Milgrams Research Flashcards
What is obedience?
It’s a form of social influence in which an individual follows a direct order. The person issuing the order is usually a figure of authority.
How many participants did milgram recruit?
40
How did he obtain his participants ?
Through newspaper adverts and flyers in the post. The ad said he was looking for participants for a study about memory
How old were the participants
Between 20 and 50 years
How much were they paid?
Paid them $4.50
How were the roles assigned?
They were rigged as the Confederate, ‘Mr Wallace’ ,always ended up as the ‘learner’ while the true participant was the ‘teacher’s. There was also an experimenter dressed in a lab cost played by an actor.
How did the teacher end up shocking the learner?
The learner was strapped in a chair in another room and wired with electrodes. The teacher was required to give the learner an increasingly severe shock each time each time the learner made a mistake on a learning task - the shock level started at 15 and rose to 450 volts.the shocks were demonstrated to the teacher but werent actually real.
What happened when the teacher reached 300 volts ?
Learner pounded on the wall and then gave no response to the next question
What happened if the teacher felt unsure about continuing ?
The experimenter used a sequence of 4 standard ‘prods’which were related if necessary
What happened if the teacher felt unsure about continuing ?
The experimenter used a sequence of 4 standard ‘prods’which were related if necessary
Findings of milgrams research
No participants stopped below 300 volts. 65% continued to the highest level of 450 colts. Qualitative data were also collected such as observations that the participants showed signs of extreme tension. All participants were debrief and assured their behaviour was entirely normal.
Participants were also sent a follow-up questionnaire how many reported that they felt glad to have participated?
84%
AO3- Low internal validity
Orne and Holland argued that the participants behaved the way they did because they didnt really believe in the set up- they guessed it wadnt real electric shocks. In which case milgram wasnt testing what he intended to test so the study lacked internal validity. This is supported by Perry’s research where she listened to tapes of his participants and reported many of them expressed their doubt about the shocks. However milgram himself reported 70% of his participants said they believed it was real shocks.
AO3- good external validity
Milgram argued that the lab environment accurately reflected wider authority relationships in real life. For example, hofling et al. Studied nurseries om a hospital ward and found that levels of obedience to unjustified demands by doctors were very high. This shows generalisability as his finding do have something valuable to tell us about how obedience operates in real life
AO3-ethicsl issues
Baumrind was very critical of the ways milgram received participants. Milgram led participants to believe that the allocation of ‘teacher’ and ‘learner’ was random, but in fact it was fixed. Perhaps the lost significant deception involved the participants believing the electric shocks were real. Baumrind objected because she saw deception as a betrayal of trust that could damage the reputation of psychologists and their research.
