Obedience

• Milgram's baseline procedure

  Milgram recruited 40 american male participants. Each participant arrived and drew lots for their role. A confederate was always the learner while the true participant was the teacher. An experimenter wore a white lab coat. The teacher had to give the learner an increasingly severe electric shock each time he made a mistake on a task. The shocks increased in 15 volt steps up to 450 volts. The shocks were fake but the shock machine was labelled to make them look increasingly severe. If the teacher wished to stop, the experimenter gave a verbal prod to continue.
• Milgram's findings

  13% of participants stopped at 300 volts

  65% continued to 450 volts

  Participants showed signs of extreme tension and three had uncontrollable seizures. After the study, participants were debriefed and 85% were glad they participated.
• Milgrams conclusions

  We obey legitimate authority even if that means that our behaviour causes harm to someone else. Certain situational factors encourage obedience.
• Evaluation

  One limitation is that Milgram's study lacked internal validity,. Orne and Holland argued that participants guessed the electric shocks were fake. So they were play acting. This was supported by Perry's discovery that only half of the participants believed the shocks were real. This suggests that participants may have been responding to demand characteristics. However, Sheridan's participants gave real shocks to a puppy and 54% of males and 100% of females delivered what they thought was a fatal shock which suggests the obedience in Milgram's study may be genuine.
• Evaluation

  One limitation is ethical issues. The participants were deceived as they thought the shocks were real. Milgram dealt with this by debriefing participants at the end. However this deception could have serious consequences for participants and researchers as there was no informed consent. Therefore, research ca damage the reputations of psychologists and their research in the eyes of the public.
• Evaluation

  Milgram's research lacked population validity. Milgram used a bias sample of 40 male volunteers, which means we are unable to generalise the results to other populations, in particular females, and cannot conclude if female participants would respond in a similar way. This study was conducted in the US which is an individualistic culture meaning it will be hard to generalise to collectivist cultures like in china This means Milgram's findings tell us little about obedience in women and people from some cultures.