1.2 Obedience: Social Influence: Psychology revision AQA

Obedience

To comply with the demands of someone you see as an authority figure. This means when orders come from a figure of authority we can easily deny personal responsibility because it is assumed that they will take ultimate responsibility. When this happens, we become ‘agents’ of an external authority.

Milgram argued that obedience results from what two opposing sets of demands?

1. The external authority: Authority of the authority figure;

2. The internal authority: Authority of our own conscience.

Milgram's interest in obedience was sparked by:

The trials of Naz who had worked in the death camps: their defense was that they had simply been obeying orders. This led Milgram to look at the Agentic State as an explanation of obedience, i.e. an individual carrying out the orders of an authority figure, acting as their agent (the shift is from autonomy to agency)

Autonomous State

An autonomous state is the opposite of an agentic state and means the person has autonomy over their actions and can act according to their own principles.

Legitimacy of authority

Most human societies are ordered in a hierarchical way, where some members of the group have legitimate social power above those beneath them in the hierarchy e.g. police/teachers/doctors. We learn via socialisation that we will be accepted if we obey those who have authority over us.

Milgram's Research

Stanley Milgram sought an answer to the question of why such a high proportion of the German population obeyed Hitler's commands to murder over 6 million Jews as well as 5 million Romani, homosexuals, Poles and other social groups during the Second World War.

Milgram thought that one possible explanation was that Germans were different from other people in other countries, perhaps being more obedient (known as a dispositional explanation of obedience).

Milgram's procedure (1963)

40 American men volunteered to take part in Milgram's study at Yale University, supposedly on memory. When each volunteer arrived to take part, they were introduced to another participant (who was a confederate to Milgram). The two participants drew lots to see who would be the 'Teacher' (T) and who would be the 'Learner' (L). The draw was fixed, so the genuine participant was always the teacher and the confederate the learner An Experimenter(E) was also involved, who was also a confederate and was dressed in a grey lab coat.

One participant, the confederate, was asked to learn a set of word pairs and the teacher would test his knowledge. They were placed in adjacent rooms and the teacher was positioned in front of a set of controls to administer electric shocks to the learner. The teacher was instructed to punish the learner with a shock after each incorrect he gave. When the teacher displayed a reluctance to injure the learner, they were encouraged to continue the procedure.

Milgram's results and conclusion

The result showed that 65% of participants went all the way up to 450 volts ('danger - severe shock') 100% of participants went up to 300 volts ('intense shock') Many of the participants showed signs of emotional distress e.g. shaking, sweating, groaning, seizures.

The conclusion is that, under the right conditions, people will commit acts of destructive obedience towards someone they have just met. Also, situational factors may explain destructive obedience.

Research support (Beauvoir et al 2012)

A French documentary focused on a game show where participants thought they were contestants in a pilot episode for a new show called Le Jeu De La Mort (The Game of Death). Participants were paid to give electric shocks ordered by the presenter to other participants in front of a studio audience. The participants who were receiving the shocks were actors and the shocks were fake.

The result showed that 80% of the participants delivered the maximum shock of 460 volts to what appeared to be an unconscious man. Participants' behavior was almost identical to that of Milgram's participants, they showed signs of anxiety, nervous laughter and nail-biting. This supports Milgram's original findings of obedience to authority

Ethical issues of Milgram's studies

- Participants thought the allocation of roles of both Teacher and Learner was random, but they were not, as Milgram's confederate was always the learner.

- Participants believed the electric shocks were real

- Milgram debriefed the participants afterwards to ensure they understood the real intentions of the experiment

Situational variables

In Milgram's original procedure, the teacher could hear the learner but could not see him. In the proximity variation,both were moved to the same room. The obedience rate dropped from 65% to 40%.

In the touch proximity variation, the teacher then had to force the learner's hand onto the electroshock plate. The obedience rate dropped further to 30%.

In the remote instruction variation, the experimenter left the room and gave instructions by telephone. The obedience rate dropped to 20.5%.

Limitation of Milgram's research

Participants may have known it was a fake situation, especially in the uniform variation when the experimenter was called away and replaced by a passer-by wearing casual clothes.

Authoritarian personality

An authoritarian personality tends to show extreme respect for authority, status and hierarchies; despises those they consider to be 'weak'; has conventional attitudes towards gender, sexuality, race etc.is rigid in their beliefs; is justice-focused; is likely to have right-wing political views.

This type of personality is likely to be the result of harsh parenting in which discipline was a key feature and expectation of 'perfect' behaviour is common i.e. the child is shown love as long as they behave exactly how the parent wants them to behave.

Adorno et al.'s research

Adorno et al. (1950) developed a questionnaire called the F-Scale (fascist scale) to test whether someone had an authoritarian personality. He studied more than 2000 middle-class white Americans and their unconscious attitudes towards other racial groups.

The result show that those who scored high on the F-Scale identified with strong people, had contempt for the weak, admired high-status individuals and exhibited 'black and white' views .There were strong positive correlation between authoritarianism and prejudice.