(4) 🧑🧑🧒🧒 explanations for obedience - Milgram Flashcards
what is obedience?
individuals comply with direct orders from authority figures that have power to punish, even if commands go against personal beliefs or morals.
what inspired Milgram?
why Germans followed Hitler’s orders; questioned if ordinary Americans would obey unjust orders and inflict pain on another because an authority figure told them to.
how were the Ps recruited and chosen for their roles?
• 40 males, 20-50 years old, recruited through newspaper ads for a study on memory
• introduced to confederate and roles randomly selected; was rigged so true P always got teacher.
after the roles were chosen, what procedure took place?
• “experimenter/professor”, dressed in a grey lab coat and also confederate, strapped learner to chair in separate room, attached electrodes.
• P told to deliver electric shocks each time “learner” got question wrong. shocks increased by 15V to 450V with machine indicating “severe shock”.
• 300V learner would pound on wall and gave no response to next question. after 315V learner made no more noise.
• If the teacher tried to stop, the experimenter provided a verbal ‘prod’ to continue, like “the experiment requires you to continue”
what were the results and conclusions of the study?
• 100% of Ps continued to 300V
• 12.5% stopped at 300V
• 65% to 450 (the max)
• most obey instructions by high authority even if they inflict pain on others. Milgram hypothesised obeyed due to situational variables.
when was the Milgram study?
1963
✅ - research support + 🦄
E: Hofling (1966). 95% of nurses in real hospital obeyed orders over the phone from a “Dr Smith” to give patient unfamiliar drug at twice the maximum
E: field experiment in real world setting, tasks had high mundane realism and high ecological validity, conclusions more likely to accurately explain obedience in real life
🦄: situational factors (time pressure, workload, perceived urgency of his request) could have influenced nurses’ decision to comply. decision-making in real-world situations is complex
❌ - low generalisability
E: androcentric only men tested = gender biassed sample. other research suggests there may be differences in why males and females obey, which need further study.
E: limited applicability to women as lacks population validity.
❌ - lacks mundane realism
E: artificial scenario of giving electric shocks to another for incorrect responses doesn’t replicate day-to-day tasks
E: limits applicability to real world scenarios.
❌ - ethical issues
E: subject to psychological harm (anxiety induced process that revealed to some Ps they could have given fatal shock to someone if instructed to by authoritative figure);
E: gives psychological research a negative reputation, could impact ability to recruit Ps for future research.
🦄: research helps understand obedience, can be applied to prevent people from following unjust instructions in future. additionally, follow up questionnaire revealed 84% of Ps glad they took part in the research, suggests not any long lasting harmful psychological effects of the research.
