Obedience Flashcards
1
Q
who researched obedience
A
Milgram (1963)
2
Q
What was Milgrams baseline procedure?
A
- 40 American men volunteered to take part in a study supposedly on memory
- when each volunteer arrived at Milgrams lab he was introduced to another participant (a confederate)
- they drew lots to see who would be the teacher and who would be the learner. The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher
- an experimenter was also involved ;also a confederate dressed in a grey lab coat)
- men were aged 20-50 years old and came from the same area in the aux
- volunteers recruited through a newspaper
paid $4.50 for participating - learner was strapped into a chair and wired up with electrodes
- the shocks were not genuine
- learner had to remember pairs of words, each time they got it wrong the teacher delivered stronger shocks by pressing switches on a shock machine
- the shocks were labelled from ‘slight shock’ to ‘danger-severe shock’
- the shocks ranged from 15v to 450v
- there were 4 standard prods: ranged from ‘please continue’ to ‘you have no other choice you must go on’
- they were all debriefed and assured their behaviour was entirely normal, also sent a follow up questionnaire and 84% said they were glad to have participated.
3
Q
what were the baseline findings
A
- every participant delivered shocks up to 300v
- 12.5% (5 participants) stopped at 300v and 65% continued to the highest level of 450v. they were fully obedient
- milgram collected qualitative data including observations such as: the participants showed extreme signs of tension, many of them seemed to sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan. Three had uncontrollable seizures.
4
Q
why were the findings unexpected
A
before the study milgram asked psychology students to predict what would happen and they said no more than 3% would continue to 450v
