Situational factors of obedience

• Milgram 1963

  Setup:

  • 40 Ps. Experimenter and 47yr old man Confederate, Confederate ‘randomly’ assigned as learner, P teacher. Ask questions, shock for wrong answer in 15V increments, all the way up to 450V. After 300V shock, Confederate shouted and banged on glass. After 315V went silent. If P wanted to stop, experimenter would give prompts ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue’ ect
• Milgram 1963

  Results:

  • Before study, milgram asked college students/colleagues their predictions. Said only 1/1000 would go to 450V
  • Actual results, 26/40 (65%) went to 450V, all Ps went over 300V (only 5 stopped there) despite labelled warnings on machine
• Proximity:

  • Obedience (going to full 450V)  fell to 40% when P in same room as Confederate
  • Fell to 30% when P had to hold Confederate hand to shock plate
  • Fell to 21% when experimenter not in room but giving instructions only over phone
• Location

  • Fell to 48% when experiment in run down office in Bridgeport instead of Yale University
• Uniform:

  • Bushman 1988, female researcher in different outfits asking for money for parking metre
  • 72% gave money when she dressed as police uniform
  • 48% as a business executive
  • 52% as a beggar
  • When interviewed after, people said they obeyed the woman in police uniform as she appeared to have authority
• AO3

  • Orne and Holland 1968, claim Ps have learned to distrust experimenters as they know study's true aim may be disguised
• AO3

  • Perry 2012, found Milgram’s assistant, Taketo Murata, had divided the Ps into doubters and believers in the realism of the shocks. Found latter more likely more likely to disobey experimenter and only give low shocks (suggests so many obeyed as they knew it was fake)
• AO3

  • Temporal relevance. Blass 1999, analysed stats from obedience studies from 1961 - 1985. Found no more or less disobedience based on time period study was carried out in. Burger 2009, similar study, found similar levels of obedience to Milgram
• AO3

  • Mandel 1998, challenges obedience studies as explanation to real life atrocities. Milgram's conclusions not born out of real life events. 1942, men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 given order to mass kill Jews in Józefów, Poland. Major Wilhelm Trapp made offer that anyone who ‘didn't feel up to’ the task to be assigned another duty. Despite presence of factors Milgram says increases defiance, only small minority refused to do the killing. Mandel argues obedience as an explanation for atrocities is only an alibi, masking true reasons such as anti-Semitism
• AO3

  • Fromm 1973, due to lab setting, Ps more likely to obey as they know it's an experiment. suggested the 65% obedience less surprising than the 35% disobedience. Argues real life obedience a lot more difficult and time-consuming to achieve, such as Rwanda genocides (1994) that took years of manipulation and mass dehumanisation to achieve
• AO3

  • Durkin and Jeffery 2000, children's view of authority most dominated by visual cues (uniform). Asked children 5-9 to identify would was able to make arrests using scenarios: policeman who was wearing civilian clothes, civilian wearing police clothes for reasons unrelated to police work, man wearing uniform of a different occupation. Children often selected the man wearing the police outfit