Explanations of Obedience

Milgram (1963)

aim: To investigate whether ordinary people would obey an unjust order from an authority figue.

method: a sample of 40 American male participants (recruited from newspaper advert) were paid $4.50 to take part in a lab experiment at Yale University. Once they arrived they were told by the experimenter to give electric shocks of increasing strength (starting from 15 volts upto 450 volts) to a learner each time they made a mistake when recalling a list of word pairs. The participant was encouraged by the experimenter to carry on increasing the intensity of the shocks by using verbal prods "the…