social influence milgram's experiment procedure (obedience) Flashcards
why did Stanley Milgram carry out his experiment
Stanley Milgram (1963) sought an answer to the question of:
“Why such a high proportion of the German people supported Hitler’s plan to slaughter over 6 million Jews in the Holocaust and other social groups during the 2nd World War - were Germans more obedient”
what is the first version of Milgram’s experiment referred to
His first original study is the one against which all the others (variations) are compared, which is why it sometimes called the “baseline” study
how did Milgram recruit participants
Milgram recruited 40 male participants using volunteer sampling
He placed ads in newspapers and flyers in the post. The ad said he was looking for participants for study about memory
The participants were offered $4.50 to take part (reasonable amount in the early 1960s)
what was the procedure
1) participants were paid the money at the outset and there was a rigged draw for their role
- a confederate “Mr Wallace” always ended up as the “learner”
- true participant waste the “teacher”
- the “experimenter” (another confederate) dressed in a lab coat
the participants were told they could leave the experiment at any time
2) learners was strapped in a chair in another room and wired with electrodes
3) Teacher required to give the learner an increasingly severe electric shock each time the learner made a mistake on a learning task ( task involved word pairs)
- the shocks were demonstrated to the teacher
- thereafter the shocks were not real
what were the shock levels
the shock level went from 15V (slight shock) to 315 (fatal - when this shock was administered, the learner pounded against the wall again but after that there was no further response from the learner )
the highest shock was 450V
what happened while the teacher administered shocks to the learner
The teacher would turn to the experimenter for guidance. The experimenter gave a standard instruction: “ An absence of response would be treated as a wrong answer” The experimenter used a sequence of four standard “prods” which were repeated if necessary
what were the four prods the experimenter used
prod 1: “Please continue”/ “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”
