Obedience eval Flashcards
Ethical issues
There is no question that Milgram deceived his participants. They believed that the allocation of Teacher and Learner roles was random, but the drawing of lots was fixed so the genuine participant was always the Teacher. The most obvious deception was leading the participants to believe they were giving real electric shocks that caused harm to the Learner.
Although Milgram debriefed his participants at the end of each procedure, Baumrind (1964) argued that the deception was unjustified. The main consequence of the deception was that the participants could not give their fully informed consent to take part. Their consent was worthless because the participants did not know what they were actually consenting to. The deception also made them vulnerable to psychological harm because they did not know what the procedure involved and what their role in it was.
Therefore the benefits may not outweigh the costs because the reputation of psychological research could become damaged if it frequently uses deception. This in turn would reduce the number of people willing to become participants, making psychological research with representative samples more difficult.
Research support
One strength is that Milgram’s findings were replicated in a French documentary that was made about reality TV.
This documentary (Beauvois et al. 2012) focused on a game show made especially for the programme. The participants in the ‘garne’ believed they were contestants in a pilot episode for a new show called Le Jeu de la Mort (The Game of Death. They were paid to give (fake) electric shocks (ordered by the presenter) to other participants (who were actually actors) in front of a studio audience. 80% of the participants delivered the maximum shock of 460 volts to an apparently unconscious man. Their behaviour was almost identical to that of Milgram’s participants - nervous laughter, nail-biting and other signs of anxiety.
This supports Milgram’s original findings about obedience to authority, and demonstrates that the findings were not just due to special circumstances.
Low internal validity
One limitation is that Milgram’s procedure may not have been testing what he intended to test.
Milgram reported that 75% of his participants said they believed the shocks were genuine. However Martin Orne and Charles Holland (1968) argued that participants behaved as they did because they didn’t really believe in the set up, so they were ‘play-acting. Gina Perry’s (2013) research confirms this. She listened to tapes of Milgram’s participants and reported that only about half of them believed the shocks were real. Two-thirds of these participants were disobedient.
This suggests that participants may have been responding to demand characteristics, trying to fulfil the aims of the study.
Counterpoint However
Counterpoint However, Charles Sheridan and Richard King (1972) conducted a study using a procedure like Milgram’s. Participants (all students) gave real shocks to a puppy in response to orders from an experimenter.
Despite the real distress of the animal, 54% of the men and 100% of the women gave what they thought was a fatal shock.
This suggests.that the effects in Milgram’s study were genuine because people behaved obediently even when the shocks were real.
Alternative interpretation of findings
Another limitation is that Milgram’s conclusions about blind obedience may not be justified.
Alex Haslam et al. (2014) showed that Milgram’s participants obeyed when the Experimenter delivered the first three verbal prods (see facing page). However, every participant who was given the fourth prod (“You have no other choice, you must go on) without exception disobeyed. According to social identity theory (SIT), participants in Milgram’s study only obeyed when they identified with the scientific aims of the research (‘The experiment requires that you continue).
When they were ordered to blindly obey an authority figure, they refused.
This shows that SIT may provide a more valid interpretation of Milgram’s findings, especially as Milgram himself suggested that ‘identifying with the science is a reason for obedience
