Milgram (Obedience) Flashcards
AIM:
• To find out whether people would be obedient to authority even if it meant physically hurting others. (Destructive Obedience)
SAMPLE:
A newspaper advertisement was used to recruit 40 men between the ages of 20 and 50 years old. This meant it was a volunteer sample, composed of men living in the New Haven area of the USA. The participants came from a range of different backgrounds and occupations, representing unskilled workers, white collar workers and professionals.
BACKGROUND:
🔹11 million jewish people were gruesomely killed by Nazis.
🔹Stanley Milgram being Jewish sought to find if anyone under a similar situation would harm or murder others under an authoritative figure’s orders.
🔹Milgram suggested a situational explanation for obedience.
🔹Milgram had conferred with his psychology students and colleagues, and they predicted that 3% of participants would deliver the maximum voltage shock of 450 volts, with many stating that no one would deliver such strong punishment.
PROCEDURE: (1)
🔹Each participant was paid $4.50 for their willingness to participate. The study took place at Yale University, in a modern laboratory. The location was chosen in order to make the procedure seem more legitimate, an important situational factor in obedience.
🔹The participants arrived individually to the lab, and were then introduced to Mr. Wallace whom they believed to be the participant. Mr. Wallace was in fact a stooge; he was a likeable, middle-aged man who worked for Milgram and had been trained in the procedure which followed. Both men were told that they would be allocated the roles of teacher or learner in what was to be an experiment about the effects of punishment on learning (deception). They drew pieces of paper from a hat to determine their roles, but it was fixed so that the real participant was always allocated the role of teacher.
🔹The participant was given a mild electric shock of 45v to the wrist to convince him that the shocks were genuine. Milgram watched through a one-way mirror. The learner never received any shock, but the test shock and the elaborate machine was set up to convince the participant that they were really injuring a learner.
🔹The memory task involved reading pairs of words aloud to the learner to test their recognition of words. Each mistake or no response was given a voltage shock of 15v higher than the previous one. The shock generator had 30 lever switches set in a horizontal line. Shocks increased by 15volts.
PROCEDURE: (2) (Prods)
When participants protested at this, the experimenter continued to give them verbal prods in the sequence:
- “Please continue/please go on.”
- “The experiment requires you to continue.”
- “It is absolutely essential that you continue.”
- “You have no other choice, you must go on.”
- Prods used when the subject asks if the learner was liable to suffer permanent physical injury: “Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on.” [Followed by prod 2/3/4 if necessary]
- Prods used if the subject said that the learner did not want to go on: “Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on.” [Followed by prod 2/3/4 if necessary.]
PROCEDURE: (3)
🔹Learner
Responses were standardized. No signs of protest are heard from the learner until after the 300v shock is administered. When the 300v shock is administered, the learner pounds on the room’s wall, which is heard by the subject. Learner stops responding to the questions after receiving the 300v shock. After getting the 315v shock, the pounding is repeated and afterwards, no response appears for the questions, and he is not heard from.
🔹Teacher
Instructed to move 15v higher with each mistake and also told to announce the voltage level before administering it. The teacher is given a preliminary series of 10 words to read to the learner. 7 answers would be wrong, reaching 105v. A second list is given and is told to repeat the procedure and list until all words are memorized by the learner. When the leaner pounds on the wall, the teacher turns to the experimenter for guidance and is advised that if a response wasn’t achieved within 5-10s, then to consider it as a wrong answer.
After the procedure was complete, each participant was interviewed and the deception was fully explained to them. As part of the interview, they were asked to rate on a scale of 0 - 14 how painful they thought the 450v shock was. They were given a chance to meet the learner again, in order to reassure them that the learner was uninjured.
RESEARCH METHOD:
This was a controlled observation in a laboratory setting where all the variables and measurements were controlled, while the behaviour of participants was observed and recorded.
EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN:
The independent measures design was implemented.
RESULTS:
65% of 40 participants = 26 participants went to 450v.
Most participants were convinced that all aspects of the situation were real; that they were delivering electric shocks to another person and that the shocks were extremely painful. The mean estimate of the pain of the 450 V shock was 13.42 out of a maximum 14, meaning that participants believed that they were causing serious injury.
Some participants protested at the orders, saying things like “I don’t think I can go on with this…..I don’t think this is very humane” and “I’m gonna chicken out… I can’t do that to a man, I’ll hurt his heart.”
Nonetheless, the verbal prods given by the experimenter generally persuaded the participants to continue. After the procedure ended, the participants showed visible signs of relief, wiped their faces, sighed and shook their heads. A small minority of participants, however, did not show elevated levels of stress and appeared calm during the procedure.
CONCLUSION:
🔹Milgram’s study supports the idea of a situational explanation for obedience.
(He identifies a number of factors that contributed to the high level of obedience recorded in this study. One of these factors is the perceived legitimacy of the study; the professional academic environment of the study and use of uniform by the experimenter. Another factor that might have encouraged obedience was that the participants had been paid to participate so they felt obliged to continue. Participants also believed that both they and the learner had freely volunteered to participate.)
Milgram stated two main conclusions from this study:
🔹Individuals are far more obedient to authority than expected. This seems to be true for most people.
🔹Despite high levels of obedience, people find the experience of carrying out destructive acts under the orders of authority figures to be stressful. This is due to a conflict between 2 important social phenomena: the need to obey those in authority and the need to avoid harming other people.
EVALUATION: (Strengths)
🔹High Validity -
The method used in the study was a controlled observation. This means that it was possible to control extraneous variables in the environment, such as the age and appearance of the actor playing the stooge. The realistic design of the electric shock generator and the example shock given to participants also improved the validity of the design, because it ensured that participants were convinced that the study was real and that their actions actually mattered.
🔹High Reliability -
The procedure was standardized throughout i.e the verbal prods used by the experimenter were the same each time. The standardisation of the procedure means the research was more reliable, because each participant went through exactly the same experience.
EVALUATION: (Weaknesses)
🔹Low generalizability -
The participants in this study were all men who came from the same local area. This could mean that the sample was low in generalizability. For eg.
It would not be possible to predict what differences there might be in obedience levels between men and women.
🔹 Low ecological validity -
The artificial setting of a lab with many controls, coupled with the task of shocking another individual (low mundane realism) contributes to the overall low ecological validity of the study.
EVALUATION: (Ethical Issues)
This study had major ethical issues.
🔹Although participants had consented to take part in the research, they did not give their informed consent as they were told the study was about memory and punishment.
🔹Participants were also repeatedly deceived throughout the study. For example, participants were tricked into believing they had chosen the role of teacher by chance.
🔹Participants were able to exercise their right to withdraw, as some did ask to stop partway through giving shocks. However, many felt as though they had to keep going with the shocks out of obligation to the research and as a result of the verbal prods.
🔹Ethical Issues are particularly important to Milgram’s research, which caused outrage at the time of it’s publication. In some ways this research can be considered harmful to the reputation of psychology. It might also lead to distrust by the general public who may not want to take part in future research studies.
🔹Participants were not protected from psychological harm; many underwent visible and extreme distress yet on only one trial the procedure was stopped. All participants were debriefed and told the true aim of the study, as well as being assured that they had not done any real harm. However, there is a potential for lasting negative consequences to the participants, who may have felt distressed by their own behaviour.
