Obedience to Authority - Milgram Flashcards
What was the aim and procedure?
To investigate whether participants would obey the instructions of a perceived authority figure.
- 40 male participants were each individually introduced to an experimenter in a grey lab coat and a friendly co-subject (who was a confederate).
- The P was told that the roles would be randomly allocated but roles were rigged so the co-subject always given the role of “learner” and the participant always given the role of “teacher”.
- The learner was taken to a room where he was strapped in a chair to prevent movement and an electrode was placed on his arm. The participant/teacher was taken to an adjoining room which contained an electric shock generator with switches that ascended in 15v increments ranging from 15v up to 450v. In fact, the shocks were not real.
- The teacher read a list of paired words and then gave the learner one part of the word pair and asked for the correct second word.
- If the learner got the answer correct, they moved on to the next word pair. If the answer was incorrect, the teacher shocked the learner starting at 15v and increasing by 15v each time.
-At times, the teachers questioned the experimenter, asking who was responsible for any harmful effects resulting from shocking the learner at such a high level. The experimenter gave standardised prompts eg “you must continue.”
A03 - Sheridan and King - Support
- offered an alternative method to obedience studies and produced similar findings.
- Participants were asked to give a puppy electric shocks increasing in strength.
- Students trained a puppy to learn a discrimination task by punishing it with increasingly severe real electric shocks whenever it made an error.
- Although the puppy actually received only a small shock, the participants could see and hear its squeals. After a while, an odourless anaesthetic was released into the puppy’s cage, causing it to fall asleep.
- Although participants complained about the procedure, they were reminded that the puppy’s failure to respond was a punishable error, and that they should continue to give shocks.
- 54% of male students and 100% of female students delivered what they thought was a fatal shock.
-Therefore, other studies also demonstrate the tendency to obey authority.
A03 - Ethical Issues
- P’s were deceived. They were told that the aim was to investigate memory and punishment, not obedience.
- They were also led to believe they were administering real electric shocks.
-This could lead to psychological harm of the participants and means that they weren’t able to provide fully informed consent.
Findings and conclsuon of Milgrams study
● 100% of Ps gave shocks of 300v on the shock generator.
● 65% of Ps went to 450v.
Conclusion:
Milgram concluded that ordinary people will enter the agentic state and obey immoral orders where conditions are right – e.g. order is given by a legitimate authority figure.
A03 - Burger
A weakness of Milgram’s study is that it has been criticised for lacking temporal validity as it was carried out over 50 years ago and obedience rates may have changed. However in a replaction, Burger, found levels of obedience almost identical to those found by Milgram. Therefore, although Milgram’s results are likely impacted by the time period and context in which it took place, this supports the idea that obedience is an internal human response to social pressure.
A03 - Abu Ghraib
There are multiple real-life examples of people following immoral orders. For example, in 2004, accounts of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, including torture, rape and murder of prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to public attention when photos of the abuse emerged. These acts were committed by military police personnel of the United States Army, many of whom later argued that they were just ‘following orders’. Therefore, Zimbardo’s study may offer valuable insight into human behaviour in these situations.
