all topics/studies evaluation

• Agency theory

  Theory that explains obedience to authority
• Milgram variation 5

  • 65% were in the agentic state (went up to 450V)
  • People who refused were in the autonomous state, showed moral strain and defence mechanisms
• Agency theory is limited and descriptive as it doesn't tell us why obedience happens in the first place, the agentic and autonomous state aren't measurable
• Supporting study

  • Bickman found that when people were given instructions from a civilian, milkman and guard they were most obedient to the guard
• Individual differences

  • Authoritarian personality
• Milgram ordinary man

  • Found that they were less obedient than in variation 5 showing that a legitimate authority figure is important
• Applications from this as uniforms and badges should be used e.g. in the police to encourage obedience
• Social impact theory

  Theory that explains obedience to authority
• Milgram's telephonic variation

  Supports the idea of immediacy because obedience levels fell when the researcher wasn't in the room
• Hoffling's nurses

  21/22 obeyed orders over the phone so contradicts the idea of immediacy being needed for obedience
• Milgram's ordinary man variation

  Obedience fell because there was no authoritative figure
• Social impact theory is reductionist as the impact of others involves many different factors such as measuring powers of persuasion which isn't able to be reduced to a mathematical formula
• The formula used makes obedience measurable and can be used cross culturally for predictive power
• Social impact theory is limited in the type of social situation that it can explain e.g. can't predict what will happen when there are two equal groups e.g. football crowds with equal strength,number and immediacy
• Milgram (original variation)

  • Standardised procedures used e.g. went up in 15 V increments for the shocks delivered, high reliability
  • Low ecological validity, shocking people isn't how obedience is seen in real life
  • Protection from harm not followed, 3 people had seizures and there were frequent signs of nervous laughter
  • Post experiment checkup months later showed that 84% were happy that they had taken part
  • High generalisability as the participants had a range of educational levels
  • Ethnocentric as all from the new haven area of america so may be cultural differences
• Rundown office block (variation 10)

  • High ecological validity took place in bridgeport, an industrial city near yale which was a more natural setting than the university
  • Low task validity as shocking people isn't a natural behaviour
  • Standardised procedure, all told that it was a private firm
  • Ethics broken e.g. deception when being told that it was part of a private firm
  • Application, a prestigious setting leads to obedience so we should make school buildings nice and have standards and rules
  • Applications may be limited because the sample had low generalisability as they were all from america
• Telephonic instructions (variation 7)

  • Standardised procedures used e.g. 15 V increments and instructions given through a tape recording
  • Low reliability as opposing research e.g. Hofling found that 21/22 nurses obeyed over the phone
  • Low ethics as they were deceived thinking they were given instructions from a real person but it was a tape recording over the phone
  • Led to applications as there is less obedience when proximity is lower so in businesses workers would be more efficient if bosses were in the same office
  • Low generalisability as the sample consisted of 40 men so may not represent obedience in females
  • Low validity as some participants wanted to help the confederate and so weren't in the autonomous state
• Ordinary man gives orders (variation 13)

  • High reliability as there is supporting research from Bickman where there was a guard,milkman and civilian asking the public to pick up litter, most obedient to the guard and least to the civilian
  • Low ecological validity as Milgram ordinary man took place in a laboratory environment at the university of Yale
  • Standardised procedure, experimenter gave the instructions and then left the room
  • Low task validity as shocking people isn't an everyday use of obedience
  • Low ethics, the participants were deceived as they didn't know that the ordinary man was a confederate
  • Leads to applications e.g. the strength of an authority figure so the police/army should wear uniforms to show power
• Individual differences

  • Those with internal locus of control were more likely to resist obeying especially if they suspected that they were being manipulated by the experimenter, 37% of high internals disobeyed
  • No link between locus and obedience found in Schurz study with 56 Austrian participants
• Locus of control

  Measured with the Rotter scale which provides a good general measure
• Measuring locus of control with a questionnaire or interview could lead to social desirability bias
• The F scale is subject to acquiescence bias which could mean that people look more authoritarian than they really are
• Cause and effect relationship not able to be established as data collected is correlational
• Culture

  • Lowest obedience rating in Australia (individualistic) and highest in South Africa (collectivist)
  • 92% of experimental group in Meeus and Raaijmakers study obeyed to the end even though they didn't like their task, showing that individualistic cultures are still obedient
  • In USA more responsibility was placed on criminals whereas in Japan and Russia, more emphasis was placed on obedience, showing that collectivist cultures are more obedient
• The study on culture looks at attitude which is an issue because it isn't an accurate or objective measure of obedience levels
• Meeus and Raaijmakers study about administrative violence where they gave negative stress remarks about performance and personality that would be detrimental to performance, higher task validity than Milgram as more realistic activity than giving someone shocks
• Blass found that the evidence is inconclusive to show that cross cultural differences exist
• Gender

  • Milgram experiment 8 found no difference in obedience between this group of females and the original sample, did show higher levels of stress
  • Sheridan and King found that 100% of females were fully obedient whereas only 54% of males were obedient, showing that there are gender differences
  • Burger found no gender differences as similar results were obtained to Milgram's original study and shows that there is no temporal effect
  • Kilham and Mann found significant gender differences across all conditions, men paired with male learners and women with female learners, women more likely to form an alliance with the victim
• Excluded people from the final sample e.g. people who had heard of Milgram's experiment, not representative or applicable to these people
• Further research should be done with men and women paired with learners of the opposite sex to see if this had any effect on obedience and to increase validity
• Social identity theory

  • Lalondes hockey study supports the idea of in-group favouritism
  • Wetherall found that with white and Polynesian children in NZ the latter were more generous to the out-group, showing that there are cultural differences
  • Tajfel's minimal group studies found that when putting school boys into arbitrary groups, they consistently awarded more points to the boy that they saw on their team
• Most minimal group studies occur in a lab environment so may not be representative of real life prejudice
• Jane Elliot's Brown eyes blue eyes experiment found that when placed into the groups, the children quickly developed prejudiced attitudes which had not been seen when they were viewed as one group
• Reductionist explanation as it reduces prejudice down to social categorization which is too simplistic
• Realistic conflict theory

  • Support from Sherif's robbers cave experiment e.g. name calling and physical fights so had to be separated
  • Tyerman and Spencer conducted a similar study with English boy scouts and friendship choices with the out-groups remained and competition remained friendly
  • Real life evidence that when people compete for scarce resources there is a rise in hostility between groups e.g. when there is high unemployment there may be high levels of racism
  • Imposing superordinate goals has been shown to not always be effective for reducing prejudice e.g. Brown found that it may increase antagonism towards the out-group
• Social identity theory contradicts the realistic conflict theory as it states that prejudice can be explained by our tendency to class ourselves as part of a group rather than due to competition
• Factors affecting prejudice

  • Levin found that when they primed Jewish participants to think about their social identity within Israel, Ashkenazi Jews had higher SDO scores but this disappeared when primed to think about relationships between Israel and Palestine
  • Cohrs et al found that RWA (+48) and SDO (+28) were positively correlated with generalised prejudice
  • Authoritarian explanation can't explain how whole groups are prejudiced because it would mean that all the members of a group would need to have authoritarian personalities which is quite unlikely
  • Greenstein found that all items on the F scale questionnaire are worded in the same direction so it is possible to get a high score by just ticking down the same line on the page, scale may be a measure of tendency to agree
• The theory can't account for the sudden rise/fall in prejudice e.g. antisemitism in Nazi Germany grew during a decade so too short for a whole generation of German families to adopt new child rearing practices
• Closed questions

  Produce quantitative data which is easier to analyse objectively
• Open questions

  Produce qualitative data which are rich in detail and allow researchers to gain new insights into the topic