Obedience: Milgram's study

Question 1

What is obedience?

Answer 1

• A form of social influence in which an individual follows a direct order. The person issuing the order is usually a figure of authority, who has the power to punish when obedient behaviour is not forthcoming.

Question 2

Milgram’s obedience study

Answer 2

• Milgram sought an answer to why the German population had followed the orders of Hitler and slaughtered over 10 million Jews, Gypsies and other members of other social groups in the Holocaust during WW2. He wanted to know if the Germans were different-were they more obedient?
• He began his research by establishing a method to study obedience. His first, original study is the one against which all others (variations) are compared, which is why it is sometimes called the baseline study.

Question 3

Sample/ participants

Answer 3

• Milgram recruited 40 male participants through newspaper adverts and flyers in the post. The ad said he was looking for participants for a study about memory.
• The participants recruited were aged between 20 and 50 years, and their jobs ranged from unskilled to professional.
• They were offered $4.50 to take part.

Question 4

Procedure pt.1

Answer 4

• When the participants arrived at Milgram’s lab they were paid the money at the outset and there was a rigged draw for their role.
• A confederate, ‘Mr Wallace’, always ended up as the ‘learner’ while the true participant was the ‘teacher’.
• There was also an ‘experimenter’ (another confederate) dressed in a lab coat, played by an actor. Participants were told they could leave the study at any time.

Question 5

Procedure pt.2

Answer 5

• The learner was strapped in a chair in another room and wired with electrodes. The teacher was required to give the learner an increasingly severe electric shock each time the learner made a mistake on the learning task ( the task involved learning word pairs). The shocks were demonstrated to the teacher. Thereafter the shocks were not real.

Question 6

Procedure pt.3

Answer 6

• The shock level started at 15 volts and rose through 30 levels to 450 volts. When the teacher got to 300 volts (‘intense shock’) the learner pounded on the wall and then gave no response to the next question.
• After the 315 volt shock, the learner pounded on the wall again but after that there was no further response from the learner.

Question 7

Prods

Answer 7

• When the teacher turned to the experimenter for guidance, the experimenter gave a standard instruction. If the teacher felt unsure about continuing, the experimenter used a sequence of 4 standard ‘prods’, which were repeated if necessary:

Prod 1= ‘Please continue’.
Prod 2= ‘ The experiment requires that you continue’.
Prod 3= ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue’.
Prod 4= ‘You have no other choice, you must go on’.

Question 8

Findings

Answer 8

• No participants stopped below 300 volts, 12.5% of participants stopped at 300 volts, 65% continued to the highest level of 450 volts. Qualitative data was also collected, such as observations that the participants showed signs of extreme tension; many of them were seen to sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips etc. Three even had full blown uncontrollable seizures.
• Prior to the study Milgram asked 14 psychology students to predict the participants behaviour. The students estimated that no more than 3% of the participants would continue to 450 volts. This shows that the findings were not expected.
• All participants were debriefed, and assured that their behaviour was entirely normal. They were also sent a follow-up questionnaire; 84% reported that they felt glad to have participated.

Question 9

Evaluation- low internal validity

Answer 9

• Orne and Holland argued that participants behaved the way they did because they didn’t really believe in the set up- they guessed it wasn’t real electric shocks. In which case Milgram was not testing what he intended to test i.e. the study lacked internal validity.
• However, Sheridan and King conducted a similar experiment where real shocks were given to a puppy. Despite the real shocks, 54% of the male student participants and 100% of the females delivered what they thought was a fatal shock.
• This suggests that the effects in Milgram’s study were genuine because people behaved the same way with real shocks. Milgram himself reported that 70% of his participants said they believed the shocks were genuine.

Question 10

Evaluation- good external validity

Answer 10

• Milgram’s study may at first glance, appear to lack external validity because it was conducted in a lab. However, the central feature of this situation was the relationship between the authority figure (the experimenter) and the participant.
• Milgram argued that the lab environment accurately reflected wider authority relationships in real life.
• Other research support this argument. For example, Hofling studied nurses on a hospital ward and found that levels of obedience to unjustified demands by doctors were very high (21/22 nurses obeying).
• This suggests that the processes of obedience to authority that occurred in Milgram’s lab study can be generalised to other situations. So his findings do have something valuable to tell us about how obedience operates in real life.

Question 11

Evaluation- supporting replication

Answer 11

• Le Jeu de la Mort (The Game of Death) is a documentary about reality TV, presented on French television. It includes a replication of Milgram’s study. The participants believed they were contestants in a pilot episode for a new game show called La Zone Xtreme. They were paid to give (fake) electric shocks- when ordered by the presenter to other participants, who were in fact actors, in front of a studio audience.
• In a remarkable confirmation of Milgram’s results, 80% of the participants delivered the maximum shock of 460 volts to an apparently unconscious man. Their behaviour was almost identical to that of Milgram’s participants- nervous laughter, nail biting and other signs of anxiety. This replication supports Milgram’s original conclusions about obedience to authority, and demonstrates that his findings were not just a one off chance occurrence.

Question 12

Evaluation- ethical issues

Answer 12

• Baumrind was very critical of the ways Milgram deceived his participants. Milgram led participants to believe that the allocation of roles as ‘teacher’ and ‘learner’ was random, but in fact it was fixed.
• Perhaps the most significant deception involved the participants believing the electric shocks were real. Baumrind objected because she saw deception as a betrayal of trust that could damage the reputation of the psychologists and their research.