Obedience: Milgram's Original Obedience Study Flashcards
Key terms/introduction
Obedience = A form of social influence in which an and visual 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.
Milgram (1963) sought an answer to the question of why the German population had followed the orders of Hitler and slaughtered over 10, million Jews, Gypsies and members of other social groups in the Holocaust during the Second World War. He wanted to know if Germans were different – why are they more obedient? He began his research by establishing a method to study obedience. His first, original study is the one against which all the others (‘ variations’) are compared, which is why it is sometimes called the ‘baseline’ study.
Procedure
Milgram recruited 40 male participants through newspaper adverts and flyers in the post. The ad said he was looking for participants for a study about memory. The participants recruited were aged between 20-50, and their jobs range from unskilled-professional. They were offered $4.50 to take part (which was a reasonable amount of money in the early 1960s).
When participants arrived at Milgram’s lab they were paid the money at the outset and there was a rich draw for the role. The confederate, always ended up as the ‘learner’ well the true participant was the ‘teacher’. There was also an ‘experimenter’ (another confederate) dressed in a lab coat, played by an actor. Participants were told they could leave the study at any time.
The learner was strapped to the chair in another room on the ward with electrics the teacher was required to give the learner an increasingly severe electric shock each time the learner made a mistake on a learning task (the task involved learning word pairs). The shocks were demonstrated to the teacher, but thereafter the shocks were not real.
The shock level started at 15 (labelled slight shock of a shock machine) and Rose 330 levels to 450 V (labelled danger – severe shock). When the teacher got to 300 votes (intense shop) the learner pounded on the wall and then gave no response to the next question. After the 315 V shop the ladder pounds on the wall again but after that there was no further response from the learner. When the teacher turned to the experimenter for guidance, the experiment gave a standard instruction: ‘An absence of response should be treated as a wrong answer’. If the teacher felt unsure about continuing, the experimenter used a sequence of 4 standard ‘prods’, which were repeated if necessary:
1) ’Please continue’ or ‘Please go on.’
2) ‘Experiment requires that you continue.’
3) ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue.’
4) ‘You have no other choice, you must go on.’
Findings
No participants stopped below 300 V, 12.5% (5 ppts) stopped the 300V, 65% continued to the highest level of 450V.
Qualitative data were also collected, such as observations that participants showed signs of extreme tension; many of them were seen to’ sweat, tremble, starter, but the lips, grows and take their fingernails into their hands’. 3 had ‘full-blown uncontrollable seizures’.
Prior to the study Milgram asked 14 psychology students to predict the participants’ behaviour. The students estimated that no more than 3% of the participants would continue to 450 votes. This shows that the findings were not expected.
All participants were debriefed, and assured that their behaviour was entirely normal. They also sent a follow-up questionnaire; 84% reported that they felt glad to have participated.
Evaluation of Milgram’s original study of obedience
- Orne & Holland (1968) argued that participants behave the way they did because they didn’t really believe in the set up – they guessed it wasn’t real shit electric shocks. In which case Milgram was not testing what he intended to test, i.e. the study liked internal validity. Gena Peris (2013) recent research confirms this. She listen to tapes of milligrams participants a reporter that many of them express their doubts about the shocks. However, Sheridan & King (1972) conducted a similar study where real shocks were given to a puppy. Despite the real shock is 54% of the male student participants and 100% of the females delivered what they thought was a fatal shock. This suggests that the effects in Milgram study were genuine because people behave the same way with real shocks. Milgram himself reported that 70% of his participants that they believe the shocks were genuine.
+ Although Milgram study was conducted in a lab, the study has good external validity because the central feature of the situation was the relationship between the authority figure (the experiment) and the participant. Milgram argued that the lab environment accurately reflected why don’t authority relationships in real life. Other research supports this argument. For example, Hofling we al. (1966) studied nurses on a hospital ward and found the levels of obedience to a justified demands by doctors were very high (with 21 out of 22 nurses obeying). 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 you have something valuable to tell us about how obedience operates in real life.
+ La Jeu de la Mort is a French documentary presented on TV in 2010. It includes a replication of Milgram study. The participants believed they were contestants in the pilot episode for a new game show called La Zone Xtrême. They were paid to give (fake) electric shocks – when ordered by the presenter – to all the participants, who were in fact actors, in front of the studio audience. In a remarkable confirmation of Milgram’s results, 80% of the participants the lip of the maximum shock of 460V to an apparently unconscious man. Their behaviour was almost identical to that of the grants participant (e.g. nervous laughter, nailbiting and other sign of anxiety). This replication supports Milgram’s original conclusions about obedience to authority, and demonstrates that his findings were not just a one-off chance occurrence.
