Milgram - Obedience Study (1963)
- Created by: Megan Vials
- Created on: 24-04-14 14:12
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Aim
- Establish a basline measure of how obedient naive participants wpould be when asked to give an increasingly intese eletric shock to an innocent victim.
Method
- Sample of 40 volunteers
- Participants were told they and another man would take part in the study
- The 'other' person would always be the student
- The teacher (naive participant) tested the learner with a list of words
- Researcher was encouraging the teacher to shock the learner and increase it everytime a wrong answer was given
- Learners response was scripted and no actual shocks were recieved
- At vasripous points the learner complained of chest pains and refused to continue
- At 315v learner went silent
- Researcher encouraged teacher to contiune dispite protesations
Results
- Milgram surveyed groups of people before conducting research
- When asked what level of shock they thought participants would go to, most thought 140v
- Those surveyed believed that very few would go beyond a very strong shock
- What the people said and what they did were two very different things
- Every participant went to at least 300v
- 14 participants stopped between 300v and 375v
- The remanin 26 went all the way to 450v
Conclusions
- Social setting is a poweful determinant of behaviour
- When the participants entered the experiment they felt they were part of the situation and found it difficult to break away
- After obeying the first time it became harder to say no
Variations
- In baseline experiment learner could be heared but not seen
- When the learner could not be heard or seen, all participants went all the way
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