Situational variables affecting obedience

Milgrim key study 1963 - Aim

to find out if ordinary American citizens would obey an unjust order from an authority figure and inflict pain on another person because they were instructed to.

Participants

40 participants, all male, single blind trial (participant unaware) 

procedure of Milgrim

Participants were told it was a study of how punishment affects learning.

There were two experimental confederates: an experimenter, and a 47-year old man who was introduced as another volunteer sample . The two participants drew to see who would act as the ‘teacher’ and who the ‘learner’. This was rigged so that the real participant was always the teacher and ‘fake participant’ the learner. The teacher was required to test the learner on his ability to remember word pairs. Every time he got one wrong the teacher had to administer increasingly strong electric shocks, starting at 15 volts, and then continuing up to the maximum of 450 volts in 15 volt increments.

In the voice feedback study, the learner, sitting in another room, gave mainly wrong answers and received his fake shocks in silence until they reached 300 volt level - very strong. At this point he pounded on the wall and then gave no response to the next question. He repeated this at 315 volts and from then on said/did nothing. If the teacher asked to stop at any point the experimenter had a series of ‘prods’ to repeat, such as saying, it is absolutely essential that you continue or, you have no other choice, you must go on.

findings of Milgrims study

 before the study, milgrim asked psychiatrists, college students and colleagues to predict how long participants would go before refusing to continue. Consistently these groups predicted that very few would go beyond 150 volts and only 1 in 1,000 would administer the full 450 volts.

However, contrary to these expectations, in the voice feedback study, 26 out of 40 (65%) continued to the maximum shock level, this was despite the shock generator being labelled ‘danger: servere shock at 420 volts and ‘XXX’ at 450. In fact, all participants went to 300 volts with only 5 (12.5%) stopping there, the point at which the leaner first objected.

Situational factors affecting obedience - proximity

In the proximity study, both teacher and learner were seated in the same room. Obedience levels fell to 40% as the teacher was now able to experience the learners' anguish more directly. In an even more extreme variation the teacher was required to force the learner's hand onto the shock plate. In this touch proximity condition, obedience rate dropped even further to 30% .

Milgrim found that the proximity of an authority figure also had an effect on obedience rates. In the experimenter absent study, after giving his instructions the experimenter left the room and gave subsequent orders over the telephone. The vast majority of participants now defied the experimenter, with only 21% continuing to the maximum shock level, some even went as far as repeatedly giving the weakest shock level despite telling the experimenter they were following the correct procedure.

situational factors affecting obedience - location

the studies were conducted in the psychology laboratory at Yale university. Several participants remarked that the location of the study gave them confidence in the integrity of the people involved, and many indicated that they would not have shocked the learner if the study had been carried out elsewhere.

What, then, would happen if the research were moved to a less prestigious location? To examine this possibility Milgriim moved his study to a run down office in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with no obvious affiliations with yale. Obedience rates did drop slightly but not significantly , with 48% of participants delivering the 450 volt max shock.

situational factors affeting obedience - power of uniform

research has shown that uniforms can have a powerful impact on obedience. They are easily recognisable and convey power and authority, which can become symbolized in the uniform itself.

Bushman (1988) carried out a study where a female researcher, dressed as either in a ‘police-style’ uniform, as a business executive or as a beggar, stopped people in the street and told them to give change to a male researcher for an expired parking meter.

When she was in uniform 72% of the people obeyed, whereas obedience rates were much lower when dressed as a business executive (48%) or as a beggar (52%). When interviewed afterwards people claimed they had obeyed the woman in uniform because she appeared to have authority.

Outline two ethical guidelines and relate them to Milgram’s study:

Deception - because the teacher was assigned teacher role everytime and confederate used, decieving the particpant- deception as they were told the aim was to study the effects of punishment on learning when this was not the real aim of the study so this lacks informed consent. 

Right to withdraw - the experimenter kept giving prods which made the participant feel like they had to keep carrying on and couldnt really withdraw

AO3 - lack of realism - internal validity

P: Orne and Holland argue that Milgram’s study lacks internal validity 

E: because the participants did not believe the shocks were real and the victim was not really suffering

E: This affects the internal validity because the participants were responding to demand characteristics - where ppts may have guessed the true aim of the study to see how obedient people were to authority and modified their behaviour. Therefore Milgram was not measuring natural obedience, but how people believed they should behave.

L: However Milgram argued that since participants displayed signs of distress and reported that they thought the final shocks would have been ‘extremely painful’, they had believed in the experimental situation and that the study therefore was valid.

A* level 4 elaboration: However one of Milgram’s researcher’s Taketo Murata found that the participants who believed the shocks were real were most likely to disobey the experimenter and give lower intensity shocks this evidence suggests the internal validity was low because the higher obedience rate may be due to demand characteristics rather than obedience to authority.

Historical validity AO3 - would the same thing happen today? - carried out 50 years ago

Blass (1999) carried out statistical analysis of obedience studies carried out between 1961 and 1985. By carrying out a correlational analysis relating each study’s year of publication and the amount of obedience it found, he discovered no relationship whatsoever i.e the later studies found no more or less obedience than the ones conducted earlier.

Furthermore Burger (2009) found levels of obedience almost identical to those found somewhat 46 years earlier 

This shows that Milgram’s study has temporal reliability and his findings are equally as applicable today as they were when he carried out the study.

AO3 - lacks popualtion validity

as the study only used white middle-class male participants from the USA.

This suggests that the results can not be generalised to other places.

However, when Milgram tested women, they gave the same level of obedience suggesting that it is valid. Furthermore A Dutch study by Meeus & Raaijmakers (1986) showed that willingness to obey wasn’t unique to the American culture, though in some cultures e.g Holland and Germany obedience was higher suggesting there are some cultural variations

AO3 - study does have ethical issues

Participants were told that the study was about the effect of punishment on learning and that punishment would be administered through giving electric shocks to a ‘learner’.

They were also told that the allocation of participants to being a ‘learner’ or a ‘teacher’ was completely by chance but it was predetermined and Pps were led to believe the shocks were real and the cries they heard were coming from the ‘learner’.

The Pps therefore did not give fully informed consent. Many Pps suffered psychological harm and felt that they could not leave. Milgram defended his study by saying that he couldn’t have foreseen the severity of stress experienced, and he did debrief participants after the study and did a follow-up study one year.  Results from the follow-up study  indicated that participants had not suffered any long term harm.  84% reported that they were very glad to have taken part in the experiment, with only 1.3% very sorry to have taken part suggesting that the benefits of the study outweighed the costs.