AO1

• Obedience

  • a form of social influence in which an individual follows a direct order. The person issuing the order is usually an authority figure who has the power to punish if obedient behaviour is not forthcoming
• Stanley Milgram

  • conducted a series of studies and sought to answer the question of why such a high proportion of the German population obeyed hitters demands during WW2
• Aim

  • To assess levels of obedience in people
• procedure (roles)

  • 40 American male volunteers attended a study on what they thought was on memory - specifically the effect of punishment on memory
  • Each ppt arrived at a lab in Yale. They met Mr Williams(researcher) and Mr Willis (fellow ppt), both of these were confederates
  • They drew straws to allocate roles - teacher and student, these roles were actually fixed and the ppt was always teacher
  • Mr Wallis was taken to his room and hooked up to a shock machine (strapped into his chair)
  • Ppts were taken to another room with the experimenter (they could hear mr Wallis but not see him)
• Procedure (experiment)

  • Mr Wallis had to answer questions about word pairs where they must recall the correct pair to the word read by the teacher
  • The teacher had to give the learner an increasingly severe shock on every incorrect answer given in 15v step ups (these shocks were fake)
  • Mr Wallis would bang on the walls, complain about heart problems, beg for the teacher to stop and at 315v (lethal) would go silent
  • This was prerecorded so Ppts would hear the same thing from mr Wallis at the same time
  • If the teacher questioned/wanted to stop mr Williams would probe him to continue
• Findings

  • The experiment continued until either the participant refused or the max level was reached
  • 100% delivered shocks up to 300v
  • 65% delivered shocks up to 450v
  • Ppts weren’t passive - sweating, nail-biting, trembling etc
  • 3 Ppts had full uncontrollable seizures
• Conclusions

  • Before conducting his series of experiments milgram asked psychiatrists, students and middle class adults the shock level of which they thought Ppts thought they would refuse to go on
  • All said they would refuse to go beyond 195 - 240v and estimated no more than 3% would go to 450v
  • All Ppts were debriefed and met mr Wallis at the end of the experiment - in a follow up 84% said they were glad they had participated
  • We obey a legitimate authority figure even if it means causing harm