumrind believes that deception was seen as betrayal of trust and this could damage the reputation of phycologists and their research.
