Milgram

• Name of Researcher and Date of Research : Milgram 1963
• Title of the Study : Obedience
• One Assumption of the Social Approach is :

  Behaviour, cognitions and emotions are influenced by social contexts, social environment and groups.
• One Assumption of the Social Approach :

  Behaviour, cognitions and emotions are influenced by the actual, implied or imagined presence of others
• Aims :

  • Overall aim: To investigate how obedient people would be to orders from a person in authority that would result in pain and harm to another person.
  • Specific aim: To see how large an electric shock participants would give to a helpless man when ordered to.
• Methodology: Controlled Observation - Aspects of the environment are controlled, in an attempt to give participants the same experience. This is often conducted in a laboratory setting. 
• Strengths of Controlled Observations:

  • More control
  • More accurate observations
  • Easier to replicate
  • Usually avoid ethical problems of consent
• Weaknesses of Controlled Observations:

  • Awareness of being observed might affect participants behaviour
  • Low ecological validity
  • Demand characteristics
  • Cause and effect
• Details about Participants :

  • 40 males between the ages of 20-50 were drawn from the New Haven district of Connecticut
  • 37.5% were manual labourers, 40% were
  • White-collar workers and 22.5% were professionals.
• Sampling Technique :

  • Participants were recruited participants using a newspaper advert (paid them).
  • Volunteering Sampling - could cause participant variable (you don’t know what you’re getting)
• Research Design: Independent Measures Design
• Results :

  • Before Milgram embarked upon his study, fourteen Yale seniors, all psychology majors, were provided with a detailed description of the experimental situation.
  • They were asked to reflect carefully on it, and to predict the behavior of 100 hypothetical subjects.
  • There was considerable agreement among the respondents on the expected behavior of hypothetical subjects. All respondents predicted that only an insignificant minority would go through to the end of the shock series.
• Results :

  • Most of the participants were sweating, shaking, stuttering or fidgeting during the study.
  • 14 participants giggled nervously. The participants who had nervous laughter fits were keen to point out that they weren’t sadistic and that their laughter wasn’t a sign that they enjoyed shocking the learner.
  • 3 had seizures and the procedure was stopped for one of them.
  • Average rating of how painful the shocks were was 13.42 out of a maximum of 14.
• Results :

  • The question was also posed informally to Milgram’s colleagues, and the most general feeling was that few if any subjects would go beyond the designation Very Strong Shock.
  • 26 participants were obedient and administered a complete round of electric shocks, while only 14 were defiant.
  • 65% obeyed 
  • 35% terminated the experiment before reaching 450 volts.
  • When the experimenter was the one to end the experiment (at 450 volts), many of the participants sighed in relief or shook their heads in what seemed like regret.
• Results :

  • The estimates ranged from 0 to 3%; i.e., the most "pessimistic" member of the class predicted that of 100 persons, 3 would continue through to the most potent shock available on the shock generator—450 volts. The class mean was 1.2%. 
• Conclusion:

  • People are much more obedient to destructive orders than we think.
  • They find this process highly stressful despite obeying them.
  • Results supported the situational hypothesis rather than the dispositional hypothesis.
• Strengths of the Study:

  • Reliability - standardised procedure (prods/script)
  • Application - Helpful in understanding destructive obedience 
  • Validity - Face and construct validity
• Weaknesses of the Study :

  • Generalisability - white privilege males from New Haven
  • Low Ecological Validity - not a mundane task
  • Ethics - suffered stress, deception, right to withdraw didn’t exist (prods)
• The Different Prods used :

  Prod 1

  Please continue or Please go on 

  Prod 2

  The experiment requires you to continue

  Prod 3

  It is absolutely essential that you continue

  Prod 4

  You have no choice, you must go on
• Situational :

  Social explanations of behaviours focus on situational factors - The presence of other people (you’d behave differently if you went to a rave than a funeral)
• Dispositional:

  The dispositional approach is that behaviour is governed by individual characteristics such as age, personality, and gender (how you react at the funeral is different than others)
• Name of Researcher and Date of Research: Piliavin and 1969
• Title of Research: Subway Samatarians
• One Assumption of the Social Approach:

  • Behaviour, cognitions and emotions are influenced by social contexts, social environment and groups.
• One Assumption of the Social Approach:

  • Behaviour, cognitions and emotions are influenced by the actual, implied or imagined presence of others
• Aims:

  • To test the diffusion of responsibility hypothesis in a real-life setting 
  • To look at the effect of the type and race of the victim on the speed of helping, frequency of responding and the race of the helper
  • To look at the effects of modelling on emergency situations
  • To examine the relationship between the size of the group, and the frequency and latency of helping response with a face-to-face victim.
• Hypotheses:

  1. An individual would be more inclined to help someone of his race than a person of another race
  2. Regarding the type of victim: help would be given more frequently and rapidly to the apparently ill victim
  3. Whatever sympathy individuals may experience when they observe a drunk collapse, their inclination to help him will be reduced by the realisation that the victim may become disgusting, embarrassing, and/or violent (cost-reward matrix)