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Milgram's study (1963) - Coggle Diagram
Milgram's study (1963)
Aim
To find out naive participants would obey orders from an authority that went against their values, specifically, to see if they would deliver electric shocks to a confederate sufficiently powerful to kill someone.
IV
This is a structured observation, so there is no IV, not an experiment. There is no manipulation of an independent variable
DV
Milgram measured the highest shock level each participant would go to, treating 450 volts as “complete obedience”. This score is treated as the dependent variable, especially in the later variations of his study.
Sample
40 participants, all men aged 20-50 years old. They were recruited by volunteer sampling by posting a newspaper ad and paid $4 for turning up to a “study of memory”, even though the study wasn’t for memory.
Procedure
- The participant and the confederate both draw slips to decide their roles, the draw was rigged for the real participant to draw the teacher and the confederate the learner.
- The learner went into a room and got strapped to an electric chair apparatus, whereas the teacher was taken into a separate room that contained an electric shock generator.
- The study consisted of a word memory game and if the learner got any wrong, the teacher would shock the learner, increasing each wrong answer, going up to 450V
- The answers from the learner were predetermined and the experimenter gave prompts to encourage the teacher to keep going.
Results
All the participants were obedient up until 300V; however at this point the learner stopped responding. Between 300V and 375V, 14 participants dropped out of the study and the remaining 26 participants (65%) carried on until 450V.
Conclusion
Milgram concluded that you do not have to be a psychopath to follow immoral orders. Situational factors also play a part in obedience:
Yale University is a prestigious setting - people believe that no immoral or unethical could happen here
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Mr Wallace seemed willing; he had volunteered and had equal chance to be the teacher (or so they thought)
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