Bocchiaro

• Background


  • whistleblower: a person who makes public disclosure of corruption or wrongdoing
  • Milgram's study and the questions it left us with regarding obedience
• method


  controlled laboratory experiment
• aims


  • to create a situation that allowed them to test whether people would obey, disobey, or blow the whistle on an authority figure who was encouraging immoral behaviours
  • to investigate if disobedient participants and whistleblowers have different personality characteristics to those who obey
• sample


  • 149 students at VU, 96F, 53M
  • opportunity method
  • paid 7 euros
• procedure


  Room 1- the participant meets a researcher in the lab of the university, the researcher asked them to write down the names of 5 students and then gave them a fake cover story about the research

  Room 2- participants are sat in front of a computer and asked to write a statement for their students recommending the research and they would find a research committee form and a mailbox to post it in. the researcher left for 7 minutes.

  participants were then debriefed by the researcher, participants filled out a second consent form to allow their data to be used
• results


  • those wrote the recommendation were obedient= 76.5%
  • those who reported the experimenter to the research committee were whistle-blowers= 9.4%
  • those who refused were disobedient=14.1%
  • there are no personality differences between those that do and do not whistle-blow/those who obey or disobey
  • no difference between males and females, between those who are religious and those who are not
  • people who have more faith tend to be more likely to whistle-blow
• conclusions


  • behaving in a moral manner is challenging for people, even when it appears to be the easiest path to follow
  • most people will obey when asked to do an unethical thing by an authority figure
  • people's personality and individual characteristics do not seem to influence how obedient they are
• links to the area


  • people still obey authority figures even when it would be easier to disobey/blow the whistle (most recommended the unethical research and did not report it)