social influence: obedience -> stanley milgram Flashcards
What is obedience?
A form of social influence in which an individual follows a direct order from another person, usually a figure of authority
Who did research into obedience?
Stanley Milgram (1963)
What was the aim of Milgram’s research?
To investigate how far an ordinary person would go in obeying an unjust order from an authority figure who instructed them to inflict pain and injure an innocent person
-> conflicting with their personal conscience
What did Milgram also investigate?
The conditions under which people obey/disobey authority and the psychological mechanisms behind obedience and disobedience
What was the sample size of Milgram’s study?
Milgram’s sample consisted of 40 male American participants recruited through a newspaper
- the participants were volunteers paid $4.50 to take part
What was the baseline procedure of Milgram’s study?
1) The participants were invited to a laboratory at Yale University where they were introduced to the experimenter and another participant (both confederates)
2) They ‘drew lots’ to see who would be assigned to the role of ‘Teacher’ and the ‘Leaner’ but this was fixed so that the naive participant was always the ‘Teacher’
3) Learner and Teacher were taken to the experimental room and strapped into a chair and wired up with electrodes
4) The Teacher was given a small shock to experience for themselves as the only genuine shock
5) The Learner had to remember pairs of words and if they answered incorrectly, the teacher was instructed to give them a shock
6) The Level of shock would gradually for each wrong answer, starting at 15 V going up in intervals of 15 to 450 V
7) At 300 V (intense shock) the learner would bang on the wall and after the 315 V shock was administered, there were no further responses from the Learner
8) The experiment continued until either the participant refused to continue or reacted to the maximum level of 450 V
9) If the teacher tried to stop the experiment, the experimenter would respond with a series of four verbal prods e.g. ‘The experiment requires that you continue’
What were the results of Milgram’s baseline study?
- 100% of participants continued up until 300V
- 65% of participants continued all the way up to the maximum of 450V
- A total of 14 ‘defiant’ participants stopped before reaching the highest levels
What qualitative observations were made?
Qualitative observations were also made which report participants showing signs of distress and extreme tension for example, sweating, stuttering and trembling
What do these results illustrate about Milgram’s aims?
Illustrates Milgram’s core point: the conflict between adhering to an authority’s commands and upholding one’s own moral standards can trigger extreme anxiety
What was the conclusion of Milgram’s study?
- Under the right situational circumstances, the majority of ordinary people will obey unjust orders from someone perceived to be a legitimate authority figure
- Milgram wanted to know why the German population followed the orders of hitler and slaughtered 10 million Jews, Gypsies and members of other social groups in the Holocaust
Evaluation: Support from other research -> strength
- Hofling (1966) conducted a field experiment into obedience (rather than lab)
- To investigate how many nurses would break hospital regulations when asked by a doctor
- nurses were given orders over the phone to administer double the maximum dosage of a drug to a patient
- 21 of 22 nurses obeyed, suggesting even in a situation with ecological validity and a task with mundane realism, people are highly obedient to those who they feel have legitimacy of authority
Evaluation: multiple methodological problems -> limitation
- Milgram conducted a laboratory study, which is very different from real-life situations of obedience
- the task, using a shock generator, lacks mundane realism; in everyday life we obey far more harmless instructions, rather than giving people electric shocks
- As a result, we are unable to generalise his findings to real life situations of obedience and cannot conclude that people would obey less severe instructions to the same degree
- Additionally, the study lacks ecological validity as the environment of Yale University was not normal for the participants
- people do obey but it’s in places and tasks they are familiar with, like work or school
- Another issue is the gender bias of Milgram’s work as his original experiment and later variations used entirely male samples, making it androcentric, and ungeneraliseable to women who may show greater levels of obedience under a patriarchal 1960s America
Evaluation: Ethical issues -> limitation
- Broke several ethical guidelines as Milgram deceived his participants in the study so they were unable to provide informed consent
- thought that the allocation of roles was random, but it was in fact fixed
- they believed that they were taking part in a study on how punishment affects learning rather than on obedience
- Due to the nature of the task, Milgram did not protect the participants from psychological harm, since many of them showed signs of real distress during the experiment
- Despite having the right to withdraw, the experiment’s immersive nature made it psychologically difficult for them to exercise that right.
- Some critics of Milgram believed that these breaches could serve to damage the reputation of psychology and jeopardise future research
Counterpoint for ethical issues:
- However, it can be argued that these decisions were necessary for Milgram to conduct his research
- considering the influence of Milgram’s work on our understanding of obedience, from a cost-benefit perspective, the temporary harm his participants experienced was worth it
- Milgram dealt with ethical issues by debriefing his participants and in a follow-up questionnaire, 84% said they were glad to have participated
