social influence - Milgram Flashcards
what is obedience
- individual follow a direct order
- person issuing the order has authority
when did Milgram conduct his study
1963
what was Milgram’s procedure
- 40 American men voluntered for a study at Yale based on memory
- each volunteer introduced to a confederate who acted as the experiementer
- draw was rigged so the teacher would always be the participant and learner a confederate
- room had a shock generator
- teacher had to test the learner on their recall on word pairs
- if the answer was incorrect the teacher would administer an electric shock
- pre-recorded screams as the shocks increased
- experimenter had 4 verbal prods
what were the findings of Milgrims experiment
- 14 participants had nervous laughing fits
- all participants delivered shocks up to 300v
- 12.5% stopped at 300v
- 65% continued until 450v
- 35% resisted pressure and backed out between 300-450v
- sent a questionnaire later on and 84% were glad to have taken part
what did Milgram conclude and aimed
- investigate if the Nazis were just simply following orders
- German people aren’t different
- participants were willing to obey orders even when they might harm another person
GRAVE Evaluation
Generalisability
- only used white male American participants
- used a volunteer sample
- low ecological validity - carried out in a lab
Reliability
- replicated his own study using variables
- Hofling et al
- Bickman
Application
- explain the holocaust
- Abu Ghraib
Validity
- lacked experimental realism - pps may have not found it real
- demand characteristics
- lacked mundane realism - didn’t resemble real life
Ethics
- failed to gain informed consent
- coerced participants into continuing
- difficult to withdraw
- asked psychological community to predict the findings of the study
- psychological harm - full debriefing and questionnaire