A03

• Low internal validity

  • Limitation- Milgrams procedure may not have been testing what he intended to test
  • Reported that 75% of his pps said they believed the shocks were genuine but Martin Orne and Charles Holland argued that pps behaved as they did because they didn’t really believe it
  • Gina Perry listened to tapes of Milgrams pps and reported that only about half of them believed the shocks were real and two thirds of pps were disobedient
  • Pps may have been responding to demand characteristics, fulfilling the aims of the study
• Counterpoint to low internal validity:

  • Charles Sheridan and Richard King conducted a study using a similar procedure to Milgram
  • Pps gave real shocks to a puppy in response to order from an experimenter and despite the distress of the animal, 54% of men and 100% of women gave the shock
  • People obeyed even when shocks were real
• Alternative interpretation of findings:

  • Limitation- blind obedience may not be justified
  • Alex Halam et al showed that Milgram pps obeyed when the experimenter delivered the first three verbal prods, however every person given a fourth prod disobeyed
  • According to social identity theory pps in Milgrams study only obeyed when they identified with the aims of the research, when they were ordered to blindly obey an authority figure, they refused
• Ethical issues

  • Pps were deceived
  • E.g thought pps thought that the allocation of roles was random, but it was fixed
  • Also thought shocks were real
  • Diana Baumrind criticised Milgram for this