Milgram AO1

• What was the aim of Milgram's study?

  To observe whether people would obey a figure of authority when told to harm another person

  Evaluating the influence of a destructive authority figure
• What was the sample of Milgram’s study?

  Milgram recruited 40 male participants through newspaper adverts and flyers in the post. The ad said he was looking for participants for a study about memory. The participants recruited were aged between 20 and 50 years, and their jobs ranged from unskilled to professional
• What was the procedure of Milgram’s study?

  The true participant was assigned the role of ‘teacher’. They were introduced to a confederate ‘Mr Wallace’ who always needed up as the ‘learner’. There was also an ‘experimenter’ (confederate) dressed in a lab coat.
• What did the participants have to do?

  The learner was strapped in a chair in another room and wired with electrodes. The teacher was required to give the learner an increasingly severe electric shock each time the learner made a mistake on a learning task (the task involved learning word pairs). The shocks were demonstrated to the teacher. Thereafter the shocks were not real.
• The shock level started at 15 (labelled ‘slight shock ’ on the shock machine) and rose through 30 levels to 450 volts (labelled ‘danger – severe shock’). When the teacher got to 300 volts (‘intense shock’) the learner pounded on the wall and then gave no response to the next question. After the 315 volt shock the learner pounded on the wall again but after that there was no further response from the learner.
• What happened if the teacher helped unsure about continuing?

  The experimenter used a sequence of four standard ‘prods’, which were repeated if necessary
• What were the 4 prods?

  Prod 1 – ‘Please continue’ or ‘Please go on.’

  Prod 2 – ‘The experiment requires that you continue.’

  Prod 3 – ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue.’

  Prod 4 – ‘You have no other choice, you must go on.’
• What were the findings?

  All participants went up to 300V and 65% went up to 450V. Only 12.5% stopped at 300V
• What qualitative data was collected?

  Observations that the participants showed signs of extreme tension; many of them were seen to ‘sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan and dig their fingernails into their hands’. Three even had ‘full-blown uncontrollable seizures’.