Milgram's shock experiment Flashcards
What did Milgram do?
Stanley Milgram (1963) conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience
What was the aim of Milgram’s experiment?
To investigate how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities
What was the question Milgram devised the experiment to answer?
Could it be that Eichmann and his millions accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?
Who were the participants for this study?
40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional, from the New Haven area were paid $4.50 for just turning up to this experiment, after it had been advertised in the newspaper
What were the 2 roles that the participants could be?
Learner or teacher - this was fixed, the confederate was always the learner
Who was the experimenter?
There was an experimenter in a grey lab coat, played by an actor
Where did Milgram conduct this experiment?
Two rooms in the Yale Interaction Laboratory were used – one for the learner, with an electric chair and another for the teacher and experimenter with an electric shock generator
What was the procedure?
The “learner” was strapped to a chair with electrodes.
After he has learned a list of word pairs given to him to learn, the “teacher” tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its pair from a list of four possible choices.
The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).
What were the findings of this study?
65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.
Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations of his study. All he did was alter the situation (IV) to see how this affected obedience (DV).
What are 3 evaluation points for this experiment?
Low internal validity
Good external validity
Supporting replication
