Milgram's study

• Milgram wanted to see why events such as the holocaust happened and how far people would go just to obey authority figures
• The experiment took place at Yale university
• 40 Participants, all white US males and were paid $4.50 for participating.
• Milgram's variations:

  1. Proximity
  2. Uniform
  3. Location
• Proximity

  • teacher and learner where seated in the same room
  • participants who administered the full 450 volts dropped from 65% to 40%
• Location:

  • conducted the experiment in a run down office
  • percentage of participants who administered the full 450 volts dropped from 65% to 47.5% because the experiment felt less credible
• Uniform:

  • originally, the experimenter wore a lab coat and instead wore ordinary clothes. This took away the level of authority
  • percentage of participants who administered the full 450 volts dropped from 65% to 20%
• If a participant wanted to stop, the researcher would give the participant a series of props such as 'the experiment requires you to continue.' (issues with right to withdraw)
• participants believed that they were involved in an experiment about punishment on learning
• The teacher (participant) was instructed to administer an electric shock ever time the learner (confederate) made a mistake and to increase the voltage after each mistake.
• As the electric shocks increased the learner’s screams, which were recorded, became louder and more dramatic. At 180 volts the learner complained of a weak heart. At 300 volts he banged on the wall and demanded to leave and at 315 volts he became silent, to give the illusions that was unconscious
• Milgram found that all of the real participants went to at least 300 volts and 65% continued until the full 450 volts. He concluded that under the right circumstances ordinary people will obey unjust orders.
• Another ethical issue was that many of the participants reported feeling exceptionally stressed and anxious while taking part in the experiment and therefore they were not protect from psychological harm and the participants may have been wracked up in guilt
• Milgram’s study has been criticised for lacking ecological validity as the experiment as it was a lab experiment. The findings from the study cannot be generalised on real life situations of obedience due to the experiment being vastly different to real scenarios 
• milgram's experiment lacked population validity as the study was conducted on all men (androccentric) and is also ethnocentric as it cannot be generalised to other cultures except for the US