social psychology : milgram Flashcards
milgrams study of destructive obedience : aim
To investigate the tendency for destructive obedience.
method.
40 male volunteers were told they were taking part in a learning experiment. They took the role of teacher, giving what they thought were painful shocks to a confederate whom they believed to be a fellow participant taking the role of learner.
Shocks increased by 15V for every wrong answer and went up to a maximum of 450V.
results
100% of participants gave at least 300V and 65% gave
the full 450V. Most participants displayed signs of stress while
giving the shocks.
Conclusion
People are surprisingly obedient to orders given by people in authority. However they become distressed when obeying orders to hurt another person.
context.
Most of the time we are told that obedience is a good thing. If your teacher tells
you to get your book out or to answer a question, you might not want to do it but
you probably accept that the most socially appropriate behaviour is to obey. You
probably also accept that your teacher has the right to give you an instruction
of this kind. But what if you were ordered to do something that caused harm or
distress to another person? This type of obedience, in which people obey orders
to cause harm, is called destructive obedience. Social psychologists such as
Stanley Milgram have been particularly interested in destructive obedience.
As the member of a European Jewish family that had left Europe for America,
Milgram was profoundly affected by the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany
against Jewish people and other minority groups. One of the key features of the
Nazi atrocities was the extent to which people displayed destructive obedience.
Many ordinary people obeyed destructive orders that led to the systematic
mass murder of minority groups, including Jews, Romanies, Communists, Trade
Unionists, and people with disabilities.
Early psychological research into the Holocaust focused on the idea that
something distinctive about German culture or personality led to the high levels
of conformity and obedience necessary for genocide to take place. This is
known as the dispositional hypothesis. While Milgram was interested in
this idea, he was also interested in the social processes that take place between
individuals and within groups. The idea that we can explain events such as the
Holocaust by reference to the social processes operating in the situation, rather
than the characteristics of the individuals involved, is called the situational hypothesis. In his early work Milgram worked with another famous social
psychologist, Solomon Asch. Together they studied people’s tendency to
conform to group pressure. Milgram went on to investigate the tendency to obey
destructive orders from individuals in positions of authority.
key words : dispositional
hypothesis and the situational hypothesis.
There is a tension in social psychology between explanations that focus on the individuals involved in a social situation and those that focus on the situation itself. These explanations are known respectively as the dispositional hypothesis and the situational hypothesis.
BEFORE THE MAIN PROCEDURE
Before carrying out the main study, Milgram told psychology students about his
procedure. This would involve ordering people to give electric shocks to a helpless
man (actually an actor) whom they believed to be a fellow participant. The electric
shocks would increase in intensity up to 450V. On average students estimated that
only 1.2% of participants would obey the orders and give all the shocks.
AIM
The aim of the study was to investigate how obedient people would be to orders
from a person in authority that would result in pain and harm to another person.
More specifically, the aim was to see how large an electric shock participants would
give to a helpless man when ordered to by a scientist in his own laboratory.
METHOD - design
Milgram himself described his original study as a laboratory experiment. Technically it might more accurately be called a pre-experiment, because it had only one condition. The results from this condition then served as a baseline for a number of variations in follow-up studies. The dependent variable (DV) was the obedience. Obedience was operationalised as the maximum voltage given in response to the orders.
METHOD - Participants
Forty men aged 20–50 were recruited by means of a newspaper advertisement.
The sample was therefore mostly a volunteer or self-selecting sample. They
were from a range of backgrounds and held a range of jobs: 37.5% were manual
labourers, 40% were white-collar workers, and 22.5% were professionals. All were
from the New Haven district of North America.
METHOD : Procedure
Participants were recruited by means of a newspaper advertisement. They were
promised $4.50 for their time, including 50 cents for travel It was made clear that
payment was for turning up to the study, and was not conditional on completing
the procedure. When each participant arrived at Yale University he was
introduced to a man he believed to be another participant. The two men were
then briefed on the supposed purpose of the experiment, which was described to
them as to investigate the effect of punishment on learning.
In fact the other man was working for Milgram. He was a 47-year-old Irish-
American accountant. He had been selected for the role because he was mild-
mannered and likeable. People who help with experiments in this way are known
as confederates or stooges.
The naïve participant and the confederate were told that one of them
would play the role of teacher and the other the learner. They drew slips of paper
from a hat to allocate the roles, but this was fiddled so that the naïve participant
was always the teacher and the confederate was always the learner. They were
then immediately taken to another room where the learner was strapped into a
chair and electrodes were attached to him. They were shown the electric shock
generator. This had a row of switches, each labelled with a voltage, rising in
15-volt intervals from 15V up to 450V. Participants were told that the shocks
could be extremely painful but not dangerous; they were each given a 45V
shock to demonstrate.
There was a wall between the teacher and learner, so that the teacher
could hear but not see the learner. The procedure was administered by an
experimenter, played by a 31-year-old male biology teacher. The participant
(in the role of teacher) read out word pairs to test the confederate (in the role of
learner). Each time the confederate-learner made a mistake, the experimenter
ordered the teacher-participant to give a shock. The shock got larger by 15V for
each mistake. The confederate-learner did not really receive shocks, but there
was no way for the teacher-participant to know this.
Up to 300V the confederate-learner did not signal any response to the
shocks. However, at 300V and 315V, he pounded on the wall. He was then
silent and did not respond to further questions. This suggested that he was
hurt, perhaps unconscious, or even dead. When participants turned to the
experimenter for guidance, they were told to treat no response as incorrect and
to continue to give the shocks. When they protested, they were given a series of
verbal prods to encourage them to continue.
Each participant was considered to have completed the procedure either
when they refused to give any more shocks, or when they reached the
maximum voltage on the shock machine. They were then interviewed and de-
hoaxed. During their interview they were asked to rate on a scale of 0–14 how
painful the last few shocks they gave were. They were told that the shocks were
not real, that the learner was unharmed, and that the real purpose of the study
was to investigate obedience.
RESULTS
Quantitative and qualitative data was gathered. The ‘headline figures’ were
quantitative, in the form of the average voltage that participants went up to,
and the number of participants giving each voltage. The average voltage given
by participants was 368V. 100% of participants gave 300V or more; 65% gave the
full 450V. Remember that psychology students had on average estimated that
only 1.2% of participants would do this! In their post-experiment interviews, their
average rating of how painful the shocks were was 13.42 out of a maximum of 14.
Qualitative data was gathered in the form of the comments and protests
participants made during the procedure, and in the form of observations of their
body language. Most participants showed signs of tension during the procedure.
Signs included groaning, sweating, biting lips, and stuttering. Fourteen giggled
nervously. One had such a severe seizure that the procedure was stopped. One
observer noted:
‘I observed a mature and initially poised business man enter the
laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced
to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching the
point of nervous collapse.’ (p. 377)
Most participants protested against the procedure, although the verbal prods
were in most cases sufficient to get them to continue giving the shocks.
CONCLUSIONS
Milgram drew two main conclusions from this study:
1 People are much more obedient to destructive orders than we might expect,
and considerably more than psychology students suggested in their
estimates. In fact, the majority of people are quite willing to obey destructive
orders.
2 People find the experience of receiving and obeying destructive orders highly
stressful. They obey in spite of their emotional responses. The situation
triggers a conflict between two deeply ingrained tendencies: to obey those in
authority, and not to harm people.
Results supported the situational hypothesis rather than the dispositional
hypothesis.
CONCLUSION : Explaining the high levels of obedience
Milgram identified nine possible factors in the situation that might have
contributed to the high levels of obedience seen.
1 The study was carried out in a respectable environment of a top university.
2 The aim of the study appears to be a worthwhile one.
3 The learner appears to have volunteered and so has an obligation to the
experimenter.
4 The teacher too has volunteered and so has an obligation to the
experimenter.
5 Features of the design, for example payment, increase this sense of
obligation.
6 From the perspective of the teacher, he might equally well have been
unlucky enough to have been the learner and to have endured the shocks.
7 The rights of the participant to withdraw and the scientist to expect
compliance are not obvious.
8 The participants were assured that the shocks were not dangerous.
9 The learner has appeared to be comfortable with the procedure for the
first 300V.
CONCLUSION : Later variations on the procedure
What we have described here is Milgram’s first published study, but over the
following 10 years he refined his procedure. (This is why, if you watch footage
of the procedure, some details might differ from the original procedure in the
first published study.) As well as refining the basic condition, Milgram also
tested the effect of a number of variations. Results are shown in the form of the
percentage of participants who went to the maximum 450V in each condition.
In general, giving the participant greater distance from the learner, or less
personal responsibility for decision-making, increased obedience, while reducing
the apparent power of the experimenter, or making the situation appear less
respectable or scientific, reduced obedience.
These variations have been replicated many times by different researchers.
Luttke (2004) reviewed these studies and concluded that Milgram was right
about some but not all of his conclusions. In particular, the presence of
disobedient participants and the physical closeness of the learner reliably
reduces obedience. However, most studies have found that varying the location
of the study makes little difference to obedience.
