burger

• Aim: To investigate whether Stanley Milgram’s findings would be replicated over 40 years later, and whether gender and  personality traits such as empathic concern and desire for personal control had an impact on obedience
• Procedure:

  ·       Participants were volunteers who responded to advertisements and flyers went through a series of screening procedures. The participants were asked if they had been to college and whether they had taken any psychology courses. The purpose of these questions was to screen out individuals who might be familiar with Milgram’s obedience research. People who had knowledge were excluded from the study.
• Procedure: ·       Participants were introduced to the confederate and researchers who were white caucasian men. They were told multiple times verbally by researchers and in writing that they could leave at any point. The participant always had the role of the teacher
• Procedure: ·       The confederate was told to learn from word pairs as a learner, the participant was told to deliver shocks when the confederate gave wrong answers. The researchers would inform the participant that they must move up one switch every time the confederate gave the wrong answer
• Procedure: ·       The researchers were instructed to use scripted prompts if the participant was hesitant to continue eg ‘the experiment requires you to continue’. The experiment stopped once the participants reached 150V or the researcher ran out of prompts to give.
• Procedure: ·       As soon as the experiment was over, the participant was told that the shocks were fake and debriefed. Participants also did questionnaires looking at their Empathic Concern (How likely a person will feel for others) and Desire for Control (How in control the person perceives/wants themselves to be) scores.
• Findings:

  ·       The obedience rate is just slightly lower than Milgram’s study. 70% of the participants pressed the 150V switch, as compared to 85% of Milgram’s variation 5

  ·       No major differences were found between the obedience of men and women or in the empathic concern scores of participants who continued and stopped

  ·       Defiant participants who stopped the experiment before 150V had a slightly higher desire for control.
• Conclusion: There were no major changes in the findings compared to Milgram’s original study. Cultural and social changes did not appear to have altered levels of obedience.
• A strength is that none of Burger's participants had knowledge of Milgram's research, enhancing the study's internal validity. All participants were asked whether they took any psychology classes. Anyone who had taken two or more classes was excluded. Five people admitted their awareness of the Milgram study at this stage and also dropped out. This suggests that demand characteristics would not have affected the study and that the obedience seen was a direct response to the authority figure.
• A weakness of Burger's finding is that the sample is not representative of the target population. Although the rigorous pre-study screening was excellent ethically, 38% of volunteers were deselected in order to exclude anyone who might have found the study particularly distressing. This is important because the people in the final sample may have been more psychologically robust than many people in the general population. This may have led to lower levels of obedience and reduces the generalisability of the findings.