Obedience: Milgram's research

Question 1

What is obedience?

Answer 1

Obedience is 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

When did Stanley Milgram conduct his research into obedience?

Answer 2

Milgram conducted his research in 1963

Question 3

What did Milgram aim to investigate?

Answer 3

Milgram 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 therefore wanted to test the ‘Germans are different’ hypothesis.

Question 4

Why is Milgram’s original study sometimes referred to as the ‘baseline’ study?

Answer 4

Because Milgram’s original study is the one against which all the others (‘variations’) are compared.

Question 5

What type of experiment was conducted by Milgram?

Answer 5

Milgram conducted a laboratory experiment

Question 6

How many participants did Milgram recruit?

Answer 6

Milgram recruited 40 participants through newspaper adverts and flyers in the post. Their jobs ranged from unskilled to professional.

Question 7

How did Milgram deceive his participants?

Answer 7

In the newspaper adverts and flyers, Milgram stated that he was looking for participants to take part in a study about memory.

Question 8

How old were Milgram’s participants?

Answer 8

All of Milgram’s participants were between 20 and 50 years old.

Question 9

How much money were his participants offered to take part?

Answer 9

Each participant was offered $4.50 to take part. This 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.

Question 10

How did Milgram allocate the participants to their role?

Answer 10

Milgram created a rigged draw in order to allocate roles to the participants.

Question 11

Who adopted the role of the ‘learner’?

Answer 11

A confederate, ‘Mr Wallace’, always ended up as the learner.

Question 12

Who adopted the role of the ‘teacher’?

Answer 12

The true participant was allocated the role of the ‘teacher’.

Question 13

Who adopted the role of the ‘experimenter’?

Answer 13

The experimenter was a confederate dressed in a lab coat. This individual was played by an actor.

Question 14

Were Milgram’s participants offered the right of withdrawal?

Answer 14

Yes: participants were told they could leave the study at any given time.

Question 15

In detail, explain how Milgram investigated the ‘Germans

are different’ hypothesis.

Answer 15

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 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. Thereafter the shocks were not real. The shock level started at 15 (labelled ‘slight shock’) and rose through 30 levels to 450 volts (labelled ‘danger-severe shock’).

Question 16

What was the lowest shock level available?

Answer 16

15 volts (‘slight shock’)

Question 17

What was the highest shock level available?

Answer 17

450 volts (‘danger-severe shock’)

Question 18

How were the learners instructed to behave when the teacher reached 300 volts (‘intense shock’)?

Answer 18

When the teacher got to 300 volts the learner pounded on the wall and then gave no response to the next question.

Question 19

How were the learners instructed to behave when the teacher reached 315 volts?

Answer 19

After the 315-volt shock the learner pounded on the wall again but after that there was no further response from the learner. This implied that the learner was either unconscious or dead.

Question 20

What happened when the teacher turned to the experimenter for guidance?

Answer 20

When the teacher turned to the experimenter for guidance, the experimenter gave the following 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 four standard ‘prods’, which were repeated if necessary.

Question 21

What were the four prods issued by the experimenter?

Answer 21

Prod 1: ‘Please continue’ or ‘Please go on’
Prod 2: ‘The experiment requires that you continue’
Prod 3: ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue’
Prod 4: ‘You have no other choice, you must go on’

Question 22

How many participants stopped before reaching 300 volts?

Answer 22

No participants stopped below 300 volts

Question 23

What percentage of participants stopped at 300 volts?

Answer 23

12.5% (five participants) stopped at 300 volts

Question 24

What percentage of participants continued to the maximum voltage of 450 volts?

Answer 24

65% continued to the highest level of 450 volts

Question 25

As well as conducting quantitative data, Milgram also generated qualitative data by observing the behaviour of his participant. What did Milgram specifically observe?

Answer 25

-Participants showed signs of extreme tension
-Many participants were seen to ‘sweat, tremble, stutter,
bite their lips, groan and dig their fingernails into their
hands’
-Three participants had full-blown uncontrollable seizures

Question 26

Milgram’s findings did not match up to those predicted by psychology students prior to the investigation. What was initially predicted?

Answer 26

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 volts. This highlights that the findings were not expected.

Question 27

How did Milgram limit the severity of ethical issues?

Answer 27

Milgram debriefed all of his participants, and assured them that their behaviour was entirely normal.

Question 28

In a follow-up questionnaire, how many participants reported that they felt glad to have participated?

Answer 28

84% reported that they felt glad to have participated

Question 29

Did Milgram accept or reject the ‘Germans are different’ hypothesis?

Answer 29

Milgram rejected the ‘Germans are different’ hypothesis because he concluded that any culture would conform in order to obey the higher powers.

Question 30

Evaluation point: ‘One limitation of Milgram’s study derives from criticism received from other psychologists’. Write a paragraph outlining this AO3 point.

Answer 30

One limitation of Milgram’s study derives from criticism received from other psychologists. For example, Orne and Holland (1968) argued that participants behaved the way they did because they didn’t really believe in the set up. Gina Perry later confirmed this after listening to tapes of Milgram’s participants, many of which reported doubt about the electric shocks. This therefore acts as a weakness of Milgram’s study because it suggests that his final conclusions, regarding whether or not ‘Germans are different’, tell us very little about how and why people genuinely conform. Because demand characteristics are likely to have been present throughout this investigation, Milgram’s findings can be criticised for lacking in internal validity. This can however be counter argued because alternative research has been conducted to suggest that people did in fact believe that the shocks were genuine. In 1972, Sheridan and King conducted a similar study where real-life shocks were given to a puppy. Despite the shocks being real, 54% of male student participants and 100% of female student participants delivered what they believed to be a fatal shock. This suggests that the effects of Milgram’s study were genuine because people behaved in the same way with real shocks. Overall, researchers have failed arrive at the same findings so Milgram’s initial theory can be criticised for being unreliable in nature.

Question 31

Evaluation point: ‘One strength of Milgram’s experiment derives from research support provided by Hofling et al (1966)’. Write an AO3 paragraph outlining this point.

Answer 31

One strength of Milgram’s experiment derives from research support provided by Hofling et al (1966). They studied nurses on a hospital ward and found that 21 out of 22 nurses obeyed when given unjustified demands by doctors. This acts as a strength of the ‘electric shock study’ because it suggests that the process of obedience to authority that occurred in Milgram’s lab study can be generalised to other situations, thus resulting in his findings having valuable application in contemporary psychology. In this light, Milgram’s experiment is high in real life application and external validity because it has the ability to be generalised to every-day contexts, providing us with insight into how obedience operates in society. Rank and Jacobson did however criticise this with their own study, in which nurses were asked to administer Valium. The nurses had the chance to discuss this order with one another and they were also provided with the name of a known doctor. Under these more realistic circumstances, only two out of 18 nurses obeyed the doctor’s order. This leads one to believe that Milgram’s participants conformed only because they knew the laboratory environment was artificial. As a result, a limit is placed on the extent of its real-life application. Additionally, because psychologists have failed to arrive at similar conclusions, the reliability of Milgram’s electric shock experiment is low.