Milgram's study of obedience

Question 1

What were the ppts in Milgrams study like?

Answer 1

• Original study n=40 but later tested nearly 1,000 participants, including female ones, all aged 20- 50
• Sample was diverse – broad range of occupations and ages, mostly male

Question 2

What was the basic procedure for the study?

Answer 2

• Fake draw of sticks to decide who plays role of learner and who teacher (image)
o The participant sees him getting into a device that would give him electric shocks - they are also given a small electric shock to prove that it actually delivered these shocks
• The learner then moved to an adjacent room and the participant is placed in front of a ‘Shock generator’ machine with lots of switches and given a sample shock (45v) to prove that is real
• Read out word pairs and then test learner’s memory for them and punish each error with a shock (diagram)
• Increase intensity of shock upon each error (15v each time, rising from 15 to 450)
• If participant became reluctant to continue, then the experimenter used a script

Question 3

What did the script say for reluctant participants?

Answer 3

• “Please continue” OR “Please go on”
• “The experiment requires that you continue”
• “It is absolutely essential that you continue”
• “You have no other choice, you must go on”

The last scripted response wasn’t often used because the ones before it prompted the participant to continue.

Question 4

What measures were used in the Milgram study?

Answer 4

• Maximum voltage participant willing to shock to (interval level measure)
• Verbal scripts - he also recorded qualitative data and verbal transcripts of what the participants said
• Observation of video footage
• Debrief interview material - he continued recording after the experiment was over and he debriefed them

Question 5

What happened in the pilot study?

Answer 5

When there was no oral feedback from the learner - everyone went to 450v

This is why they had to add the feedback from the learner where they were screaming in pain.

Question 6

What sort of feedback from the learner was given at different voltages?

Answer 6

By 180v feedback included “I can’t stand the pain”, by 270 volts a loud scream)

Question 7

At what voltage did ppts stop?

Answer 7

• Mean disobey voltage = 360 volts
• 65% never disobeyed at all and went to 450v
• No participants stopped before 300v

Question 8

What other variations of the study were done?

Answer 8

• Participant left alone to set shock level – mean level chosen = 50v
• 2 experimenters present and they argued with each other – no participant continued
• Location changed from university to run-down office block – reduced to 48% fully obedient
• Experimenter (scientist) replaced by layperson – 20% fully obedient
• ‘Touch proximity’ - in this variation the participant has to push down the actors hand to deliver the shock, so there is no visual or physical barrier – 30% fully obedient (image)
• Proximity of learner (the target) decreased (link in chain) - instead of the participant pressing the button to deliver the shock, they only give the order to someone else who gives the shock – 93%
• Proximity of authority reduced (orders by phone) - when the experimenter wasn’t in the room and the orders were being phoned in - 20.5%

Question 9

Is there any cross-cultural evidence to support the Milgram study?

Answer 9

In holland, 92% were obedient to the max shock level.

However this replication wasn’t very accurate to the original study.

In the Holland study, instead of electric shocks, they were asked to be verbally aggressive to the learner.

Question 10

How valid is the early explanation suggested that participants isn’t real?

Answer 10

Almost all Ps said they thought they were delivering real shocks that were painful

Question 11

Was the Milgram study a relic of its time?

Answer 11

Burger partial replication 2007
• Tested 18 men, and found that 65 percent of them agreed to administer increasingly painful electric shocks
• 22 women signed up for the experiment. 73 percent yielded to the orders of the experimenter. In this study the women were more obedient than men.
• Ps had an unusually high level of education. 22.9 percent had some college, 40 percent had bachelor’s degrees and 20 percent had master’s degrees.
• The group was also ethnically diverse with 54.3 percent (white), 18.6 percent (Asian), 12.9 percent (Latin/Hispanic), 8.6 percent (Indian-Asian) and 4.3 percent (African -American).

Burger (2009)
– replication in US (up to 150v) – similar obedience levels in men and women
– He stopped at 150v because the evidence showed that participants didn’t get upset before this point and furthermore, the vast majority of participants that got to this point in previous studies, would continue right to the very end.

Probably not a relic of its time, looking at Burger’s work.

Question 12

Were participants just horrible people?

Answer 12

– Danger of Fundamental Attribution Error – this is the tendency to believe that someone behaves in a particular way because of something internal to them and their innate individual qualities. E.g., we want to think of terrorists as having personality flaws and something wrong with them, however, one of the 7/7 bomber was a teaching assistant loved by his pupils (Ross, 1977).
– Elms and Milgram found no significant personality differences

Question 13

How is the case of Adolf Eichmann an early explanation of obedience?

Answer 13

Eichmann was a pen pushing office worker in Nazi Germany, who personally had to sign the death warrants of millions of Jews during the time of the holocaust.

• Hanna Arendt (1963) was a Jewish philosopher who attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. She wrote the book Eichmann in Jerusalem
• She argued that he appeared to be a very ordinary, banal figure.
• “I am not the monster I am made out to be”  his defence was that he was just following orders (very similar to what participants said in Milgram’s experiment, interestingly the book was published near the same time of his first experiment)

Question 14

What is the agentic shift?

Answer 14

(Milgram, 1974)
Individual becomes an instrument of authority, no longer fully autonomous.

He argues that your individual sense of morality is temporarily suspended when you feel that you are just part of a bigger machine. It can free us of inhibition and focuses solely on pleasing the authority figure.

• Almost an altered state of consciousness
• Acts conducted in this state have no long-term consequences for self-concept - what you do doesn’t have any long-term consequences for you, you feel absolved of responsibility
• Societies tend to require unthinking obedience to authority
• Obedience is often rewarded – e.g., in school or in the world of work
• Socially organized evil - there’s an idea that a situation can be evil

Question 15

What explanations for obedience are there?

Answer 15

• Displacement of responsibility is powerful way of maintaining self-esteem and self-concept in the face of threat (Berkowitz, 1993)
• Norms – Ps had entered into a ‘contract’  they were going to be paid to take part, this put pressure on them to deliver what they had promised to do
• Buffer (technology) see Wye, 1971; Fisher (1981)  there is a barrier between you and your actions (the shock generator)
• Incremental steps – ‘foot in the door’ technique  start with a small request and slowly build the level of requests over time
• Authority respected – Yale
• Cause respected – ‘Science’ (ideological justification) & meaningful roles (learner/teacher)
• Surveillance  being watched added pressure
• Little time for reflection and novel situation
• Focusing on ‘doing the job’ and the task itself (quotation)
• ‘De-valuing’ learner
– “He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked”

Question 16

Explain how nuclear weapons personnel diffuse the responsibility of their job?

Answer 16

• Similar kind of duality of self
• Personal responsibility diffused  they have to launch the nuclear weapons in pairs
• Emotional and moral reactions blunted
• Never told the targets
• No one person can feel solely responsible
• Often work in pairs in missile silos so conformity issues as well
• Language:- crews don’t “fire” missiles, they “enable launch procedures”

Question 17

Explain the criticisms behind the ethics of the Milgram (1964) study?

Answer 17

Baumrind, 1964

– Caused harm to participants? 
o	Attitudes to trust and authority 
o	Stress, self-image 
–	No true informed consent? 
–	Encouraged participants to continue when they wanted to quit

Question 18

Explain the criticisms about the ecological validity of the Milgram (1964) study?

Answer 18

Fromm (1974)

– Baumrind – lab is a strange setting - too far removed from real world situations
o Nazi comparison is spurious
However, this doesn’t necessarily take away from the study. The soldiers in Nazi Germany would have been under far more pressure than participants in the study. Therefore, the findings are even more impressive. All this suggests is that situational forces can be much more powerful than those Milgram created.

Question 19

What response did Milgram (1964) give to the criticisms?

Answer 19

– Only 1.3% of Ps had negative feelings about taking part
– Psychiatric assessment found no harm caused
– Experimental lab IS a valid setting for study of obedience
– It may be a good thing to make people question authority more!

Question 20

What are the more recent criticisms about the Milgram (1964) study?

Answer 20

• Is the banality of evil argument over- played?
o e.g. work of Cesarani (2005) on Eichmann
He argued that we shouldn’t overplay the idea that situational forces mean no one has any personal responsibility

•	Is personality really unimportant? 
o	Blass (1991) - some personality measures that Milgram used do correlate with obedience levels

• Are there alternative explanations?
o Haslam et. al. (2014) – engaged followership model: “Our own research shows that tyranny does not result from blind conformity to rules and roles, it is a creative act of followership that flows from identification with authorities who represent vicious acts as virtuous.”
They argue that it’s not blind conformity that’s going on, instead there’s a shared identity created between the experimenter and participant. The act is seem as virtuous because they’re part of a shared identity that is associated with doing something good to progress science

Question 21

What can be concluded on the Milgram study?

Answer 21

• The power of situations
• Evil acts can stem from evil situations – concept of destructive obedience
• A situationist view of evil (see Zimbardo, 2004)
– “Human beings have the capacity to come to experience killing other people as nothing extraordinary.” (Staub, 1989, p.13)
– “When one probes behind evil actions, one normally finds, not an evil individual…but instead ordinary individuals who have done acts of evil because they were caught up in complex social forces.” (Darley, 1996)