Milgram

Aims

• Discover whether people with obey a legitimate authority even when required to injure somebody

• Testing the ‘Germans are different’ hypothesis

  • Suggests that the Holocaust couldn’t happen anywhere else in the world as Germans were more likely to commit such atrocities

Procedures

• 40 male volunteers: self-selected (20-50 years old, range of occupations & education levels)

• Paid $4.50 even if withdrew

• 2 confederates

  • Experimenter

  • ‘Learner’

  • Participant drew lots and always ended up as the ‘teacher’

  • ‘Teacher’ had to always administer shocks to the ‘learner’ for each incorrect answer, escalating the voltage with each mistake

• 45V was tested on the participants to show that it works

• The learner in another room recieved (fake) shocks, in silence until 300V

• Then pounded on the wall & gave no response to the next question

• Repeated this at 315V, from then on they did/said nothing

• If ‘teacher’ asked to stop, then experimenter has a set of ‘prods’

Findings

• 65% of participants went to maximum voltage (450V)

• 12.5% (5) of participants stopped at 300V

• 100% went up to 300

• Before the study, Milgram asked psychology students for their predictions on how far participants will go.

  • Estimated fewer than 4% would go to the maximum level

Conclusions

• Ordinary people are astonishly obedient to authority when asked to behave in an inhumane manner

  • Crimes against humanity may be the outcome of situational rather than dispositional factors

  • An individuals capacity for making independent decisions is suspended under certain social constraints- orders from an auhtority figure

• Pasqual Gino, 43 year old water inspector, found himself thinking at the end of the experiment “Good God, he’s dead. Well, here we go, we’ll finish him. And I just continued all the way through to 450 volts”.

• Other participants were seen to '“sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan and dig their finger-nails into their flesh”

• 3 participants had “full-blown uncontrollable seizures”

Variations of Milgram

• In orginal study there was 2 confederates, an experimenter and a learner.

• Variations were carried out:

Evaluation

• It’s a laboratory study so allowed a controlled environment where extraneous variables can be controlled, including what participants saw & heard, for example the learner confederate would bang on the wall in ‘pain’ at 300V. It allows a standardised procedure which reduces extraneous variables and makes the study reliable and able to be replicated.

• The method has low ecological validity, because the research was conducted in a lab where the room is designed & dictated. An artificial environment can allow demand characteristics which means participants may act unnatural and not reflect their true behaviour. As a result this can lead to questions about the generalisability of the findings to real-world situations, as the pressure and context of the laboratory setting may not accurately represent everyday scenarios.

• Sample is unrepresentative, as the study is androcentric as it only studies males, and the volunteers are self selected allowing a participant bias, and a chance for demand characteristics. You cannot generalise the findings from just men to the whole populations as it is unrepresentative.

• The research lacks depth, this is because the data collected is only quantitative and shown as percentages. It doesn’t allow an explaination of results and is only presented as numerical. Milgrams results only states the conclusions and not explain why he found them.

• The research is unethical, as the participants had the right to withdraw but to actually do so was difficult due to the ‘prods’. The participants were also decieved about the true nature of the experiment, believing they were part of a study on learning and memory, which raises further ethical concerns regarding informed consent. Furthermore, the psychological distress experienced by participants during the experiment highlights the potential harm caused. All of these ethical points go against the BPS guidelines, and therfore this research cannot be replicated nor repeated.