original obedience study

• Milgram recruited 40 male participants through newspaper adverts and flyers. The participants were between 20-50 years old, and their jobs ranged from unskilled to professional.
• There was a rigged draw for their role so the participants were always teachers not the learner.
• Participants were told they could leave at any time.
• The shock level started at 15 and rose 30 levels to 450 volts (labelled 'danger-severe shock'). When the teacher got to 300 volts the learner pounded on the wall and then gave no response to the next question.
• The experimenter gave a standard instruction 'An absence of a response should be treated as a wrong answer'.
• The experimenter used a sequence of four standard 'prods' if the participant was unsure about continuing:

  • 'Please continue'
  • 'The experiment requires that you continue'
  • 'It is absolutely essential you continue'
  • 'You have no other choice, you must go on'
• No participant stopped below 300 volts, 12.5% stopped at 300 volts. 65% continued to the highest level of 450 volts.
• Participants showed signs of extreme tension, many were seen to 'sweat, tremble, stutter, groan and dig their fingernails into their hands'. Three even had 'full-blown uncontrollable seizures'.
• Milgram had asked 14 psychology students to predict the participants' behaviour. They estimated no more than 3% would continue to 450 volts. This shows the findings were not expected.
• All participants were debriefed and assured their behaviour was entirely normal. They were also sent a follow-up questionnaire, 84% reported they felt glad to have participated.
• Orne and Holland argued the participants behaved the way they did because they didn't really believe in the set up. In which case Milgram was not testing what he intended to test, so the study lacked internal validity. Gina Perry listened to tapes of Milgram's participants and reported many of them expressed their doubts about the shocks.
• However, Sheridan and King conducted a similar study where real shock were given to a puppy. Despite the real shocks, 54% of the male participants and 100% of the female participants delivered what they thought was a fatal shock. This suggests the effects in Milgram's study were genuine because people behaved the same when the shocks were real. Milgram himself reported that 70% of his participants said they believed the shock were real.
• Although Milgram's study was conducted in a lab (which would suggest it would lack external validity), the central feature was the relationship between the authority figure and the participant. Milgram argued the lab environment accurately reflected wider authority relationships in real life.
• This is supported by Hofling's study of nurses on a hospital ward. He found high levels of obedience to unjustified demands by doctors with 21 out of 22 nurses obeying. This suggests the processes of obedience to authority that occurred in Milgram's lab study can be generalised to other situations.
• A French replication of Milgram's study found that 80% of the participants delivered the maximum shock of 460 volts to an apparently unconscious man. Their behaviour was almost identical to that of Milgram's participants- nervous laughter, nail biting and other signs of anxiety. This supports Milgram's original conclusions about obedience to authority and demonstrates his findings were not just a one-off chance occurrence.