obedience

    Cards (20)

    • Obedience is when an individual follows direct orders given to them by a figure of authority.
    • Milgram (1961) aimed to see if people would obey an authority figure telling them to harm someone else. 40 male ppts were told they were taking part in research about memory. Ppts introduced to a confederate & picked their roles via random selection - this was rigged, the ppts was always the teacher, confederate was always the learner (real ppts didn't know this). Teachers & experimenter = same room, learner in another. T asked L questions, if L got it wrong they had to give an electric shock. L got it wrong on purpose. Shocks from 15V to 450V. All went to 300V, 65% went to 450V. People obey.
    • In Milgram's experiment, 3 people had seizures and all ppts showed signs of nervousness. Most still obeyed despite not wanting to. He said this is because of our upbringing.
    • Milgram's research AO3:
      • controlled setting. Can determine cause & effect, increases the internal validity. HOWEVER, cannot generalise to real-life situations as lab experiments do not reflect this, low external validity.
      • gender & culture bias. All American male ppts. Can't generalise. HOWEVER, Burger (2009) replicated the study with males & females & got similar results. Reliable.
      • unethical: informed consent, deception, right to withdraw (were told to continue even if they wanted to stop). Did give a debrief but caused a lot of harm.
    • Milgram replicated his study with different situational variables. These were uniform, location and proximity.
    • Milgram changed the proximity in three ways.
      • He put teachers (real ppts) and learners (confederates) in the same room. Obedience dropped to 40% at 450V. This is as there was no psychological distance between the teachers and learners.
      • Milgram got teachers to put the learners hand on the shock plate, when doing this obedience dropped to 30% at 450V. T felt guilty.
      • When the experimenter gave the instructions over the phone obedience dropped to 20.5% at 450V. T did not feel obliged to listen as the authority wasn't in the room.
    • Location was changed by conducting the experiment in a run-down office block in place of Yale University. Obedience (to the highest voltage) dropped to 47.5%. This happened as ppts wouldn't have seen the experiment as official. However, ppts still knew that they were in an experiment so that may have had some influence.
    • The experimenter (giving instructions to real ppt) wore plain clothes, instead of a uniform. When this happened, rates of obedience dropped to 20% (at 450V). Milgram said this is because we obey authority figures and do not see people wearing plain clothes as authority.
    • Situational variables AO3:
      • research support (uniform) - Bickman (1974). Ppts are 2x more likely to listen to a security guard than they are a milkman. Increases the reliability & validates the fact that uniform influences obedience.
      • RWA. Many replications of Milgram's research in real-life settings which found similar results. Increases reliability & generalisability to real-life obedience.
      • unethical: ppts were not protected from psychological harm in all variables but more so in the proximity variable (hand on shock plate). Defies the BPS guidelines & gives psychology a bad reputation.
    • There are two situational explanations for obedience. These are the agentic state and legitimacy of authority.
    • In the agentic state people act as an agent for a figure of authority - people do not feel responsible for their actions, they think that the authority figure is responsible. In this state, people experience moral strain (feel anxious bc the actions go against their morals), but still do as they're told bc of binding factors. To enter this state people start off in the autonomous state (know they are responsible for their own actions, are independent). There is then an agentic shift (moving from autonomous to agentic), once a person has gone through this shift they are in an agentic state.
    • Legitimacy of authority is when people are more likely to obey someone that has more authority than they do. There is a social hierarchy that legitimises an individual's position (and authority) in society. The higher up an individual in the hierarchy, the more likely they are to be obeyed. These authority figures can use destructive authority (use authority in a negative way) to get people to do different tasks for them. We are taught to obey authority through socialisation.
    • Agentic state AO3 (situational explanation):
      • research support - Milgram. Learners would ask if the experimenter was responsible for what happened to the learner, they said E was. Ppts then continued. Validates the explanation. HOWEVER, research into the Nazis found that they harmed civilians without being given direct orders. Can't generalise the explanation to all situations.
      • contradictory evidence - rank and Jacobson. 16/18 nurses disobeyed orders given from a doctor, they remained in an autonomous state. Shows that this situational explanation does not explain obedience in all cases.
    • Legitimacy of authority AO3 (situational explanation):
      • cultural differences. 16% of ppts in Australia obeyed an authority figure, in comparison to 85% of ppts in Germany. Authority was legitimate in both cases. Cultural bias (western) so cannot be generalise to other cultures.
      • contradictory evidence. Milgram: 35% of ppts disobeyed despite a legitimate authority figure. Rank and Jacobson: 16/18 nurses disobeyed the legitimate authority. Explanation lacks use & validity.
    • The dispositional explanation is an individual's characteristics that make them likely or unlikely to obey an authority figure.
    • Adorno (1950) looked at the causes of an authoritarian personality by studying middle-class Americans and their attitudes to racial groups. Created the F-scale. People who scored higher on the F-scale had an authoritarian personality. Adorno thought that being highly obedient was a psychological disorder caused by the personality.
    • The authoritarian personality is a dispositional explanation that looks at personality traits which cause extreme respect, and obedience, towards authority figures. Some of the personality traits include hostility towards other groups, being submissive to authority and black-and-white-thinking. The authoritarian personality is a result of harsh parenting. The harsh parenting caused a fear or hatred for the parents which is then expanded to authority figures and displacing emotions on other groups.
    • The f-scale test calculates how fascist people are.
    • Scapegoating is when feelings are displaced on people who are weaker, they cannot express these feeling to a figure of authority.
    • Dispositional explanations AO3:
      • research support: Elms & Milgram (1966). Obedient people scored higher on the f-scale than disobedient people. Is a link between obedience and the authoritarian personality. Increases the validity of the authoritarian personality.
      • large sample size. 2000 ppts did the f-scale. HOWEVER, sample was all American males - bias. Lacks population validity (can't be generalised) but has item validity.
      • can't apply to all situations. Not all Germans would have had this personality but millions still obeyed the Nazi leaders. Limited explanation, decreases validity.