milgram (1962) Flashcards
What was the aim of Milgram’s research?
To identify whether ordinary Americans would obey an unjust order, from a person of authority, to inflict pain on another person.
Describe the procedure of Milgram’s baseline study.
40 male students, each paid £4.30, were deceived into thinking they were giving electric shock. The ptp was told the study concerned the role of punishment in learning. Genuine ptp = teacher, confederate = learner, who had to memorise pairs of words and indicate an answer on lights. The teacher would administer shocks for every wrong answer (learner = in another room). Started at 15V, increased by 15V every wrong answer until 450V. If the ptp hesitated, the researcher encouraged.
(No shock actually administered, experiment ended after 450V administered 4 times).
Outline the findings of Milgram’s baseline study.
All ptp = at least 300V.
65% = 450V (hearing).
30% = 450V (seeing and hearing).
most ptp = very stressed, wanted to stop but continued and obeyed researchers orders.
Outline the conclusion of Milgram’s baseline study.
In certain circumstances, most obey due to a subordinate position in a dominant hierarchy.
He suspected there were certain factors in the situation that influenced obedience, so decided to investigate them further.
discuss the internal validity of Milgram’s baseline study.
Low internal validity. Milgram reported that 75% of ptps said they believed the shocks were genuine. However Orne and Holland (1966) argued that ptps behaved as they did because they didn’t really believe in the set-up, that they weren’t really fooled and were ‘play-acting’. Gina Perrys (2013) research confirmed - she listened to the recordings and reported only half of the ptps believed the shocks were real, and two-thirds of these ptps disobeyed - suggests the ptps were responding to demand characteristics.
HOWEVER
Ptps did show a physical stress response - shaking, real relief after seeing confederate). Has been argued they were just playing along and didn’t truly believe they were hurting the confederate.
However, in a variation of the experiment where the researcher was absent, ptp cheated and didn’t actually hurt Mr Wallace, they pretended. This limits the limitation demand characteristics can have, increasing the validity of the experiment.
Discuss population validity in Milgram’s research.
Milgram only used males in his research, so results cannot be generalised, limits the validity of the study.
However, he later replicated the study with women, and found that obedience was 65% - same as men.
However in a later study, Killham and Mann (1974) - the findings of obedience were different for males and females, males = 40% and females = 16%.
However this could be argued to be a freak finding as Milgram also repeated his study using both genders and found males and females did not differ.
