Behavioral Study Of Obedience To Malevolent Authority (Milgram, 1963)

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  • Created by: Maryam
  • Created on: 10-10-12 20:10

Aim: The aim was to establish a baseline measure of how obedient naïve participants would be when ordered to administer increasingly intense electric shocks to an innocent victim. Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities for example, Germans in WWII.

Procedure: Volunteers were recruited for a lab experiment investigating “learning” (re: ethics: deception).  Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional.  At the beginning of the experiment they were introduced to another participant, who was actually a confederate of the experimenter (Milgram).  They drew straws to determine their roles – leaner or teacher – although this was fixed and the confederate always ended to the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a white lab coat, played by an actor (not Milgram). The “learner” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped to a chair in another room with electrodes. After he

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