Obedience - Milgrams Research

Procedure

Milgram recruited 40 male participants through newspaper adverts and flyers in the post. The ad said he was looking for participants for a study about memory. The participants recruited were aged between 20 and 50 years, and their jobs ranged from unskilled to protessional. They were offered $4.50 to take part (this was a reasonable amount of money in the early 1960s).

When participants arrived at Migram's lab they were paid the money at the outset and there was a rigged draw for their role. A confederate, "Mr. Wallace', always ended up as the

"learner' while the true participant was the 'teacher'. There was also an 'experimenter' (another confederate) dressed in a lab coat, played by an actor. Participants were told they could leave the study at any time.

The learner was strapped in a chair in another room and wired with electrodes. The teacher was required to give the learner an increasingly severe electric shock each time the learner made a mistake on a learning task (the task involved learning word pairs). The shocks were demonstrated to the teacher. Thereafter the shocks were not real.

The shock level started at 15 (labelled "slight shock' on the shock machine) and rose through 30 levels to 450 volts (labelled ' danger - severe shock'). When the teacher got to 300 volts (intense shock") the learner pounded onthe wall and then gave no response to the next question. After the 315-volt shock the learner pounded on the wall again but after that there was no further response from the learner.

When the teacher turned to the experimenter for guidance, the experimenter gave a standard instruction: "An absence of response should be treated as a wrong answer. If the teacher felt unsure about continuing, the experimenter used a sequence of four standard 'prods", which were repeated if necessary:

Prod 1 - Please continue' or "Please go on."

Prod 2 - The experiment requires that you continue.*

Prod 3 - "It is absolutely essential that you continue.*

Prod 4 - 'You have no other choice, you must go on.'

Findings

No participants stopped below 300 volts, 12.5% (five participants) stopped at 300 volts (intense shock), 65% continued to the highest level of 450 volts. Qualitative data were also collected. such as observations that the participants showed signs of extreme tension; many of them were seen to 'sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan and dig their fingernails into their hands' Three even had "full-blown uncontrollable seizures'

Prior to the study Milgram asked 14 psychology students to predict the participants behaviour.

The students estimated that no more than 3% of the participants would continue to 450 volts This shows that the findings were not expected

Limitation - Gender Bias

Milgram's baseline sample consisted entirely of 40 male participants. the findings cannot automatically be generalized to women.

Strength - high ecological validity

an authority figure dictating commands to a subordinate—accurately mirrors real-world hierarchical power structures.