milgrams experiment

• Deception


  The participants actually believed they were shocking a real person, and were unaware the learner was a confederate of Milgram's
• Told they were involved in


  Memory and learning experiment
• Milgram interviewed participants afterwards to find out the effect of the deception
• 83.7% of participants said that they were "glad to be in the experiment"
• 1.3% of participants said that they wished they had not been involved
• Protection of participants


  Participants were exposed to extremely stressful situations that may have the potential to cause psychological harm
• Limitation of Milgram's study


  • Lacked ecological validity as it was carried out in a lab under artificial conditions
  • Hard to generalise the finding to a real life setting, as people do not usually receive orders to hurt another person in real life
• Limitation of Milgram's study

  • Sample was biased as Milgram only used males, so results cannot be generalised to females
• Value of Milgram's work


  • Gives an insight into why people under the Nazi reign were willing to kill Jews when given orders to do so
  • Highlights how we can all be blind to obedience, often doing things without question
• Strength of Milgram's study

  • Used a standardised procedure because it was a lab experiment, which improves the reliability of the study and helps establish a causal relationship
• uniform on obedience:

  • more likely to address man as a guard
  • lab coat worn by experimenter gives status-increasing legitimacy of authority
• location:

  • run down office building vs yale
  • led to 47.5% decrease
  • yale setting gives credibility
• proximity:

  • teacher and learnerin same room increased obedience
  • orders given over the phone decreased obedience by 20.5%
  • ppts returned to more autonomous state
• low internal validity on situational variables:

  • orne and holland
  • procedure faked due to extra manipulation of variables
  • as the procedure with replacing the experimenter with a ordinary member of the public was very contrived (not very natural), therefore obedience was not truly being measured.
  • subject to demand characteristics
• Hofling et al study in which nurses were to instructed over the phone by a doctor (the researcher) to give patients a does of a unfamiliar drug which was also a higher doses of what they should actually take. The findings of this where that 21 out of 22 nurses obeyed, supporting the proximity variation, decreased proximity allows people to psychologically distance themselves from the consequences of their actions, and because the doctor had more authority they just obeyed and did as they were instructed to do.
• what is the agentic state?


  a mental state where we feel no personal responsibility for our behaviour because we believe ourselves to be acting for an authority figure, (as their agent)this frees us from the demands of our consciences and allows us to obey even a destructive authority figure
• if you are in the autonomous state you are free to behave according to their own principles and feels a sense of responsibility for their own actions
• when does the agentic shift happen?

  Milgram suggested that this occurs when a person perceives someone else as an authority figurethe authority figure has greater power because they have a higher position in a social hierarchy
• what are binding factors?Milgram proposed that they could shift responsibility onto the victim

  aspects of a situation which will allow the person to minimise the damaging effect of their behaviour and reduce the moral strain they feel
• legitimacy of authority:this authority is justified (legitimate) by the individual's position of power within a social hierarchy

  an explanation for obedience which suggests that we are more likely to obey people who we perceive to have authority over us.
• consequence of legitimacy of authority is some people are granted the power to punish others and we give up some independence to people we trust to exercise authority properly
• Rank and Jacobson nurses:

  • 16/18 hospital nurses disobeyed orders from a a doctor to adminster excessive drug dose to a patient
  • all nurses remained autonomous = therefore agentic shift cannot explain all explanations of obedience
  • most of them were disobedient in a hierarchal authority structure
  • suggests some people are may be more or less obedient than others - innate tendencies