Obedience

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Milgram's Research
Procedure

  • Stanley Milgram recruited 40 male participants through newspaper ads and postal flyers. The ad said he was looking for participants for a memory study.
  • Participants were aged between 20 and 50 years, in jobs ranging from unskilled to professional. They were given $4.50 for just turning up.
  • Participants drew lots for their role. A confederate was always the 'learner' while the true participant was the 'teacher'. An 'experimenter' wore a lab coat. Participants were told they could leave the study at any time.
  • The learner was strapped into a chair in another room and wired with electrodes. The teacher had to give the learner an increasingly severe electric 'shock' each time he made a mistake on a task (learning word pairs). The teachers were not told that the shocks were all fake and that the learner was an actor.
  • Shocks started at 15 volts and rose through 30 levels to 450 volts. At 300 volts the learner pounded on the wall and gave no response to the next question.
  • After the 315-volt shock, the learner pounded on the wall again but gave no further response.
  • When the teacher turned to the experimenter for guidance, he gave the standard instruction: 'Absence of response should be treated as a wrong answer'.
  • If the teacher felt unsure about continuing, the experimenter used a sequence of four standard 'prods':
    'Please continue' or 'Please go on'
    'The experiment requires that you continue'.
    'It is absolutely essential that you continue'.
    'You have no other choice, you must go on.'

Findings and Conclusions

  • No participant stopped below 300 volts.
  • Five (12.5%) stopped at 300 volts.
  • 65% continued to 450 volts.
  • Observations indicated that participants showed signs of extreme tension; many were seen to 'sweat, tremble, bite their lips. groan and dig their fingernails into their hands'. Three had 'full-blown uncontrollable seizures'.
  • Prior to the study, Milgram asked 14 psychology students to predict the naive participants' behaviour. They estimated no more than 3% of them would continue to 450 volts, therefore the findings were unexpected.
  • Participants were debriefed and assured that their behaviour was normal. In a follow-up questionnaire, 84% reported that they felt glad to have participated. 74% felt they had learned something of personal importance.

Evaluation

  • A limitation of Milgram's study is that it lacked internal validity. Orne and Holland suggest participants guessed the electric shocks were fake, so Milgram was not testing what he intended to test. However, Sheridan and King's participants gave real shocks to a puppy; 54% of males and 100% of females delivered what they thought was a fatal shock, so the obedience in Milgram's study might be genuine, 70% of  Milgram's participants believed the shocks were genuine.
  • A strength of Milgram's research is that it has good external validity. Milgram argued that the lab-based relationship between experimenter and participant reflected wider real-life authority relationships. Hofling et al found that levels of obedience in nurses on a hospital ward to unjustified demands by doctors were very high (21 out of 22…

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