AO1

• Aim:

  To investigate whether people would obey an authority figure even when asked to do something which could cause harm to someone else.
• Method:

  40 males who volunteered to take part in a study investigating ‘how punishment affects learning’. 

  Controlled observation set in a laboratory, independent measures design.
• Procedure:

  The participants were asked to sit in a waiting room with a confederate who they believed was also a participant. The two men were then given envelopes and told they had been randomly assigned as either the ‘teacher’ or the ‘learner’. However, this was set up so that the naïve participant was always the ‘teacher’. 

  The naïve participant was then taken into the testing room and introduced to the experimenter who wore a white laboratory coat.
• Procedure: (2)

  The naïve participant was told to read words out loud which the ‘learner’ has been given to memorise. If the ‘learner’ answered correctly with the other word in the pair, the naïve participant was to read the next word. If the ‘learner’ answered incorrectly, the naïve participant was told to deliver an electric shock. Each time an incorrect answer was given, the electric shocks increased by 15v (from 0 all the way up to 450v ‘danger - XXX’).
• Procedure: (3)

  The electric shocks were not real and no harm was caused to the ‘learner’. The ‘learner’ was told to act as though he were in pain; at 300v he started to pound the wall and cry out, after 315v he fell silent and provided no answers. 

  If the naïve participant expressed that they wanted to stop at any time the experimenter used ‘prods’ to encourage them to continue; for example, ‘it is absolutely essential that you continue’.  
• Results:

  Milgram found that 100% of the participants shocked the ‘learner’ up to 300v, 12.5% stopped at 300v and 65% continued all the way up to 450v (which would be fatal) and was labelled ‘danger – XXX’.
• Conclusion:

  Milgram concluded that individuals do obey authority figures even when they are asked to hurt people and that their obedience is the result of the situation they are in.