Milgram -Obedience

• Stanley Milgram (1963) conducted a study into obedience
• There were three roles in the experiment


  • The experimenter, the authority figure played by a confederate
  • The teacher, the person who would test the learner and administer punishments played by the real participant
  • The learner, the person who would receive punishments if they got questions wrong played by a confederate
• Procedure

  1. Participants were told they had to ask questions to the learner and if the learner answered incorrectly the teacher had to give them an electric shock that would increase in voltage starting at 15 volts, going up in 15 volt increments up to a maximum shock at 450 volts

  2. The learner sat in another room and gave mainly incorrect answers. The learner remained silent until the 300 volt shock (labeled 'very strong shock'). At this point he didn't respond to the next question but pounded on the wall instead, he did this again at 315 volts and after that he said/did nothing

  3. If the teacher refused to continue, the experimenter had some verbal prods that he used to try and get the teacher to continue
• Structured interview


  An interview with predetermined questions to collect qualitative data
• Qualitative data


  Data in the form of words, descriptions, and observations rather than numbers
• Quantitative data


  Data in the form of numbers that can be measured and analyzed statistically
• Milgram's original obedience study

  Stanley Milgram (1963) sought an answer to the question of why the German population had followed the orders of Hitler and slaughtered over 10 million Jews, Gypsies and members of the social groups in the Holocaust during the Second World War
• Procedure

  1. Milgram recruited 40 male participants through newspaper adverts and flyers

  2. Participants were aged between 20 and 50 years, and their jobs ranged from unskilled to professional

  3. Participants were offered $4.50 to take part

  4. Participants were told they could leave the study at any time

  5. Learner was strapped in a chair in another room and wired with electrodes

  6. Teacher was required to give the learner an increasingly severe electric shock each time the learner made a mistake on a learning task

  7. Shocks were demonstrated to the teacher but were not real

  8. When the teacher turned to the experimenter for guidance, the experimenter gave a standard 'prod' instruction
• The experiment requires
• Prior to the study Milgram asked 14 psychology students to predict the participants' behaviour
• The students estimated that no more than 3% of the participants would continue to 450 volts
• This shows that the findings were not expected
• All participants were debriefed, and assured that their behaviour was entirely normal
• Many of Milgram's participants objected, but they were still willing to carry out the wishes of the experimenter
• Orne and Holland (1968) argued that participants behaved the way they did because they didn't really believe in the set up - they guessed it wasn't real electric shocks
• Sheridan and King (1972) conducted a similar study where real shocks were given to a puppy, and 54% of the male student participants and 100% of the females delivered what they thought was a fatal shock
• This suggests that the effects in Milgram's study were genuine because people behaved the same way with real shocks
• Milgram himself reported that 70% of his participants said they believed the shocks were genuine
• Milgram's study

  • It may at first glance appear to lack external validity because it was conducted in a lab
  • However, the central feature of this situation was the relationship between the authority figure (the experimenter) and the participant
  • Milgram argued that the lab environment accurately reflected wider authority relationships in real life
• Hofling et al. (1966) studied nurses on a hospital ward and found that levels of obedience to unjustified demands by doctors were very high (with 21 out of 22 nurses obeying)
• This suggests that the processes of obedience to authority that occurred in Milgram's lab study can be generalised to other situations
• In the replication, 65% of the participants delivered the maximum shock of 460 volts to an apparently unconscious man, and their behaviour was almost identical to that of Milgram's participants
• This replication supports Milgram's original conclusions about obedience to authority, and demonstrates that his findings were not just a one-off chance occurrence