Social-psychological factors- Evaluation
- Created by: MollyL20
- Created on: 12-10-20 22:04
View mindmap
- Social-psychological factors- Evaluation
- Research support
- Blass and Schmitt (2001) showed a film of Milgram's study to students and asked them to identify who they felt was responsible for the harm of the learner
- The students blamed the experimenter rather than the participant. Also they indicated that the responsibility was due to legitimate authority but also due to expert authority
- A limited explanation
- The agentic shift doesn't explain many of the research findings
- For example, it doesn't explain why many of the participants didn't obey an also doesn't explain the finding of Holfing et al (1966)
- The agentic shift explanation predicts that as the nurses handed over responsibility to the doctor, they should have shown levels of anxiety
- Similar to Milgram's participants as they understood their role in a destructive process. But, it wasn't the case, suggesting that agentic shift can only account for some situations of obedience
- Cultural differences
- A strength of the legitimacy of authority explanation is that is is a useful account of cultural differences in obedience
- Many studies show that country's differ in the degree to which people are traditionally obedient to authority
- Killham and Mann (1974) replicated Milgram's study in Australia and found that only 16% of their participants went all the wat up to 450V
- Mantell found that 85% of Germans went up to the full amount. This shows that some cultures, authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate and entitled to demand obedience from individuals
- This reflects the way that different societies are structured and how children are raised the percieve authority figures
- This research increases the validity if the explanation
- Research support
Comments
No comments have yet been made