Randomly selected participants - 40 male volunteers
What was the aim of the investigation?
To observe whether people would obey a figure of authority when told to harm another person i.e evaluating the influence of a destructive authority figure
What was the procedure of the investigation?
Participant given the role of 'teacher' and a confederate given role of 'learner'. This was decided through a random allocation.
Participant had to ask the confederate a series of questions - when confederate got the answer wrong, the participant had to give him an electric shock, even when no answer was given. This was incremented by 15V at a time, ranging from 300-450V, where 330V=lethal
Participants thought shocks were real when in fact there were no real shocks administers+confederate was acting. Shocks were told to be real before study.
What were the participants assessed on?
How many volts they were willing to shock the confederates with
What was the experimenter's role in the investigation?
Give a series of orders/prods when the participant refused to administer a shock, which increased in terms of demandingness for every time the participant refused to administer a shock.
The same 4 prods were used each time the participants refused to administer the shocks - first 3 demanded obedience to science, whereas the final prod demanded obedience specifically to the confederate
What were the findings of the investigation?
100% participants went up to 300V
65% went up to 450%
No participants stopped below 300V, whilst only 12.5% stopped at 300V, showing that the vast majority of participants were prepared to give lethal shocks to a participant
How did proximity of the experimenter affect obedience?
Participants obeyed more when the experimenter was in the same room i.e 63%. This was reduced to 40% when the experimenter and participant were in separate rooms, and further reduced to 30% in the touch proximity condition i.e where the experimenter forcibly placed the participant's hand on the electric plate.
How did location affect obedience?
Participants obeyed more when the study was conducted in a more prestigious university i.e Stanford.
This is because the prestige of such a location demands obedience and also may increase the trust that the participant places in the integrity of the researchers and their experiments
How did uniform affect obedience?
Participants obeyed more when the experimenter wore a lab coat - a person is more likely to obey someone wearing a uniform as it gives them a higher status and a higher sense of legitimacy.
It was found that obedience was much higher when the experimenter wore a lab coat opposed to regular clothing, however demand characteristics were particularly evident in this condition, with even Milgram admitting that participants could see through this deception
Strength of Milgram's study - high degree of replicability
The procedure has been repeated all over the world, where consistent and similar obedience levels have been found.
Replication of Milgram's study using TV show 'Le Jeu de la Mort', researchers found that 85% of participants were willing to give lethal electric shocks to an unconscious man (confederate), whilst being cheered on by a presenter and a tv audience.
Such replication increases the reliability of the findings
Strength of Milgram's study - external validity being established by supporting studies
Hofling et al observed the behaviour of doctors and nurses in a natural experiment (covert). The researchers found that 95% of the nurses in a hospital obeyed a doctor (confederate) over the phone to increase the dosage of a patient's medicine to double what is advised on the bottle.
This suggests that 'everyday' individuals are still susceptible to obeying destructive authority figures
Weakness of Milgram's study - social sensitivity issue
Milgram's findings suggest that those who are responsible for killing innocent people can be excused because it is not their personality that made them do this, but it is because of the situation they were in and the fact that it is difficult to disobey - some may strongly disagree with this, and especially the judicial system, where individuals are expected to take moral responsibility for their actions