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Factors Affecting Obedience (Situational Factors (Personal Responsibility,…
Factors Affecting Obedience
Personality
Evaluation
Milgram found a great deal obedience through the participants in his studies, so it is
unlikely that there are just personality factors
at work with so many individuals obeying orders
Elms looked at
interviews
after Milgram's study to find evidence for personality, and it
showed some evidence of authoritarian personality being obedient
Milgram's study did not directly focus on personality,
more research is needed for this to link to obedience
Authoritarian personality
Adorno (1950)
: An authoritarian personality is
submissive to authority but harsh to those subordinate to themselves
F-scale questionnaire
used on participants
The higher the score the
more obedient
they were
More submissive --> less likely to withdraw
Research
Holland (1967)
: Milgram's ideas on obedience to
see if they linked to a person's locus of control but found no link
Blass (1991)
:
Found a link between internal locus of control and resistance to obedience
Schurz (1985)
: Austria found those with internal locus of control felt more responsible for their actions
Rotter (1966): Locus of control
People with
internal locus of control tend to believe they are responsible for their own actions
and are less influenced by others
Internal locus of control
- they are in control of their own actions and believes that what happens is something they have caused
External locus of control
- what happens to them comes from outside their control
Situational Factors
Personal Responsibility
Social Impact Theory
suggests when people are in a social situation
surrounded by others, they are less likely to take responsibility for their actions
, as
responsibility becomes diffused
among the group
Proximity
The
closer the authority figure, the higher level of obedience
Telephonic variation of Milgram's experiment when the
experimenter gave orders over the phone, causing obedience levels to fall to 22.5%
Status of authority
The authority figure
must seem legitimate for people to obey
People in uniform (e.g police or fireman) are perceived as superior
Milgram's variation study with an o
rdinary man giving the "teacher" orders to give the shocks, causing the obedience level to fall to 20%
Evaluation
As situation changes in Milgram's variations,
levels of obedience also change despite the same procedure
Both variations (Meeus and Raajimakers) found similar effects,
change in situation lowers obedience
Variations show
less pressure from authority resulted in lower obedience
Situational factors can't help us understand how some obey and don't even when the situation is the same, so
individual differences
also play a key role
Momentum of compliance
If an order is given to a person
more gradually they are more likely to obey
Milgram's experiment involved participants gradually increasing the shock voltage from 15 to 450, where
65% of them administered the highest shock
This
gradual approach makes the order less powerful and increases obedience levels
Gender
Gender Role Schema Theory
Individuals develop a sense of
masculinity or femininity as they're brought up
Men = strong and aggressive, women = compliant
Females may be more obedient but according to some experiments thats not the case
Milgram's change of the experiment in which he used females found
65%
obedience, which was the
identical
Studies that provide gender differences
Kilham and Mann (1974)
A
replication of Milgram's experiment done in Australia
, which showed how male and female levels of obedience are
not similar
Gupta (1983)
A study reported by
Blass (2012
) which used seven conditions
Six of the seven conditions found that
females were less obedient than males
Evaluation
The sole study conducted by Milgram that involved female participants is most likely
not enough to test how gender impacts obedience
-
Burger (2009)
found
no differences
in gender within results of his studies
-
Blass (2012)
suggests the
majority of 12 studies across cultures found no gender differences
Only
Kilham and Mann (1974)
and
Gupta's (1983)
findings say otherwise that
women are less obedient
Studies lack ecological validity as they took place in an artificial setting
An argument could be made that the
results of the studies were similar therefore it could be said that there was a high level of reliability
Culture
Milgram
Collectivist cultures
- cooperation and compliance is important for the stability of the group
Individualistic cultures
- behave independently and resist conformity
Non-western cultures are considered more obedient
due to traditional and respect to their families compared to individualistic cultures
Italy 85%
Spain 50%
South Africa 87.5%
Jordan 73%
Austria 80%
Australia 28%
UK 50%
Obedience is found across cultures suggesting that it is
universal
, however these results
do not explicitly show cultural influences in procedures
He wanted to see whether people in the
US would obey in a similar way to how people in Germany did in WWII
, and found participants were
more obedient
than expected
-
Agency Theory implies there is a feature in society that makes one person an authoritative figure and the rest agents
It is
part of human nature for people to obey an authoritative figure
Research
-
Shanab and Yahya (1977)
: a
female experimenter
asked children, aged
6-16 in Jordan
, to give 'shocks' to other children, where
73% of people gave full shocks to same gender peers
, which concludes children are obedient and that there are
differences between Jordan and USA
-
Kilham and Mann (1974)
: first year
Australian students
to order pain to be administered and administer pain, where there was a
higher level of obedience when ordering pain rather than administering it
Evaluation
Studies in different cultures need to have t
he same procedure, and controls, to draw a conclusion about effects of culture
These studies had differences in procedure, and based on similar results it looks like culture has no effect on obedience