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Milgram (1963) - Research into Obedience (SOCIAL) - (Baseline experiment) …
Milgram (1963) - Research into Obedience (SOCIAL) - (Baseline experiment)
Aim
To establish a baseline measure of the level of obedience shown when naïve participants were ordered to administer increasingly intense electric shocks to a confederate by an authority figure.
Results
Milgram’s (1963) baseline experiment found that 100% of participants obeyed the instructions of the authority figure to administer shocks up to 300 volts and 35% stopped sometime before 450 volts, making them defiant participants. 65% continued to the full 450 volts, making them obedient participants.
Participants showed signs of nervousness and tension such as sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, groaning, digging fingernails into their flesh and nervous laughing fits.
Three participants were observed to have full-blown uncontrollable seizures
Conclusion
Social influence is strong and people will be obedient even if it may cause distress or go against their morals if they consider someone to be a legitimate authority figure.
Individual differences, such as personality, influence the extent to which people will be obedient.
Milgram concluded numerous situational explanations for the high levels of obedience such as Yale University being a prestigious setting so it must have ethical baselines, the study having a worthy cause towards science, Mr Wallace willingly volunteering and the participant feeling obligated to participate after being paid and volunteering themself.
Evaluation
✗ Generalisability - Milgram’s original study has low generalisability. He had a small sample size of 40 male American participants who were all volunteers. This makes the study androcentric as the sample was entirely male, making it unrepresentative of how female individuals in the target population may reflect obedience. The sample is ethnocentric as it uses all American participants meaning you can’t generalise this to other geographies or cultures worldwide who may show obedience to different levels. As all the participants were volunteers they may all have similar personality types. For example, they may be dispositioned to being extroverted or have an external locus of control as they volunteered to participate via an advertisement. There is a lack of generalisability due to the sample being unrepresentative of the wider target populations which is a weakness as you can’t be sure that all populations would reflect obedience similar to the findings. To improve the study, Milgram carried out variations of his procedure that involved a sample where he used women for instance, making the findings more generalisable to wider target populations.
✓ Reliability Milgram’s procedure is reliable because it can be replicated due to the standardised procedure such as the same confederates, timings (etc.) Milgram carried out multiple replications and Burger (2009) replicated the variations of Milgram's studies to find similar obedience rates. Burger followed Milgram’s script, indicating high reliability. Milgram also filmed parts of his study, allowing viewers to review his findings (inter-rater reliability).
✓ Application - His results can be applied to improve pilot training. Tarnow (2000) describes how 20% of plane crashes could be avoided if first officers in training weren't hesitant to question their captain upon suspicion of errors made. This could improve cockpit behaviour and save lives. This could also be applied to genocides such as the My Lai Massacre and the Holocaust to avoid such tragedies happening again due to destructive obedience.
✗ Ethics- The main criticism is that participants’ well-being was ignored: they were deceived (about the shocks and the learner being severely harmed) and didn't give valid informed consent (they were told it was a memory test, not an obedience test). The protection from harms was violated such as three participants had full blown seizures and others showed great signs of distress. The “prods” made this difficult for them when they tried to withdraw. This sort of treatment of participants drags science into disrepute making it harder to recruit for future research and society may lose faith in authority.
✓/✗ Validity - This study has high internal validity due to the use of controls and a standardised procedure, There was a greater control over extraneous variables that may have impacted the validity. However, this study had low ecological validity due to being conducted in a lab environment not reflective of the participants' natural environment. The task was artificial – in real life, teachers are not asked to deliver electric shocks to learners, reducing task validity/mundane realism.
Method
This was a lab experiment that took place in a smart psychology lab at Yale University.
Procedure
The stern experimenter was introduced to the participant upon arrival. The victim or learner role was played by Mr Wallace. One participant and one confederate were used for each trial. A phoney shock generator with 30 switches marked in 15 volt increments from 15 volts to 450 volts was used.
To enhance the authenticity of the shock generator, the participant (teacher) was given a sample shock of 45 volts to demonstrate it was a real shock. The participants overheard the experimenter tell Mr Wallace (learner) that 'although the shocks can be extremely painful, they cause no permanent tissue damage'.
The participant was told this was a study to investigate the effects of punishment on learning. Mr Wallace and the participant were separated into two rooms. Mr Wallace (learner) had to memorise a series of words and every time he answered incorrectly, the participant (teacher) was instructed to shock him. For every subsequent wrong answer, the participant was required to increase the shocks by 15 volt increment switches. Only one in every four answers was right and there was a predetermined set of responses from the learner complaining about the shocks. If unsure the participant asked for advice and the experimenter encouraged using verbal prods such as 'Please go on' and 'The experiment requires that you continue'. Sessions were filmed and notes were taken. After the experiment, the participants were debriefed using open-ended questions and a number of psychometric measures were taken to ensure they weren't harmed.
Sample
40 male American participants of different occupational backgrounds, aged 20-50 from the New Haven area were recruited through volunteer sampling via newspaper advertisements and were paid $4.50 for turning up to a "study of memory".