Obedience: Milgram's research

• Obedience: Milgram's research

  Milgram (1963) aimed to find out why such a high proportion of German people supported Hitler's plan to slaughter 6 mil Jews in the Holocaust. Wanted to know if they were more obedient.
• Obedience: Milgram's research 2

  Procedure

  Recruited 40 male ppts aged 20-50 through newspaper adverts for memory study. Given $4.50 on the outset and there was a rigged draw for their role. A confederate 'Mr Wallace' = 'learner' and ppt = 'teacher'. Also an 'experimenter' (confederate) in white lab coat. Told they could leave study at any time. Learner strapped in chair in another room and wired w/ electrodes. The teacher was required to give the learner an increasingly severe electric shock (15V 'slight shock' -> 450V 'danger-severe shock') each time they made a mistake on a learning task.
• Obedience: Milgram's research 3

  Procedure 2

  No response after 315V. If teacher was unsure about continuing, experimenter used 'prods'- 'Please continue', 'You have no other choice you must go on'
• Obedience: Milgram's research 4

  Findings

  No ppts stopped before 300V. 12.5% stopped at 300V. 65% continued to 450V. Signs of extreme tension observed- 'sweat, tremble, full-blown uncontrollable seizures', etc. 14 Psychology students on predicted 3% would continue to 450V. Ppts debriefed and assured their behaviour was normal. 84% reported they felt glad to have participated.
• Obedience: Milgram's research- evaluation

  Good external validity. Despite being conducted in a lab, Hofling et al. (1966) studied nurses in a hospital ward and found that levels of obedience to unjustifiable demands by doctors were very high (21 out of 22). Suggests that processes of obedience to authority that occurred in Milgram's study can be generalised to other situations. Increases value of findings.
• Obedience: Milgram's research- evaluation 2

  Low internal validity- Orne and Holland (1968) suggested that ppts behaved the way they did because they didn't believe they were delivering real shocks, meaning Milgram was not testing what he had intended to. Gina Perry's research confirmed this, as she recorded interviews w/ some of the ppts who expressed doubt about the experiment. However, has been repeated where similar results were recorded.
• Obedience: Milgram's research - evaluation 3

  Supporting replication. The 2010 French documentary "The game of death" mirrors Milgram's experiment, w/ naïve ppts delivering shocks to actors in front of an audience. Similar levels of obedience were recorded w/ 80% of ppts delivering a 460V to an already unconscious man.