Situational Variables affecting obedience

• A dispositional hypothesis- Milgram

  • Wanted to know if Germans had a different personality which made them more likely to blindly follow orders
  • Adolf Eichmann transported Jews to their murder, but was mild mannered and likeable when held for trial
• Milgram

  • Came from a working class, jewish family
  • Left Germany and fled to america to escape nazi rule
• Milgram wished to complete his study in Germany, however the Yale pilot was so shocking that he did not need to
• The Milgram Paradigm- a basic method for studying obedience which was then adopted by many researchers
• Summary of Milgram's research

  Participants were told to shock a confederate as punishment, the confederate protested. All participants administered 300V, 26/40 went to 450V
• Milgram's agency theory

  • When a person is on their own, they are responsible for their actions
  • When an authority figure is in the room, they become responsible for the person's actions
• Autonomous- actions based on our own values and conscience
• Agentic- Suppress own values, no longer feeling the responsibility
• Milgram's changing variables

  • Proximity
  • Location
  • Uniform
• Location

  • Run down office block rather than Yale Uni: 47.5%
• Uniform

  • Experimenter was replaced during the experiment by an ordinary member of the public, not in uniform: 20%, lowest of all the variations
• Evaluation

  • Concurrent Validity
  • Cross-cultural replications
  • Low internal validity
• Concurrent validity

  • Bickman (1974) had 3 people dress in a suit and tie, as a milkman and as a security guard
  • People were twice as likely to obey the security guard than the guy in jacket and tie
  • Uniform has a powerful affect on obedience
• Cross cultural representations

  • Netherlands: Meeus and Raaijmakers (1986) asked people to say stressful things to someone in an interview desperate for a job- 90% obedience
  • When the person giving order left, obedience fell
  • COUNTER: Smith and Bond (1998) found only two replications took place outside western culture (India and Jordan) between 1968-1985
• Low internal validity

  • Orne et Holland (1968) said participants may be aware the procedures were faked
  • Milgram agreed that the uniform variable looked fake
  • Demand characteristics