MILGRAM (OBEDIENCE)

Destructive obedience, social roles, social pressure?

-Destructive obedience - obedience that has potential to cause psychological or physical harm or injury to another

-Social roles - these are the ways in which we behave as members of a social group. A person can have a number of different roles as they adapt their behaviour to meet expectations

-Social Pressure - the influence of a person or group on another person or group

Psychology Being Investigated

-Social pressure can take the form of feeling the needs to conform to the expectations of others, or to obey the directions of another person

-An agreed system of authority and obedience is a necessary for humans to live and work together

-The social pressure created by obedience to authority can also have negative consequences, including aggression towards others

-In Europe around the time of the Second World War, 11 million innocent people were systematically murdered on command by the Nazis during Adolf Hitler's regime, The Holocaust took the lives of people from a range of minority groups, including six million Jews. For such a large-scale atrocity to be possible required the obedience of many people, including most ordinary citizens as well as Nazi officers and guards. Some of those who were later tried as war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials argued in their defence that they were 'just following orders'

Background

-Stanley Milgram, who was himself born into a Jewish family, sought to challenge this 'Germans are different' hypothesis

-He proposed a situational explanation for obedience; that many people who found themselves in a similar situation would harm or even kill other human beings under the orders of an authority figure

-Before his study, Milgram told psychology students and some of his own colleagues about the procedure he would use involving destructive obedience, and asked them how many participants would apply the maximum voltage shocks to another person. Those asked believed that less than 3% of participants would deliver the maximum voltage shock, with many stating they felt that no one would deliver such strong punishment

Aim

-Investigate how obedient individuals would be to orders received from a person in authority

-Wanted to know whether people show obedience even when it would result in physical harm to another person (destructive obedience)

Research Method Design

-Controlled observation

-Laboratory experiment; behaviour of participants was observed ad recorded, variables were controlled (in the previous study, the variables weren’t manipulated)

-In this particular study, each participant underwent the same procedure and there was no control condition. However, he later replicated the procedure in other studies using different variations (e.g., using voice feedback from the 'victim') to allow comparisons to be made

-Participants' levels of obedience were measured through observation. This was operationalised as the maximum voltage given in response to the orders

-Observers also noted the participants' body language and any verbal comments or protests made throughout the procedure

Sample

-A newspaper advertisement was used to recruit 40 men between the ages of 20 and 50 years old (volunteer sample)

-Men living in the New Haven area of the USA

-Participants came from different backgrounds and occupations representing unskilled workers, white collar workers(who perform manual work), and professionals

Procedure

-$4.50 was given to the participants for being a part of the study

-Study took place at Yale University in a modern laboratory

-The participants arrived individually to the lab, and were then introduced to another man whom they believed to be another participant. This man was in fact a stooge or confederate; he was a likeable, middle-aged man who worked for Milgram and had been trained in the procedure which followed. Both men were told thatnthey would be allocated the roles of 'teacher' or 'learner'. They drew pieces of paper from a hat to determine the roles, but it was fixed so that the real participant was always allocated the role of teacher.

-Next the participant was taken to another room, where the stooge was strapped to a chair and had electrodes attached to him by the experimenter. The participant was presented with the shock generator, which consisted of rows of switches labelled with voltage readings ranging from 15 V to 450 V. The shock voltage was also labelled in ascending order with words such as 'moderate shock', to 'danger: severe shock' and for the final two switches 'XXX'

-The participant was told that although the shocks were painful, they were not dangerous. They were also then given an example shock of 45 V as a demonstration

Procedure (2)

-After this, they were seated behind a wall so that they could hear but not see the stooge who was attached to the machine. Although the stooge 'learner' at no point in the procedure received any kind of shock, the elaborate machine was set up to convince the participants that they were really able to injure the learner.

-The experimenter remained with the participant; the same experimenter was used in each trial. He was a 31-year- old teacher who wore a grey technician's coat and behaved seriously throughout.

-Memory task - reading pairs of words aloud to the learner, and subsequently testing the learner on their recognition of the words.

-Whenever the learner made a mistake, the participants were told by the experimenter to give him a shock by pressing a switch on the generator. They were ordered to increase the level of shock each time by 15 V for each error the learner made. Since the learner was a stooge, they could follow a pre-set plan of mistakes, deliberately giving the wrong answers at particular times.

-Until 300 V were reached, the learner had remained silent when receiving the punishment. However, once the punishment level had reached 300 V and again at 315 V, the learner began to bang the wall in protest to the participant. After this time, the learner made no further noises and stopped responding to the memory task altogether. If the participants asked the experimenter what they should do, the experimenter insisted that they continue with reading the words aloud and punish the learner.

Procedure (3)

-Participants were told that no response from the learner counted as an incorrect answer and should also receive a shock. When participants protested at this, the experimenter continued to give them verbal prods in the sequence: Please go on / Please continue / The experiment requires that you continue / It is absolutely essential that you continue / You have no other choice, you must go on. These verbal prods or orders had a set wording, and were given in a standard order to any participants who protested the task

-The procedure was considered to be complete when the participant refused to give any more shocks, or when they had given the maximum 450 V available. One-way mirrors were used to record the physical behaviours of the participants, and observers noted any comments that participants made. After the procedure was complete, each participant was interviewed and the deception was fuily explained to them.

-As part of the interview, participants were asked to estimate how painful they thought the final 450 V shock was, on a scale of 0-14 ('not at all painful' to 'extremely painful'). They were given the chance to meet the learner again, in order to reassure them that the learner was uninjured.

Results

-The mean estimate of the pain of the 450 V shock was 13.42 out of a maximum 14 (as reported in the debriefing interview), meaning that participants believed that they were causing serious pain.

-Some participants protested at the orders, saying things like 'I don't think I can go on with this...I don't think this is very humane', and 'I'm gonna chicken out... I can't do that to a man, I'll hurt his heart'.

-Nonetheless, the verbal prods given by the experimenter generally persuaded the participants to continue. After the procedures ended, the participants showed visible signs of relief, wiped their faces, sighed and shook their heads. A small minority of participants, however, did not show elevated levels of stress and appeared calm during the procedure.

-26 out of 40 participants administered the maximum 450 V (65%).

-40 out of 40 went up to 300 V (100%)

Conclusion

-Participants were willing to oppose their moral values to obey an authority figure, even when it meant harming another person

-Following destructive orders caused emotional strain on the participants

Ethical Issues

-Participants were deceived when they were told the aim of the research was learning and memory

-Milgram thoroughly debriefed his participants, revealing that the experimenter and learner were confederates. The learner reassured the participant that he was completely unharmed

-Participants were further deceived into believing that the learner (confederate) was another participant and the electric shocks were real. The prods used by the experimenter prevented participants from leaving the study. Three participants had seizures and the majority showed signs of intense distress

Strength

-Reliability – controls of the procedure (same instructions by the experimenter, feedback from the learner) led to higher level of standardisation

-Validity – participants were unaware their reactions were being recorded and a false study aim was given, decreasing the chance of demand characteristics

Weakness

-Generalisation – the study had low population validity as it included only Americans. Obedience may be different in other countries

-Validity – shocking a stranger is not an everyday task so does not reflect obedience to situations in real life

-Low ecological validity - artificial setting

Individual and situational explanations

-Only 65 per cent obeyed to the maximum voltage, supporting an individual explanation of obedience; 35 per cent were defiant and resisted the experimenter’s prods to continue causing harm. This suggests personal factors were responsible for their resistance.

-Situational factors, such as the location of the experiment (Yale University), resulted in all 40 participants giving 300 V

Application to everyday life

-The findings can be used to educate people to resist authority in cases of destructive obedience. Training programmes have been developed for soldiers in some armies to highlight the importance of resisting orders on moral grounds.