Obedience - Milgram's

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 if their instructions are not obeyed.

Question 2

what is the positive influence of obedience

Answer 2

Arguably, society could not operate in an effective manner unless rules and laws are obeyed and people in authority are acknowledged as having the right to give orders.

Question 3

what are the negative consequence of obedience

Answer 3

During the Second World War, under the Nazis, some German citizens unquestioningly followed orders that saw the mass murder of millions of people, like the Jews, the Gypsies and the disabled – an event that became known as the Holocaust

Question 4

what did Milgram set out to test

Answer 4

Milgram set out to test the ‘Germans are different’ hypothesis

Question 5

what did the Germans are different’ hypothesis suggest

Answer 5

This hypothesis claimed that Germans are highly obedient and that Adolf Hitler could not have exterminated the Jewish people and other minority groups in the 1930s and 1940s without the unquestioning co-operation of the German population.

Question 6

what did Milgram want to know about the Germans

Answer 6

Milgram wanted to know whether Germans have a different personality (disposition) that led them to blindly obey and commit acts of murder without question, or whether people are generally more obedient than they would care to believe due to the nature of the situation.

Question 7

what was the aim of Milgram’s study

Answer 7

To see if individuals would obey the orders of an authority figure that incurred negative consequences and went against one’s moral code.

Question 8

What was the procedure of Milgram’s study

Answer 8

40 American males aged 20-50 years, with jobs ranging from unskilled to professional (no students), responded to a newspaper advertisement to volunteer for a study of memory and learning at Yale University Psychology Department. They were offered $4 to participate.

Question 9

what is a confederate

Answer 9

A confederate is a stooge i.e. an accomplice, working on behalf of the investigator.

Question 10

who were the two confederates Milgram’s study

Answer 10

Each participant was met by a confederate experimenter wearing a grey lab coat (to give him the appearance of authority), who was actually a biology teacher.
He introduced participants to Mr Wallace, a confederate participant, a gentle, harmless looking man in his late 50s.

Question 11

what were participants told

Answer 11

Participants were told that the roles of ‘teacher’ and ‘learner’ would be determined randomly by drawing lots, but it was rigged:
Mr Wallace was always the Learner
The real participant was always the Teacher

Participants were told that the experiment concerned ‘the effects of punishment on learning’.

Question 12

what did the experimenter explain to participants

Answer 12

The experimenter explained to participants that punishments would involve increasingly severe electric shocks.
In an adjoining room, the experimenter strapped a consenting Mr Wallace into a chair with his arms attached to electrodes.
The Teacher was told to give shocks through a shock generator in the next room.

Question 13

What was the shock generator like

Answer 13

The generator had a row of switches, each marked with a voltage level.
The first switch was labelled ’15 volts’ and the verbal description ‘slight shock’.
Each switch gave a shock 15 volts higher than the one before, up to a maximum 450 volts, marked ‘XXX’.
The real participant (‘Teacher’) received a real shock of 45 volts to convince him that everything was authentic. Thereafter, the shocks were not real.

Question 14

what did the participants have to read out/ do if they got it wrong

Answer 14

Participants then read out a series of paired-associate word tasks, to which they received a pre-recorded series of verbal answers from the Learner (with the real participant believing these to be genuine responses).
The Teacher was told by the experimenter to give a shock each time Mr Wallace got a word pair wrong, with each shock 15 volts higher than the previous one.
His answers were given by him supposedly switching on one of four lights located above the shock generator.

Question 15

what was the voice-feedback like at each voltage

Answer 15

At 150 volts the Learner began to protest and demanded to be released.
At 300 volts he refused to answer any more questions and said he had heart problems that were starting to bother him.
At 315 volts he screamed loudly.
From 330 volts no more was heard.

Question 16

what happened anytime the teacher became reluctant to continue

Answer 16

Any time the teacher seemed reluctant to continue, he was encouraged to go on through a series of verbal prods.
If he questioned the procedure, he was told that the shocks would not cause any lasting tissue damage and was instructed to keep shocking Mr Wallace if he stopped answering.
Verbal prods included ‘the experiment requires that you continue’ and ‘you have no other choice, you must go on’.

Question 17

what were the quantitative results of the study

Answer 17

62.5% (25 out of 40 participants) administered the full 450 voltage shock in the voice-feedback experiment.
100% of participants continued up to at least 300 volts.

Question 18

what were the qualitative results of the study

Answer 18

Many participants showed distress, such as twitching, sweating, stuttering or giggling nervously, digging their nails into their flesh and verbally attacking the experimenter.
3 participants had uncontrollable seizures.
Some participants showed little if any signs of discomfort, instead concentrating dutifully on what they were doing.

Question 19

did Milgram’s study support the hypothesis

Answer 19

Many participants showed distress, such as twitching, sweating, stuttering or giggling nervously, digging their nails into their flesh and verbally attacking the experimenter.
3 participants had uncontrollable seizures.
Some participants showed little if any signs of discomfort, instead concentrating dutifully on what they were doing.

Question 20

what were the conclusions of the study

Answer 20

The results suggest that obeying those in authority is normal behaviour in a hierarchically organised society.
Under certain circumstances, most people will blindly obey orders that are distressing and go against their conscience and moral code, losing feelings of empathy and compassion.
Therefore, it is the situation that people find themselves in that determines how they act.

Question 21

what are the practical applications of Milgram’s study

Answer 21

It was hoped that Milgram’s findings would help form strategies to reduce destructive blind obedience.
Unfortunately, not much has changed since 1963; horrendous crimes are still committed by people operating under the excuse of ‘simply following orders’ e.g. the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US troops in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004 and Lt William Calley, whose defence of the My Lai Massacre was that he was only doing his duty by following orders.

Question 22

the study was highly controlled - why/why is this a strength?

Answer 22

Features that make for a standardised procedure in this study include:
the pre-scripted “prods” used by the Experimenter
the tape-recorded responses from Mr Wallace
the fact that the Teacher cannot see Mr Wallace, the Learner (so there will be no differences in how he looks between each test).
This is a strength of the study because every participant had a similar experience, therefore minimising any potential extraneous variables that could confound the results.

Question 23

P:Milgram’s study lacks internal validity i.e. he was not testing what he intended to test.

Answer 23

E:Orne and Holland (1968) claimed that participants delivered the shocks because they knew they were not real (therefore not demonstrating obedience). In Milgram’s study, despite the fact the learner cried out in pain, the experimenter remained cool and distant, leading the participant to suppose the ‘victim’ could not really be suffering any real harm.
C:However, 75% of participants in post-study interviews said they did think the shocks were real. Similarly, the extreme physical responses of many of the participants suggests that they believed they were really inflicting pain on someone else.

Question 24

P:Milgram’s study lacks ecological validity.

Answer 24

E:The lab environment was unrealistic in terms of real-life situations where obedience is seen e.g. participants knew they were taking part in an experiment; it was an unusual environment for them and an artificially constructed situation.
C:However, a study by Hofling et al. (1966) provided support for the ecological validity of Milgram’s findings, showing that obedience to an authority figure could occur just as readily in a real life setting.

Question 25

What was Hofling’s study (1966)

Answer 25

This field experiment was conducted in a hospital.
Nurses - working alone - were telephoned by an unknown “Dr Smith” (confederate), who asked them to give 20mg of an unknown drug (Astroten) to a patient.
If the nurse obeyed, she would be breaking several hospital rules e.g. giving twice the maximum dose allowed for this drug.
Key finding: 21 of the 22 (95.4%) nurses obeyed the doctor and went to administer the drug.
This suggests that Milgram’s findings can be generalised to other situations.

Question 26

P:Milgram’s study lacks population validity i.e. it’s difficult to generalise the findings to other people.

Answer 26

E:This is because the sample only consisted of American male participants (gender bias, androcentric – male-centred; cultural bias), suggesting that the findings cannot be generalised to females.
C:Sheridan and King (1972) got male and female participants to give real electric shocks to a puppy, every time it responded to a command incorrectly. The shocks were actually only mild (but enough to make the puppy jump/howl). The researchers found that 54% of males and 100% of the females obeyed up to an apparent 450 volts, suggesting that females can be more obedient than males.