Social Influence - obedience

Milgram´s study into obedience

Aim: Milgram wanted to understand why instructions in the holocaust were obeyed and if there was something unique about the German people that made them more obedient.

Method:

• 40, white males tested at Yale universities, they were respondees to adverts distributed through flyers and newspapers, they were under the assumption that they were taking part in an assessment of memory.
• The participants were given the role as a teacher, whose job it was to assess the performance of learners, who were actually confederates.
• The teacher and learner were in seperate rooms and the learner would indicate his answer through a series of lights, the teacher was also instructed to administer an electric shock, each one stronger than the last, every time the learner gave an incorrect answer, the participants were told that the shocks went up to 450 volts.
• There was also an experimenter present who gave four standardised prods. 

Findings:

• All participants went to at least 300 volts
• 65% went up to 450 volts
• Many participants whoed signs of extreme tension -they were trembling and sweating and stuttering.

Conclusion: Ordinary people are obedient to authority, even when that authority is giving immoral instructions.

Evaluation of Milgram´s study into Obedience

• This study has low ecological validity. The laboratory conditions bear little to no resemblance of reality. The task was unrealistic. This limits our ability to generalise the results to real examples of obedience.
• The study took place in lab conditions so therefore it yeilded demand characteristics. There are questions as to whether the participants truly believed they were giving electric shocks, after all people aren´t stupid, this therefore questions the result´s accuracy and internal validity.
• The results have been replicated and the participants even showed the same behaviour.

Ethical Evaluation

• He did not give informed consent and decieed the participants. He did not tell them the true purpose of the experiment, they therefore could not give their informed consent. This could cause harm to the participants and to the reputation of psychology. However, if the participants had not been decieved they wouldn´t have behaved naturally and the results would have been invalid.
• Milgram failed to offer protection from harm as the particpants were observed to be suffering from extreme tension. This also could have damaged their self-esteem. However, in a questionaire only 1.3% of participants actually reported negative side effects.
• Milgram did properly debrief them.This helpèd to set a new standard for researchers to follow.

The study was repeated in an everyday setting, nurses were called by a researcher and asked to give 20 mg of a drug which had a maximum dose of only 10 (as was explicitly stated on the bottle), 21 of the 22 nurses obeyed.

Variations of Milgram´s study

1. Proximity: 

• Participants were in the same room as the confederate, obedience dropped from 65% to 40%.
• Participants had to phsyically force the confederate´s hand onto a electroshock plate, obedience fell…