Obedience as investigated by Milgram

Obedience as investigated by Milgram

 Milgram was interested in the high levels of obedience seen in Germans during the holocaust and wanted to know if Germans were more obedient than anyone else.

Procedure:

Milgram (1963) recruited 40 male participants through a newspaper ad as well as flyers in the post – statin that he was looking for participants to engage in a study about memory. The participants that were recruited were aged between 20 and 50 with jobs ranging from unskilled too professional. They were offered $4.50 to take part in the study (a reasonable price during the 1960s). They were paid when they arrived at the lab and there was a rigged draw to determne their role. A confederate was the `learner` while the real participant was the `teacher`. There was also another confederate dressed in a lab coat who played the `experimenter`. Participants were told they could leave the study at any time. The learner was strapped to a chair in another room and attached to electrodes. The teacher was required to give the learner an increasingly severe shock whenever the learner made a mistake on a learning task. There was only one real shock – which was shown to the participant. The shock level began at 15v and rose through 30 levels to 450v. when the teacher got to 300v, the learner…