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OBEDIENCE - Coggle Diagram
OBEDIENCE
MILGRAMS STUDY
Procedure: An add was made in need of a nursery teacher with pay. Participants were then called to Yale University and told to give electric shocks to 'learners' as part of a new 'learning programme'. Despite resistance, they were continuously told by the researcher to continue increasing the voltage of the shocks. Participants were debriefed after the study.
Findings: 65% of participants continued to 450 volts and 84% said they were glad to have taken part.
Conclusion: The research showed that obedience to authority is due more to situational factors eg the setting, experimenter and pressure exerted on the participant to continue.
Supporting research evidence: Hoflings research where nurses were given instructions over the phone to over prescribe patients a drug supported the idea that Milgrams findings tell us about obedience in real life as 21 out of 22 nurses were prepared to administer the drug.
Evaluation:
- Hoflings research supports Milgrams study as it was high in ecological validity.
- However, Milgrams study is low in internal validity due to the demand characteristics. Many say that the set-up was not believable and participants were just 'playing along' so the obedience was not a genuine effect.
- However, this can be contradicted due to the stress reactions.
- It has ethical issues such as deception due to lack of conformed consent and Psychological harm
SITUATIONAL FACTORS
Proximity: When the teacher and the learner were in the same room, 40% of participants were fully obedient and went to 450 volts whereas when the experimenter gave instructions over the phone this dropped to 20.5%.
Location: Milgram changed the setting to a run-down office building instead of the university and 47.5% obeyed.
Uniform: Milgram changed the experimenters clothes from a lab coat to ordinary clothes and 20% were fully obedient.
Evidence to support uniform: Bickmans study where he got people to dress up as a security guard, a milkman uniform, and in a jacket and tie and ask random people to do odd tasks in public to see if they obeyed. It was found that the security guard outfit caused more people to obey compared with the milkman outfit and the jacket and tie supporting the fact that uniform is very important in gaining authority.
AGENCY THEORY
Agentic state: People allow others to direct their actions, and pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving the order so they act as agents for another persons will.
Autonomous state: People direct their own actions, and take responsibility for the results of those actions so are not influenced by others.
Agentic shift: We switch from being autonomous to being an agent because we perceive someone else to be an authority figure entitled to expect obedience.
LEGITIMACY OF AUTHORITY
- We obey people at the top of the social hierarchy as we accept that their authority is legitimate and can exercise social power to allow society to function smoothly.
- Authority figures have legitimacy through societies agreement for example we agree that the police and courts have the power to punish wrongdoers.
- Upbringing leads us to handing control of our behaviour to authority figures. We learn this from parents, adults and teachers.
AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY - Dispositional explanation for why people obey.
- They have very high respect for authority figures and dismissive of people whom they feel to be inferior to them in status.
- They have very conventional attitudes and are inflexible in outlook.
- They score highly of the F scale which is a personality developed from harsh parenting.
THE F SCALE
Adorno developed the F scale which is the potential for fascism scale. He concluded that obedience is sue to the personality of the individual which is a dispositional explanation which contrasts with Milgrams situational explanations. He came up with the authoritarian personality.