Obedience - Milgram

• Study Aim


  see whether people would obey and inflict harm on each other person using electric shocks, by following the order of an authority figure

  was to see whether all individuals had the potential to cause harm like the Germans and the Nazi's or if they were different
• Study Procedure


  40 male ppts -> recruited through newspaper adverts and flyers in the post

  ad was about memory

  ppts - aged 20-50

  confederate was always 'learner' and true ppt was always 'teacher'

  experimenter (confederate) was dressed in a lab coat

  teacher was required to give learner an increasingly severe electric shock each time the learner made a mistake on learning task

  shocks went from 15V to 450V - 30levels

  when teacher got to 300V, learner pounded on wall then gave no response

  when teacher turned to experimenter for guidance, experimenter gave a standard instruction 'an absence of response should be treated as a wrong answer'

  if teacher hesitated, experimenter used a sequence of 4 standard 'prods'

  1. 'please continue'

  2. 'experiment requires that you continue'

  3. 'absolutely essential that you continue'

  4. 'you have no other chance, you must go on
• Study Results


  no ppts stopped below 300V

  12.5% of ppts stopped at 300V

  65% continues to 450V

  qualitative data were collected -> observation of extreme tension, sweating, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan

  3 had full blown uncontrollable seizures

  prior to experiment, Milgram asked 14 psychology students to predict ppts behaviour

  students estimated no more than 3% of ppts would continue to 450V
• Study Conclusion

  all ppts were debriefed

  84% of ppts felt glad they participated

  Milgram concluded German people aren't 'different'

  American ppts in his study were willing to obey order even when they might harm another person
• Weakness - Ethical Issues

  Baumrind was very critical of ways Milgram deceived his ppts. Milgram deceived his ppts as they believed they were taking part in a memory study

  also led ppts to believe the allocation of teacher and learners was random, but it was fixed

  ppts believed electric shock were real.

  Baumrind saw deception as a betrayal of trust that could damage the reputation of psychologists

  also danger ppts are less likely to volunteer in the future.
• Strength - Supporting replication

  Hofling conducted study in a hospital

  Nurses were telephoned by a 'Dr Smith' asking they administered a drug to a patient

  order went against hospital regulations

  1. nurses weren't allowed to take instructions over phone

  2. instructions were from an unknown doctor

  3. dosage was twice that advised on the bottle

  95% of nurses did as requested

  Strength - demonstrates that obedience to authority figures does occur IRL
• Weakness - Lacks Population Validity

  Milgram used a biased sample of 40 male American volunteers

  unable to generalise the results to other populations, particularly in collectivist cultures and for females as it can't be concluded those with other experiences would respond in a similar way than observed by Milgram
• Weakness - Low in internal validity

  Orne and Holland propose so many of ppts went to higher voltages as they didn't believe the shocks were real.

  means Milgram may not have been testing what we intended to investigate, lowering the internal validity

  later argued that up to 70% of ppts believe the shock being administered were real