Milgram Flashcards
What is the aim of milgram?
To investigate the tendency for destructive obedience when participants were told by a figure of authority to administer electric shocks to another person
What was the sample?
Volunteer or self selecting sample. 40 male participants aged 20-50, from a range of backgrounds and jobs recruited by a newspaper advert all from the new haven district of North America
What was the DV?
Obedience
Operationalised by the maximum voltage given in response to orders
Experimental design?
Lab experiment but more accurately a pre-experiment as it only had one condition
Where the experiment take place?
Yale university
How much were the participants payed?
They were promised $4.50 for their time, including 50 cents for travel and it was made clear that payment was for turning up not for completing
The procedure?
When each participant arrived at Yale university they were introduced to a man they believed was another participant. They were briefed on the purpose of the experiment and were told that one of them would play the role of the teacher and the other would play the learner. They were then taken to another room where the learner was strapped into a chair with electrodes attached to him and shown the electric shock generator. They were told the shocks could be extremely painful but not dangerous and they were each given 45V to demonstrate. The teacher would read out word pairs to test the learner and each time they made a mistake the experimenter ordered the teacher to give a shock
what were they told was the aim of the experiment?
To investigate the effects of punishment on learning
How were the roles picked?
They drew slips from a hat to allocate the roles however this was fiddled so that the naive participant was always the teacher and the confederate was always the learner
What is a confederate and who was it in this case?
Someone who helps with experiments by being in them
He was a 47 year old Irish accountant selected for the role because he was mild mannered and likeable
What was the electric shock generator like
It had a row of switches each labelled with a voltage rising in 15 volt intervals from 15V to 450V
Who was the experiment administered by
A 31 year old biology teacher
What happened up until 300V and 315V?
The confederate learner did not signal any response until 300 and 315 volts where they pounded on the wall and then he was silent and didn’t respond to any further questions suggesting he was unconscious or dead
What happened when the participants turned to the experimenter for guidance?
They were told to treat no response as incorrect and continue to give the shocks. When they protested they were given a series of verbal prods to encourage them to continue
What happened after the experiment
They were de-hoaxed and interviewed and asked to rate on a scale from 0-14 how painful the last few shocks they gave were. They were then told the shocks were not real, that the learner was unharmed and the real aim of the study
Results?
Quantitative data- the average voltage given by participants was 368V and 100% of participants have 300V or more. 65% gave the full 450V
Qualitative data- most participants showed signs of tension during the procedure including groaning, sweating, lip biting, stuttering, nervous laughing and one had a seizure
2 main conclusions from the study
- People are much more obedient to destructive orders than we might expect as psychology students suggested only 1.2% of participants would go all the way when in fact the majority of people are willing to obey
- People find the experience of receiving and obeying orders highly stressful and obey in spite of their emotional responses. The situation triggers a conflict between the tendency to obey those in authority and not to harm people
What 9 possible factors might have contributed to the high levels of obedience
- Study was carried out in a respectable environment (top university)
- The aim of the study seems like a worthwhile one
- The learner appears to have volunteered so had an obligation to the experimenter
- The teacher has volunteered so has an obligation to the experimenter
- They were payed so sense of obligation
- From the teachers perspective, he might equally well have been unlucky enough to have been the learner
- The right to withdraw and the scientist to expect compliance was not obvious
- The participants were told the shocks were not dangerous
- The learner seemed comfortable for the first 300V
What were the 4 verbal prods used?
‘Please continue/go on’
‘The experiment requires that you continue’
‘You have no other choice, you must go on’
‘Although the shocks may be painful they are not harmful’
Why was having both quantitative and qualitative data a strength in milgrams study?
If we only had the figures of how many people went to what voltage we might conclude that people were uncaring and did not mind harming others however when we add the qualitative data it becomes clear that although they were highly obedient they experiment high levels of stress
Ethical problems?
- he caused participants considerable distress and might have put their health at risk
- he did not obtain informed consent because participants agreed to take part in a learning experiment
- they were deceived about several things: the aim of the study, the nature of the confederate, the reality of the shocks, and the apparent suffering of the learner
- they were effectively denied their right to withdraw by the use of verbal prods as they didn’t feel like they could
Validity?
Lacks ecological validity because the experiment took place in an artificial environment that was different to those in which most atrocities take place and the task was artificial as we dont find ourselves operating electric shock machines very often in real life
Reliability?
MIlgrams procedure has good reliability as it was replicated many times and the results of the basic procedure have proved to be consistent
Sampling bias?
- the sample is tricky to generalise from to the whole population as it was made up of 40 men from the same region in the USA
- the volunteer/snowball method is very unrepresentative because the volunteers are not typical people and participants tend to invite other people who are like themselves to take part
Practical applications?
understanding the circumstances in which people will obey destructive orders has proved useful in understanding atrocities, even allowing the International Criminal court in some cases to predict atrocities before they take place
understanding obedience has also had some surprising benefits eg. Tarnow analysed records of 37 plane crashes and suggested that in 25% of cases the crash was a direct result of the pilots obeying orders from the ground- these results prevent accidents
