Milgram’s Obedience Experiment

Question 1

What is Obedience

Answer 1

• Obedience is a type of Social Influence which causes a person to act in response to an order given by another person
• The person giving the order is usually a figure of authority, who has the power to punish.

Question 2

What was Milgram’s Procedure

Answer 2

• selected 40 random male participants and told them they were participating in a ‘punishment and learning’ experiment.
• Milgram selected participants as ‘teachers’ and had confederates as ‘students’.
• the teachers were put in separate rooms as the students read out a series of mathematical questions.
• The students answered questions and every time they got one wrong teachers were instructed to electrocute them, going from 10volts to 450volts.
• In reality the students just played a noise recording of them shrieking.
• The experiment looked at how obedience causes people to be inhumane and do bad things.

Question 3

What did Milgram find from his experiment.

Answer 3

Milgram found 26/40 participants delivered the maximum shock. Regular people are very obedient to authority and this is due to situational rather than dispositional factors.

Question 4

Real world examples of obedience showing external validity.

Answer 4

-My Lai Massacre: 500 villagers killed by US troops.
- Khmer Rouge: Khmer Rouge killed 1-2 million people.
- Rwandan Genocide: Hutus killed 500,000 people.
- Abu Grain prison abuse: American soldiers abused Iraq prisoners.
- Holocaust: Nazis killed 5-6 million Jews.

Question 5

Supporting replication of Obedience.

Answer 5

• One experiment was done in which participants were made to give an electric shock when a real puppy misbehaved.
• They found 54% of male and 100% of female participants shocked the puppy to maximum voltage.
• The participants could see the pain so they would believe it was real.
• Bickam did a social experiment on the general public using someone dressed as a police officer and someone dressed as a milk man.
• They both told random people to do meaning tasks, such as jump up and down and turn around, - found 80% obeyed the police uniform and 40% obeyed the milkman showing people are more obedient to authoritative figures.

Question 6

Alternative explanations for participants Obedience, social identity theory.

Answer 6

• This theory states that in the experiment the participants identified more with the experimenter and the scientific study and is why they delivered maximum voltage.
• If the obedience of the participants decreased it would be due to them identifying more with the students.
  ‘The first three prods did not demand obedience, they appeal for help with the science’

Question 7

Experiment showed low internal validity.

Answer 7

• No control
  -Many psychologists argue that the experiment lacked realism.
• Experimenter was cool and distant when learner cries out in pain, therefore participants supposed the victims were not really suffering.
• study in 2013 participants listened to the tape recordings and many of them expressed doubts about the validity.

Question 8

What are the 3 states in Milgram’s agentic shift?

Answer 8

• Autonomous state: the state a person is in when they ‘see themselves acting on their own’
• Agentic Shift: The shift from autonomy (inderpendance) to ‘agency’
• Agentic State: a condition a person is in when they ‘see themselves as an agent for carrying out another persons wishes’.