Obedience: Milgram's research

• milgram recruited 40 male participants through newspaper ads and postal flyers. the ad said he was looking for participants for a memory study.
• participants were aged between 20 and 50 years, in jobs ranging from unskilled to professional. they were given $4.50 just for turning up.
• participants drew lots for their role. a confederate was always the 'learner' while the true participant was the 'teacher'. an 'experimenter' (another confederate) wore a lab coat. participants were told they could leave the study at any time.
• the learner was strapped into a chair in another room and wired with electrodes. the teacher has to give the learners an increasing severe electric 'shock' each time he made a mistake on a task (learning word pairs). the teachers were not told that the shocks were all fake and the learner was an actor.
• shocks started at 15 volts (labelled 'slight shock' on the machine) and rose through 30 levels to 450 volts ('danger- severe shock'). at 300 volts ('intense shock') the learner pounded on the wall and gave no response to the next question.
• when the teacher turned to the experimenter for guidance, he gave a standard instruction: 'absence of response should be treated as a wrong answer'.
• if the teacher felt unsure about continuing, the experimenter used a sequence of four standard 'prods'

  1. 'please continue' or 'please go on'
  2. 'the experiment requires that you continue'
  3. 'it is absolutely essential that you continue'
  4. 'you have no choice, you must go on'
• no participant stopped below 300 volts.

  five (12.5%) stopped at 300 volts.

  65% continued to 450 volts.
• observations (qualitative data) indicated that participants showed signs of extreme tension; many were seen to 'sweat, tremble, bite their lips, groan and dig their fingernails into their hands'. three had 'full-blown uncontrollable seizures'.
• prior to the study, bigram asked 14 psychology students to predict the naive participants' behaviour. they estimated no more than 3% of them would continue to 450 volts. therefore the findings were unexpected.
• participants were debriefed, and assured that their behaviour was normal. in a follow-up questionnaire, 84% reported that they felt glad to have participated. 74% felt they has learned something of personal importance.
• ethical issues associated with milligram's research

  baumrind criticised milgram's deceptions. participants believed the allocation of roles was randomly allocated, but it was fixed. the most significant deception was that participants believed the electric socks were real. baumrind objected because deception is a betrayal of trust that damages the reputation of psychologists and their research. deception of participants may also make then less likely to volunteer for future research.
• strength of milgram's research: good external validity

  milligram argued that the lab-based relationship between experimenter and participant reflected wider real-life authority relationships. hofling et al. found that levels of obedience in nurses on a hospital ward to unjustified demands by doctors were very high (21/22 nurses). therefore the processes of obedience in milgram's study can be generalised.
• limitation of milgrams study: lacked internal validity

  orne and holland suggest participants guesses the electric shocks were fake. so milligram was not testing what he intended to test (i.e. obedience). however, Sheridan and king's participants gave real shocks to a puppy, 54% of males and 100% of females delivered what they thought was a fatal shock. so the obedience in milgram's study might be genuine, 70% of milligram's participants believed the shocks were genuine.
• strength: support from replications

  in a French documentary contestants in a reality TV game show were paid to give (fake) electric shocks, when ordered to by the presenter, to other participants (actors), 80% gave the maximum 450 volts to an apparently unconscious man. their behaviour was like that of milligram's participants, e.g. many signs of anxiety. this supports milligram's original conclusions about obedience to authority and shows that his findings were not just a one-off