Social Influence: Variables Affecting Obedience

• Variables affecting Obedience


  Proximity, Location and Uniform
• Milgram (1963)


  Experiment investigating whether people would obey a figure of authority when told to harm another person
• Procedure


  1. A participant given the role of 'teacher' and a confederate given the role of 'learner' through random allocation

  2. Participant had to ask the confederate a series of questions

  3. Whenever the confederate got the answer wrong, the participant had to give him an electric shock, even when no answer was given

  4. The electric shocks incremented by 15 volts at a time, ranging from 300V to 450V, where 330V was marked as 'lethal'

  5. Participants thought the shocks were real when in fact there were no real shocks administered, and the confederate was acting

  6. The shocks were falsely demonstrated to be real prior to the start of the study

  7. Participants were assessed on how many volts they were willing to shock the confederate with

  8. The experimenter's role was to 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 the shocks

  9. The same 4 prods were used each time when participants refused to administer the shocks. The first 3 demanded obedience to science, whereas the final prod demanded obedience specifically to the confederate
• Factors


  • Proximity
  • Uniform
• Proximity


  • Participants obeyed more when the experimenter was in the same room i.e. 62.5%
  • Reduced to 40% when the experimenter and participant were in separate rooms
  • 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
  • Prestige of such a location demands obedience
  • May increase the trust that the participant places in the integrity of the researchers and their experiments
• 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
  • Obedience was much higher when the experimenter wore a lab coat as opposed to normal clothes
  • Demand characteristics were particularly evident in this condition, with even Milgram admitting that many participants could see through this deception
• The participants were thoroughly and carefully debriefed on the real aims of the study, in an attempt to deal with the ethical breach of the guideline of protection from deception and the possibility to give informed consent
• In a follow up study conducted a year later, 84% of participants were glad they were part of the study and 74% felt as if they learned something
• This suggests that the study left little or no permanent or long-term psychological harm on participants
• Real life applications


  This research opened our eyes to the problem of obedience and so may reduce future obedience in response to destructive authority figures
• Such research also gives an insight into why people were so willing to kill innocent Jews simply when told to

  It highlights how we can all easily be victims to such pressures
• A general awareness of the power of such influences


  Is useful in establishing social order and moral behaviours
• Gina Perry reviewed the interview tapes and found that a significant number of participants raised questions about the legitimacy of the electric shocks
• Quantitative data gathered by Milgram directly suggested that 70% of participants believed that the shocks were real
• These findings appear plausible when considering that 100% of the females used in Sheridan and King's study administered real electric shocks to puppies
• This suggests that although the findings were certainly surprising, they were also likely to be accurate
• Highly replicable


  • The procedure has been repeated all over the world, where consistent and similar obedience levels have been found
  • For example, in a replication of Milgram's study using the TV pseudonym of 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