Obedience: Milgram’s study

Aim: milgram wanted to investigate whether in certain circumstances a normal person would give somebody a potentially lethal electric shock. If told to do so by an authority figure.

Method: milgram recruited 40 male volunteers and told them it was for a study on memory. Participants were aged from 20 to 50 years and from a range of jobs.

Participants were paid $4.50 on arrival and drew lots for their role. A confederate (‘mr Wallace’) always ended up as the learner while the true participant was always the teacher. An experimenter (another confederate) directed the study. Participants were told they could leave the study at any time.

The learner was strapped into a chair in another room. He was wired with electrodes so he could be given an increasingly severe electric shock each time he made a mistake on the memory task (he had to remember word pairs.) The shocks were not real but the teacher did not know this.

The electric shocks started at 15 Volts (labelled slight shock on the shock machine) and rose through 30 levels to 450 volts (danger- severe shock) the learner pounded on the wall and gave no response to the next question.

If the teacher asked the experimenter for guidance, he was told to continue.

Results: milgram found that no participant stopped below 300 volts. Five of them (12.5%) stopped at 300 volts when the learner pounded on the wall.

In total 65% of participants continued to the full 450 volts.

Observations (qualitative data) indicated that participants showed signs of extreme tension; many were seen to ‘sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan and dig their fingernails into their flesh’. Three had full blown uncontrollable seizures.

conclusions: milgram concluded that obedience had little to do with disposition. The relatively high levels of total obedience to a destructive order was better explained in terms of factors in the situation that made it difficult to disobey.

He identified 13 factors that influenced obedience, including:

The location of the stidy at a prestigious university provided authority.

The participant didn’t wish to disrupt the experiment because he felt under obligation to the experimenter due to his voluntary consent to take part.

It was a novel situation for the participant, who therefore didn’t know how to behave. If it had been possible to discuss the situation with others the participant might have behaved differently.

Evaluation: lacked realism

One weakness of the study was that participants may not have believed that the shocks were real.

Milgram did test the shocks out on the true participant beforehand but it is possible that the participants felt it was very unlikely that such severe shocks would be delivered in a psychological study. This is supported by some recent research by Gina Perry (2013). She listened to the original tape recordings made during the study and reported that participants often voiced their suspicions about the shocks.

Perry concluded that most of milgram’s participants realised that the shocks were faked but went along with the study because they didn’t want to spoil it.

Evaluation: supported by other research

One strength of the study is that the same results have been found in other studies.

In one laboratory study participants were asked to give real shocks to a puppy. The researchers found that 54% of males and 100% of females delivered what they thought was a fatal shock (Sheridan and King 1972). In another study a French reality show called la zone Xtrême was created where contestants were paid to give electric shocks when ordered to by the presenter. The shocks were actually fake and delivered to actors not real participants but the contestants didn’t know this. The researchers found that 80% of the contestants gave the maximum 460 volts to an apparently unconscious man (beauvois et al. 2012)

This suggests that milgram’s results were not fakes but represented something real. He claimed that 70% of his participants believed the shocks were genuine.

Evaluation: ethical issues

One weakness of the research is that participants experienced considerable distress.

Diana Baumrind (1964) claimed that milgram caused psychological damage to his participants because they thought they were causing pain to the learner. At the end of the study the teacher was actually shown that no actual harm had been caused- however, Baumrind’s argument was that the deception was a betrayal of trust that could damage the reputation of psychologists. She did not feel the benefits of the study outweighed the damage.

Such ethical issues do not challenge the findings themselves but do question the value of the research. Such research does not enhance the reputation of psychology.