Obedience To Authority - Milgram’s Research Flashcards
What is obedience
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.
Example of obedience
One such example of this was when six million innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command by the Nazis during Hitler’s regime. The inhumane policies of the Nazis could only have been carried out on such a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders. The defence for many of the war criminals was that they were only following orders. Milgram’s study is an attempt to test ‘the Germans are different’ hypothesis.
Why did milgram do this study
Milgram’s study is an attempt to test ‘the Germans are different’ hypothesis. The Germans are different hypothesis states that German’s have a basic character deficit which means they have a readiness to obey people in authority regardless of the act they are being asked to carryout. It is an example of a dispositional explanation as it is arguing that the cause of behaviour is believed to result from the persons own personality or characteristics However, Milgram set out to question this dispositional attribution of the Germans. He believed that the situation had led to the inhumane behaviour of the Nazis and therefore that anybody in the same situation as those committing such atrocities would have done the same in the same circumstances. Milgram argued that people would commit atrocities if required to do so by an authority figure. This argument is an example of a situational explanation as it is arguing that the behaviour resulted from the situation a person was in.
Milgram aim
To investigate the level of obedience participants would show when an authority figure tells them to administer electric shocks to another human being.
And
To test the ‘Germans are different’ hypothesis and prove that the Holocaust was due to the dispositional factors of the soldiers
Milgram procedure
Milgram selected participants by advertising for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University. This is known as a volunteer sampling method. There were 40 male participants in all that took part in his original study. They were paid $4 per hour and told that the study was based on memory and learning. The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher’. The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s confederates (pretending to be a real participant).
The Learner was known as Mr Wallace. The learner (Mr Wallace) was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arms – the teacher (the real pp) saw this happening. Mr Wallace was asked if he had any medical conditions and he replied, ‘that apart from a minor heart condition’ he was fine!. Next, the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX).
The participant did not know that all of this was false; they thought that the learner was actually a real participant, and they thought the shock generator was real, and would actually give out electric shocks. The participant was told to read out pairs of words that the learner had to remember. If they got one wrong or said nothing at all, then the participant had to give them an electric shock, and had to increase the voltage each time. At 180 volts the learner shouted that he could not stand the pain, at 300 volts he begged to be released, and after 315 volts there was silence. If the participant asked advice from the experimenter, whether it be; ‘should I continue administering shocks’, or some other indication that he did not wish to go on, he would be given encouragement to continue with a sequence of standardised ‘prods’:
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’.
The prods were always made in sequence. Only if Prod 1 was unsuccessful could Prod 2 be used, etc. If the participant continued to disobey after Prod 4, the experiment was terminated. The experimenter’s tone of voice was always firm, but not impolite.
Milgram results/findings + conclusion
Milgram had predicted before the study that 2% of people would shock to the highest level, but most people would quit very early on. In fact, prior to the study Milgram asked 14 psychology students to predict the participants’ behaviour. The students estimated that no more than 3% would continue to 450 volts.
However, it was found that all participants shocked up to 300 volts and 65% of participants shocked all the way up to 450 volts.
In other words, All 40 of the participants obeyed up to 300 volts at which point 5 refused to continue. Four more gave one further shock before refusing; two broke off at the 330 volts level and one each at 345, 360 and 375 volts. Therefore, a total of 14 participants defied the experimenter, and 26 obeyed. Overall, 65% of the participants gave shocks up to 450 volts (obeyed) and 35% stopped sometime before 450 volts.
During the study many participants showed signs of nervousness and tension. Participants sweated, trembled, stuttered, bit their lips, groaned, dug fingernails into their flesh, and these were typical not exceptional responses. Quite a common sign of tension was nervous laughing fits (14 out of 40 participants), which seemed entirely out of place, even bizarre. Full-blown uncontrollable seizures were observed for three participants. On one occasion, a participant had such a violently convulsive seizure that the experiment had to be halted; the 46-year-old encyclopaedia salesman was extremely embarrassed. Participants took pains to point out that they were not sadistic types, and that the laughter did not mean they enjoyed shocking the learner.
Also all participants were debriefed at the end of the study and assured that their behaviour was entirely normal. All participants were sent a follow-up questionnaire, 84% reported that they felt glad to have participated.
Conclusion: normal ordinary people will obey authority even if their actions may be detrimental. Thus the hypothesis that the ‘Germans are different’ was not supported.
Consequences of procedure - milgram
-Some of the subjects suffered extreme nervous tension. Nervous laughter was observed.
-Participants were obviously physically sweating and continually asking for reassurance from the experimenter before continuing
-One participant had an epileptic fit.
Standardised Prompts
Standard prompts were used such as ‘the experiment requires that you continue’ and ‘you have no other choice you must go on’.
Why use controls
Controls in experiments are anything that help keep the situation the same for each participant or each condition.
Strengths of milgram study
Good external validity - although this study appears to lack external validity at first glance because it was carried out ion a lab, it still shows the relationship between the authority figure (in this case the experimenter) and the participant. Milgram argued that the lab environment accurately reflected real life authority. His research is also supported by Hofling et al.’s (1966) study where 21/22 nurses were willing to exceed the maximum dose of a drug followed by Dr Smith’s orders over the phone. Despite the nurses not knowing if Dr Smith was genuine! (please see below for full study) Another strength of Milgrams research into obedience is that it has supporting replication – Le Jeu De La Mort (The Game of Death)(2010) Le Jeu De La Mort is a documentary about reality TV, presented on French Television in 2010. It includes a replication of the Milgram study. The participants believed they were contestants on a pilot show for a new game show called La Zone Xtreme. They were paid to give (fake) electric shocks- when ordered by the presenter, to other participants, who were in fact actors, in front of the studio audience. In a remarkable confirmation of Milgram’s results, 80% of participants delivered the maximum shock of 460 volts to an apparently unconscious man. Their behaviour was identical to that of Milgram’s participants – nervous laughter, nail biting and signs 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
Hofling et al (1966) – Obedient nurses
22 nurses working a various American hospitals received telephone calls from a confederate “Dr Smith of the Psychiatric Department”, instructing them to give Mr Jones (Dr Smith’s patient) 20mg of a made up drug called Astrofen. Dr Smith said he was in a desperate hurry and would sign the drug authorisation form when he came to see the patient in 10 minutes time.
The label on the box containing the Astrofen clearly stated that the maximum dose was 10mg. So if the nurse obeyed Dr Smith’s instruction she would be exceeding the maximum daily dose. She would also be breaking the rules requiring written authorisation before any drug is given and that a nurse be absolutely sure that “Dr Smith” is a genuine doctor.
In reply to questionnaires, most nurses said they would not obey such an order. In reality, 21 out of the 22 nurses that received a call from “Dr Smith” complied without hesitation and 11 later said that they had not noticed the dosage discrepancy.
Weakness of milgrams study
Low internal validity – the term, internal validity means whether the procedure used in the experiment is measuring what it is supposed to measure – in other words, were the participants in Milgram’s experiment really being obedient or just showing demand characteristics? Orne and Holland (1968) argued that the participants behaved the way they did because they didn’t really believe in the set-up and guessed that they were not really giving electric shocks to the ‘learner’ meaning that the study is not measuring what it intends to measure thus lacking internal validity. In fact, Perry’s (2013) research confirms this. As she listened to tapes of Milgram’s participants and many of them expressed doubts on whether the shocks were real or not. However Milgram himself reported that 70% of the participants believed that the shocks were real.
Ethical issues – Baumrind (1964) was extremely critical of the ways Milgram deceived his participants. For example, Milgram made his participants believe that the roles of teacher and learner were purely randomly allocated when in reality the participant was always the teacher. Also, the fact that Milgram made his participants believe that the shocks were real. Baumrind believed that deception was seen as a betrayal of trust that could damage the reputation of psychologists and their research. (see table below for criticism and defence)
How did milgram defend ethical issues
1) Participants were not fully informed about the nature of the study and were thus unable to give their full consent.
The experiment required that the participants weren’t aware of the true nature of the study; deception was necessary. Afterwards participants were fully debriefed and told the true aim of the experiment. 2) Was made very difficult to withdraw. When participants said they wanted to stop they were actively told to continue. Withdrawal difficult but not impossible. Participants were not physically forced to continue and 35% did withdraw.
3) Risk of long-term harm: participants were put in an extremely stressful situation in which they were led to believe they had seriously injured and maybe even killed another person. Thorough debriefing provided. Told shocks were not real and reunited with the learner. Obedient participants were told that their behaviour was normal and that many others had also obeyed.
Furthermore, in defence of Milgram’s research, after the experiment was conducted, questionnaires were sent to participants of the study. 84% were glad/very glad to have taken part, with only 1.3% sorry to have taken part. 74% said they had learnt something of personal importance. This means that the majority of participants were not psychologically disturbed after the experiment meaning the experiment was worthwhile. In fact, one year on, participants were interviewed and judged to have sustained no psychological harm.
