AO1

• Milgram (1963):

  • Participants - Randomly selected participants - 40 male volunteers.
  • Aim - 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.
• Milgram (1963):

  • Procedure A participant given the role of ‘teacher’ and a confederate given the role of ‘learner’. This was decided through a random allocation. Participant had to ask the confederate a series of questions. Whenever the confederate got the answer wrong, the participant had to give him an electric shock. The electric shocks incremented by 15 volts at a time, ranging from 300V to 450V, where 330V was marked as ‘lethal’. The shocks were falsely demonstrated to be real prior to the start of the study.
• Milgram (1963):

  • Findings All participants went up to 300V and 65% went up to 450V. No participants stopped below 300V, whilst only 12.5% stopped at 300V, showing that the vast majority of participants were prepared to give lethal electric shocks to a confederate
• Factors affecting obedience:

  • Proximity
  • Location
  • Uniform
• Proximity Participants - obeyed more when the experimenter was in the same room i.e. 62.5%. This was reduced to 40% when the experimenter and participant were in separate rooms, and reduced to a further 30% in the touch proximity condition i.e. where the experimenter forcibly placed the participant’s hand on the electric plate.
• Location Participants - obeyed more when the study was conducted at a 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
• Uniform - 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 greater sense of legitimacy. It was found that obedience was much higher when the experimenter wore a lab coat as opposed to normal clothes.