Obedience: Milgrams baseline study Flashcards
Aim
To test the belief that germans were more obedient by creating an obedience test on americans
Procedure
How did he gather participants
volunteer sample through local newsletter in the post, were offered $4.50 for participation
Procedure
sample size
40 men aged 20-50
Procedure
Describe the procedure
Participants were allocated a ‘teacher’ role and introduced to a confederate ‘learner’.
Participants asked to shock ‘learner’ (Mr Wallace) every time he got a question wrong
Everytime the learner got a Q wrong voltage fo shock would increase, maximum was 450V.
Milgram acted as the authorty figure to push the participants into increasing the voltage.
Results
65% went to max 450V
100% reached 300V, however at this point 12% of the sample dropped out.
3 participants had uncontrollable seizures
Conclusion
Findings showed Americans were just obedient at extreme levels, proving germans weren’t ‘just different’
Generalisability -
Study is androcentric as participants were all male. Findings cannot be applied to females so it lacks generalisability
However in other varient experiments including women, MIlgram found no significant difference between male and female levels of obedience
Reliability +
It had standardised procedures
example: confederates always played by the same actors, and the number and timing of the learners mistakes were always the same
this means everyone hada the same experience, reducing extraneous variables
Internal validity -
previously unseen film footage shows the participants questioning the authenticity of the shock machine
this reduces the internal validity of the study as participants may have guessed the shocks weren’t real
applicability +
Shows how obedience to authority works and this can be used in settings like schools. Teachers may change their appearance (uniform) to show their authority status.
