Milgram - evaluation

• Unethical - P


  Participants were deceived. They were recruited through newspaper ads, asking for volunteers to partake in a 'memory study'.

  
  

  They believed the roles of 'teacher' and 'student' were randomly allocated.
• Unethical - E


  The most significant deception was that they believe they were administrating real electric shocks.

  
  

  Although they had the right to withdraw, he made it very difficult for them to do so. The experimenter was given a standardised script of 4 'prods' to say when pp's refused to administer the shock.

  
  

  Eg:

  - 'please continue', 'the experiment requires that you continue
• Unethical - E


  Due to the nature of the task, pp's weren't protected from psychological harm. Many of them showed sins of real distress during the experiment and may have continued to feel guilt afterwards.

  
  

  3 pp's even had uncontrollable seizures.
• Unethical - L


  These ethical issues lower the appropriateness of the research. However, he debriefed them immediately after, and a questionnaire revealed that 84% said they were glad to have participated.
• Lacks internal validity - P

  The internal validity of the study is compromised due to a lack of standardise action and the potential influence of demand characteristics.
• Lacks internal validity - E


  The staged situation, and extreme experimental manipulation means it was more likely for participants in Milgram's variation to realise the procedure was faked.

  
  

  In the variation where the experimenter was replaced by a 'member of the public', Milgram himself agreed it would be more likely for participants to figure out the truth.
• Lacks internal validity - E

  Furthermore, Milgram published a textbook account of his 'standardised procedure' in which he included a list of standardised 'prods'.

  
  

  However, on analysing videotapes, Gibson found considerable variation from published protocol - prods differed across trials.

  
  

  Another analysis by Perry showed the experimenter often improvised more coercive prods beyond the 'script'.
• Lacks internal validity - L


  This weakens the validity of findings from the study - and further weakens the ecological validity, as it's difficult to conclude that it's appropriate to generalise findings to real life.
• Sample bias - P

  Milgram's original study involved an androcentric sample of 40 American males. One criticism may be that the findings are culture-bound, and specific to males.
• Sample bias - E

  For example, Kilham and Mann repeated the study in Australia to observe gender differences in obedience behaviour. Maybe females are raised to be more compliant and obedient than men? Or maybe they're less likely to follow aggressive instructions, due to both biological and social factors.

  
  

  They found that only 16% of female pp's obeyed, and 40% of male pp's did.
• Sample bias - L

  This suggests that there are real gender differences in obedience behaviour, which are overlooked in Milgram's study.