Bocchiaro

• Social power refers to the influence an individual has to change another's behaviour, thoughts or feelings. Authority figures have social power so previous research has shown that people obey authority.
• Whistleblowers report or expose unjust behaviours in organisations.
• Milgram found that a high proportion of people will obey authority when asked to harm another person, but did not look at a person's dispositional obedience.
• Bocchiaro wanted to expand on Milgram's research by giving participants the option to obey, disobey or whistleblow an unjust request and touch on their individual differences.
• Bocchiaro aimed to:

  1. investigate rates of obedience, disobedience and whistle-blowing in response to an unethical request,
  2. investigate the accuracy of people's estimates of obedience, disobedience and whistleblowing,
  3. investigate the role of dispositional factors.
• Bocchiaro studied 149 undergraduate students (96 women and 53 men) from VU University who were paid €7 or given course credit. They had a mean age of 20.8. 11 participants were removed for being suspicious.
• Procedure part 1:

  • Main participants were informed of task and assured of confidentiality and greeted in the lab by the Dutch Experimenter who was formally dressed and stern,
  • They were asked to provide the name of 3 friends for a study on sensory deprivation,
  • They were told the cover story of a Rome study with disastrous effects and the ethics committee was evaluating if it should be allowed at VU University,
• Procedure part 2:

  • They were given 3 minutes to decide if they should write an enthusiastic letter, do nothing, or report the study to the ethics committee anonymously (by putting a form in a mailbox in the room),
  • They were left alone with the forms to the ethics committee for 7 mins to carry out their chosen action in another room,
  • The experimenter then returned and gave them HEXACO and SVO personality tests,
  • They were fully debriefed and asked to sign another consent form.
• Findings

  • In the comparison group only 3.6% said they would obey, 31.9% said they would disobey and 64.5% said they would whistleblow,
  • In the main participants, 76.5% obeyed, 14% disobeyed and 9% blew the whistle,
  • The only significant individual difference that the people who whistle blew tended to have a faith.
• Bocchiaro concluded that people tend to obey authority even when the authority is unjust. He also concluded that what people say they will do in response to an unethical request differs from what happens in reality.