obedience : milgrams research ao3 Flashcards
Strength - research support
P: One strength is that Milgram’s findings were replicated in a French documentary that was made about reality TV (Beauvois et al. 2012).
E: Participants believed they were contestants in a pilot episode for a new gameshow called Le Jeu de la Mort.
E: 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 participants gave the maximum shock of 460v to an apparently unconscious man.
E: Their behaviour was almost identical to that of Milgram’s participants.(nail biting nervous Laughter alongside being completely obedient.
L: This supports Milgram’s original findings and shows they were not due to special circumstances. Thus giving credibility to Milgrams original findings (65% gave maximum 450v)
Weakness - low internal validity
P: One limitation is that Milgram’s procedure may not have been testing what he intended to test.
E: Milgram reported that 75% of participants said they believed the shocks were genuine.
However, Orne and Holland (1968) suggests participants didn’t really believe in the set-up and were play-acting.
• Perry (2013) confirmed this after listening to tapes of Milgram’s participants and reported that only about half of them believed the shocks were real and two-thirds of these participants were disobedient.
→ Suggests that participants was responding to demand characteristics.
Counter point to low internal validity
However, Sheridan & King (1972) did a Milgram-like study, but with one difference, the participants were delivering real shocks to a shock to a puppy in response to orders from an experimenter
• 54% of males and 100% of females delivered what they thought to be a fatal shock.
• This suggests that maybe Milgram’s results were genuine because people behaved obediently even when the shocks were real.
Weakness - ethical issues
P: One criticism of Milgram’s study is that it broke several ethical guidelines.
E: • Deception: they believed that they were taking part in a study on how punishment affects learning, and the role allocation was rigged.
Protection from harm: many of the participants showed signs of real distress during the experiment and may have continued to feel guilty following the experiment.
E: → Some critics of Milgram believed that these breaches could serve to damage the reputation of psychology and jeopardise future research.
HOWEVER CONSIDER…Do the rewards outweigh the cost???
We could argue the importance of findings made did justify the way research was conducted.
Bc the research is actually useful for society in determining factors affecting obedience to authority. As we have a better understanding of why people obey orders they might not agree with. Providing explanations why atrocities happen in the real world.
