Obedience - Milgram

Question 1

What is obedience?

Answer 1

• A form of social influence in which an individual follows a direct order. The person issuing the order is usually a figure of authority, who has the power to punish when obedient behaviour is not forthcoming.

Question 2

What was the aim?

Answer 2

Milgram (1963)

• Interested in researching how far people would go to obey an instruction, even if it meant harming another person.

(Milgram was interested in how easily normal people could be influenced into commotion atrocities, e.g. Germans in WWII)

Question 3

Who were the participants?

Answer 3

• Recruited 40 male participants through newspaper adverts and flyers in the post
• Advertisement said the study was about memory
• Participants aged between 20 and 50 years, were paid $4.50, and their jobs ranged from unskilled to professional.

Question 4

What was the procedure?

Answer 4

• There was a rigged draw for their role ( true participants were always the teacher)
• One confederate (Mr Wallace) was the learner and the other acted as the experimenter dressed in a lab coat, participants were told they could leave the study at any time.
• The learner was strapped in a chair in another room wired with electrodes, and the teacher was required to administer a shock every time they made a mistake on a learning task. The shocks were not real but the naive participant did not know this.
• The shock level started at 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 volts (severe shock). when the teacher got to 300 volts (intense shock), the learner pounded on the wall and then gave no response to the next question.
• When the teacher looked for help, the experimenter gave a standard instruction ‘An absence of a response should be treated as a wrong answer’ and if the teacher felt unsure about continuing, the experimenter would say:
  1. Pleas continue/go on
  2. The experiment requires you to go on
  3. It is absolutely essential that you continue
  4. You have no other choice, you must go on

Question 5

What were the findings?

Answer 5

• No participants stopped before 300 volts, 65% administered the final shock of 450 volts
• Many participants showed signs of stress and anxiety ( sweating, trembling, stuttering) and 3 had ‘full-blown uncontrollable seizures’.
• Before the study, 14 psychology students were asked to predict how many participants they thought would obey, the majority said 3%.
• Participants were debriefed and 84% of participants mentioned in a questionnaire that they were glad they took part in the study.

Question 6

(AO3) What is a strength of the study?
(1)

Answer 6

Good external validity:

• While the study appeared to lack external validity because it was conducted in a lab, the central feature of the situation was the relationship between the authority figure (experimenter) and the participant.
• Milgram argued that the lab environment accurately reflected wider authority relationships in real life.
• Hofling et al (1966) studied nurses in a hospital ward and found that levels of obedience to unjustified demands by doctors were very high (21/22 obeyed).
• This suggests that the processes of obedience to authority that occurred in Milgram’s lab study can be generalised to other situations, so his findings do have something valuable to tell us about how obedience operates in real life.

Question 7

(AO3) What is a strength of the study?
(2)

Answer 7

Supporting replication:

• In 2010, a French TV show replicated Milgram’s study, and the participants believed they were contestants in a pilot episode for a new game show called la Zone Xtreme. They were paid to give (fake) shocks - when ordered by the presenter - to other participants (who were 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 the participants in Milgram’s study (nail biting, nervous laughter).
• This supports Milgram’s original conclusions about obedience to authority and demonstrates that his findings were not just a one-off chance occurrence.

Question 8

(AO3) What is a weakness of the study?

Answer 8

Low internal validity:

• Orne and Holland (1968) - argued that participants behaved the way they did because they didn’t believe the set-up (guessed the shocks weren’t real), which means that Milgram was not testing what he intended to test - lacked internal validity.
• Perry (2013) - listened to tapes of Milgram’s participants and reported that many of them expressed their doubts about the shocks.

Counter-argument:
- Sheridan and King (1972) conducted a similar study where real shocks were given to a puppy, and despite the real shock, 54% of the male student participants and 100% of the females delivered what they thought was a fatal shock.

• This suggests that the effects of Milgram’s study were genuine because people behaved the same way with real shocks. Milgram reported himself that 70% of his participants said they believed the shocks were genuine.