Milgram's Baseline Study Flashcards
What are two aims of Stanley Milgram’s study?
- To investigate how far people will be prepared to go in obeying an authority figure.
- To understand the behaviour of the Germans who followed orders to kill over 10 million people in the Holocaust.
The “Germans are Different” hypothesis
What are the details of the sample used in Milgram’s study?
40 men
Aged between 20 and 50
From a range of occupations - unskilled to professional
What was the location of the study?
Yale University
How much were the sample paid for being involved in the study?
$4 plus 0.50c for car fare
How were the sample selected?
They were a volunteer sample and each responded to an advertisement.
What did the participants think the study was about?
To investigate learning and memory
What is a confederate?
It is a person that is involved in the study and they know the true aims of the study - like an actor.
What was the role of the confederate?
They were the learner.
How were the ‘teachers’ assigned to their roles?
They drew straws but the outcome was always fixed.
What was the ‘learner’s’ name?
Mr Wallace
What was the experimenter wearing?
A white lab coat
What task did the learner have to do?
Learn word pairs and he was given four possible answers.
What was strapped to the learner (Mr Wallace)?
Electrodes
What did the teacher have to do if the learner got the incorrect answer in the word pair task?
Press the button on the machine to give an electric shock.
How many switches were on the electric shock machine?
30
What was the voltage of the switches (from lowest to highest)?
15 volts (slight shock) all the way up to 450 volts (danger/severe shock)
When the teacher refused to give an electric shock, what happened?
The experimenter gave a prod (a verbal command) to encourage them to continue.
How many different prods were there?
4
What were the prods?
- Please continue
- The experiment requires that you continue
- It is absolutely essential that you continue
- You have no other choice, you must go on
How many volts did each switch increase by?
15 volts
At what stage did the learner pound on the wall?
300 volts
When did silence from the learner occur?
350 volts
What percentage of people went to the full 450 volts?
65%
What percentage of people went to at least 300 volts?
100%
What was the minimum shock that was given?
300 volts
What can be concluded from this study in relation to obedience?
- Ordinary Americans are astonishingly obedient to authority when asked to behave in an inhumane way.
- It is not necessarily evil people who commit evil crimes but ordinary people who are just obeying orders.
- Crimes against humanity may be the outcome of situational rather than dispositional factors
- An individual’s capacity for making independent decisions is suspended under certain situational constraints – namely, being given an order by an authority figure
Can Milgram’s findings be applied to other people (Generalisability)?
Generalisability was low (a weakness) because Milgram only used American males.
He used only 40 participants which means any anomalies are not evened out.
Milgram - Strength
Reliability - standardised procedures
The standardised procedures (e.g. verbal prods)mean his studies are replicable and therefore can be tested for reliability, such as Burger (2009).
Milgram - Weakness
The controlled settings are an artificial context for testing the nature of obedience in society, so lacks ecological validity.
