Burger's Contemporary Study - Evaluation

• Strong Internal Validity

  • All Participants were unaware of Milgram's previous study, anyone who did know or had taken any Psychology classes were excluded
  • This was so no Demand Characteristics were created
• Drawbacks of Strong Internal Validity

  • Poor Generalisability - 38% were excluded from the study, this led to poor representation as only Psychologically robust people were tested
• Limited Application

  Alan Elms (2009) claims that Burger's research tells us little about the real world, as the experiment was stopped before any suffering or dissonance. Milgram's post-150V produced some of the most illuminating results in Psychology - Burger's study simply didn't replicate this wonder
• Issues and Debates

  Burger's study reawakened an old debate in ethical decision-making in Modern Psychology. Unlike Milgram's brutal carelessness for ethics, Burger was too tame. Benjamin and Jeffrey Simpson (2009) argue the tameness in modern studies is slowing progress in the field