Milgram's study of obedience Flashcards
What were the ppts in Milgrams study like?
- Original study n=40 but later tested nearly 1,000 participants, including female ones, all aged 20- 50
- Sample was diverse – broad range of occupations and ages, mostly male
What was the basic procedure for the study?
• Fake draw of sticks to decide who plays role of learner and who teacher (image)
o The participant sees him getting into a device that would give him electric shocks - they are also given a small electric shock to prove that it actually delivered these shocks
• The learner then moved to an adjacent room and the participant is placed in front of a ‘Shock generator’ machine with lots of switches and given a sample shock (45v) to prove that is real
• Read out word pairs and then test learner’s memory for them and punish each error with a shock (diagram)
• Increase intensity of shock upon each error (15v each time, rising from 15 to 450)
• If participant became reluctant to continue, then the experimenter used a script
What did the script say for reluctant participants?
- “Please continue” OR “Please go on”
- “The experiment requires that you continue”
- “It is absolutely essential that you continue”
- “You have no other choice, you must go on”
The last scripted response wasn’t often used because the ones before it prompted the participant to continue.
What measures were used in the Milgram study?
- Maximum voltage participant willing to shock to (interval level measure)
- Verbal scripts - he also recorded qualitative data and verbal transcripts of what the participants said
- Observation of video footage
- Debrief interview material - he continued recording after the experiment was over and he debriefed them
What happened in the pilot study?
When there was no oral feedback from the learner - everyone went to 450v
This is why they had to add the feedback from the learner where they were screaming in pain.
What sort of feedback from the learner was given at different voltages?
By 180v feedback included “I can’t stand the pain”, by 270 volts a loud scream)
At what voltage did ppts stop?
- Mean disobey voltage = 360 volts
- 65% never disobeyed at all and went to 450v
- No participants stopped before 300v
What other variations of the study were done?
- Participant left alone to set shock level – mean level chosen = 50v
- 2 experimenters present and they argued with each other – no participant continued
- Location changed from university to run-down office block – reduced to 48% fully obedient
- Experimenter (scientist) replaced by layperson – 20% fully obedient
- ‘Touch proximity’ - in this variation the participant has to push down the actors hand to deliver the shock, so there is no visual or physical barrier – 30% fully obedient (image)
- Proximity of learner (the target) decreased (link in chain) - instead of the participant pressing the button to deliver the shock, they only give the order to someone else who gives the shock – 93%
- Proximity of authority reduced (orders by phone) - when the experimenter wasn’t in the room and the orders were being phoned in - 20.5%
Is there any cross-cultural evidence to support the Milgram study?
In holland, 92% were obedient to the max shock level.
However this replication wasn’t very accurate to the original study.
In the Holland study, instead of electric shocks, they were asked to be verbally aggressive to the learner.
How valid is the early explanation suggested that participants isn’t real?
Almost all Ps said they thought they were delivering real shocks that were painful
Was the Milgram study a relic of its time?
Burger partial replication 2007
• Tested 18 men, and found that 65 percent of them agreed to administer increasingly painful electric shocks
• 22 women signed up for the experiment. 73 percent yielded to the orders of the experimenter. In this study the women were more obedient than men.
• Ps had an unusually high level of education. 22.9 percent had some college, 40 percent had bachelor’s degrees and 20 percent had master’s degrees.
• The group was also ethnically diverse with 54.3 percent (white), 18.6 percent (Asian), 12.9 percent (Latin/Hispanic), 8.6 percent (Indian-Asian) and 4.3 percent (African -American).
Burger (2009)
– replication in US (up to 150v) – similar obedience levels in men and women
– He stopped at 150v because the evidence showed that participants didn’t get upset before this point and furthermore, the vast majority of participants that got to this point in previous studies, would continue right to the very end.
Probably not a relic of its time, looking at Burger’s work.
Were participants just horrible people?
– Danger of Fundamental Attribution Error – this is the tendency to believe that someone behaves in a particular way because of something internal to them and their innate individual qualities. E.g., we want to think of terrorists as having personality flaws and something wrong with them, however, one of the 7/7 bomber was a teaching assistant loved by his pupils (Ross, 1977).
– Elms and Milgram found no significant personality differences
How is the case of Adolf Eichmann an early explanation of obedience?
Eichmann was a pen pushing office worker in Nazi Germany, who personally had to sign the death warrants of millions of Jews during the time of the holocaust.
- Hanna Arendt (1963) was a Jewish philosopher who attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. She wrote the book Eichmann in Jerusalem
- She argued that he appeared to be a very ordinary, banal figure.
- “I am not the monster I am made out to be” his defence was that he was just following orders (very similar to what participants said in Milgram’s experiment, interestingly the book was published near the same time of his first experiment)
What is the agentic shift?
(Milgram, 1974)
Individual becomes an instrument of authority, no longer fully autonomous.
He argues that your individual sense of morality is temporarily suspended when you feel that you are just part of a bigger machine. It can free us of inhibition and focuses solely on pleasing the authority figure.
- Almost an altered state of consciousness
- Acts conducted in this state have no long-term consequences for self-concept - what you do doesn’t have any long-term consequences for you, you feel absolved of responsibility
- Societies tend to require unthinking obedience to authority
- Obedience is often rewarded – e.g., in school or in the world of work
- Socially organized evil - there’s an idea that a situation can be evil
What explanations for obedience are there?
• Displacement of responsibility is powerful way of maintaining self-esteem and self-concept in the face of threat (Berkowitz, 1993)
• Norms – Ps had entered into a ‘contract’ they were going to be paid to take part, this put pressure on them to deliver what they had promised to do
• Buffer (technology) see Wye, 1971; Fisher (1981) there is a barrier between you and your actions (the shock generator)
• Incremental steps – ‘foot in the door’ technique start with a small request and slowly build the level of requests over time
• Authority respected – Yale
• Cause respected – ‘Science’ (ideological justification) & meaningful roles (learner/teacher)
• Surveillance being watched added pressure
• Little time for reflection and novel situation
• Focusing on ‘doing the job’ and the task itself (quotation)
• ‘De-valuing’ learner
– “He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked”