Core studies summary Milgram (1963) Study of obedience
Aims and context (Put aims of study & background history):The aim of the study was to see how far people would go in obeying an authority figure. He also wanted to test the ‘Germans are different’ hypothesis, i.e. Germans have a character defect, namely to obey, with out questioning, an authority figure. Milgram aimed to set up a situation which allowed him to quantifiably assess exactly how obedient individuals would be in a controlled situation, (in a laboratory) which he could then vary to assess the situational variables which would heighten, lower or have no effect on the level of obedience. He wanted to find out what situational variables influenced levels of obedience.
Context:
Horrific events at Nazi concentration camps provided the impetus for the study. After WW2 people thought that Germans had a character defect; this was a readiness to obey without question, to carry out Hitler’s evil plans. Milgram (1963) was trying to test the character defect hypothesis in this study. He wondered if people could really act without compassion and restraint.
We know from Asch’s study that people’s actions are shaped by group pressure, and Asch said that people will deny evidence and bow to social pressure. Adorno et al (1950) stated that there was an authoritarian personality type, due to your upbringing. He said you would have had a stern father and harsh punishment as a child and would feel angry to your father for this, but this anger would be displaced onto minority groups rather than your father as you fear him. Adorno said that Germans are different due to their childhood. Milgram believed that this dispositional hypothesis was wrong and instead the situation overrides personality factors in obedience.
Charcot stated that only hysterical people could be hypnotised, these were people who demonstrated strange symptoms with no bodily cause, e.g. deafness or paralysis. He had found that people are highly influenced by an authority figure under hypnosis; people are suggestible. Later, Berheim found you could put ‘normal’ people under a hypnotic trance.
The individual who is commanded by a legitimate authority figure ordinarily obeys. Obedience comes easily and often it is a powerful feature of social life.
Snow (1961) states that hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience, he points to William Shirer’s RISE & FALL OF THE 3RD REICH - the German Officer Corps assisted in the ‘most wicked large scale actions in the history of the world’.
Procedures (What did the Psychologists do to the participants?)
· Self-selected sampling - subjects responded to a newspaper advert; they were paid $4.50 to take part.
· The study took place at Yale University in a laboratory.
· Subjects drew slips of paper from a hat and were named as a teacher or learner, but this was always rigged so the subject was always a teacher.
· The experimenter was a 31 year old Biology teacher, wearing a grey technician’s coat. The victim was a 47 year old mild mannered accountant of Irish American descent.
· Shock generator is used with 30 clearly marked voltage levels that go from 15 volts to 450 volts. There are verbal labels under each lever e.g. Danger: Severe shock.
· Teacher & learner were taken to another room and the learner was strapped into an electric chair. The straps, the subjects were told, were to prevent excessive movement. Electrode paste was applied to the learner’s wrists to prevent burns and blisters.
· The teacher had a sample shock of 45 volts.
· An electrode was put on the learner’s wrist which was attached to a shock generator in the next room.
· Teachers had to read out word pairs to the learner called a paired-associate task and then read the first word of the pair with 4 other terms. The learner had to say which of the 4 words had been paired with the first word. He stated the answer by pressing one of 4 switches in front of him, which lit up one of 4 quadrants in an answer box so the teacher could see the answer. The teacher had to shock the learner each time a wrong answer was given, moving up 15 volts a time each time a wrong answer was given.
· Responses of the victim are standardised (the same for each subject teacher).
· Orders to give shocks are given to the member of the public called the naïve subject, they are told it is a learning experiment set up to study the effects of punishment on memory.
· As the experiment goes on the teacher has to give higher level shocks to the victim i.e. the learner.
· A quantitative value is given to the subject’s performance based on the maximum intensity shock he is willing to give before he refuses to go on.
· For any subject the degree of obedience is given a numerical value.
· Qualitative data was also obtained e.g. descriptions of how the subjects behaved was recorded by tape and one way mirrors were used and filming happened.
· Degree of obedience was measured by shock level the subject went up to.
Perspective : Social
Method: Controlled Observation – Laboratory Study
3 advantages of the methodology: Sample (e.g. representative)
Internal & external validity/internal & external reliability/ethics & any other issues:
1. High internal validity - the researcher was able to control and manipulate the environment e.g. the prods and prompts of the experimenter for the teacher to continue, the levels of shocks given, and the responses of the learner. This then meant that Milgram could observe & compare responses in a scientific setting
2. External reliability - Milgram in variations of his experiment still showed that p’s are obedient even if the experiment was done in seedy offices and not in the prestigious Yale University in the U.S.A.
3. Sample were from different walks of life e.g. postal clerks, high school teachers, so people of different occupations were at least represented.
4. The data collected was quantitative, measuring p’s obedience level in terms of how far they were prepared to go, this means results can be compared and analysed statistically.
5. Experimental conditions - standardised procedures followed, means the study can be replicated so the results can be tested e.g. responses of victim (Learner) /place of testing/behaviour of confederates etc.
3 disadvantages of this methodology: Sample bias/validity – internal & external/reliability internal & external/ethics/gender bias/cultural bias & any other issues:
1. Sample - all 40 subjects were male American citizens between 20-50, so low population validity in terms of you can’t generalise results to other types of people e.g. older or younger male adults. Also gender bias as no females were used. They were also volunteers - they might be different from the ‘normal’ target population, so we can’t generalise results. There were also individual differences - not everyone was obedient.
2. Internal validity could be lowered by demand characteristics, where p’s look at the situation and guess how they should react, so behaviour is not telling truth i.e. it is not valid. Experimenter may also expect p’s to behave in a certain way and this is transmitted to them - called expectancy effects. Orne & Holland claimed subjects in the study did not believe they were really giving electric shocks and they pretended, in order to please the experimenter.
3. Low mundane realism - this means is the task in the study like real life? Well, no so it has low mundane realism, as Milgram’s laboratory was not like real life situations, where obedience is required.
4. Gender bias - no females were used.
5. Demand characteristics - p’s acted in the way they thought, which led to unnaturally high levels of obedience?
6. Ethics - participants were misled, told the study was about the effect of punishment on learning, so deception, no informed consent, hard to withdraw from the study due to prods and prompts of the experimenter. Subjects weren’t protected from harm - psychological especially.
Findings and conclusions of the study:
· Ordinary people are obedient to an unjust authority, so it is not evil people who commit evil crimes but ordinary people who are just obeying orders - a situational not dispositional (character trait) explanation for obedience.
· Psychology students estimated less than 3% of people would go up to 450 volt (Maximum) shock level, in fact 65% of p’s continued to the maximum shock level.
· All p’s obeyed up to 300 volts the point when the learner first objected to his treatment.
· By the 375 volts point, 9 refused to go on ‘shocking’.
· Most p’s found the procedure very stressful and wanted to stop. Some showed signs of extreme anxiety; although they may have disagreed verbally, they still carried on, as the experimenter still prodded them to give shocks.
· When people are in a subordinate (lower) position in a hierarchy, they lose feelings of compassion, empathy and morality and are often blindly obedient.
· Atrocities carried out like those in WW2 may be largely explained by the pressure people feel to obey an authority figure.
· It provided evidence against the ‘Germans are different’ hypothesis i.e. they have a character problem of blindly obeying, without question, authority figures.
· A reason for obedience was also due to the location of the study - at a very good university in a lab.
· The experiment took place in a closed setting with no one for the p’s to discuss the situation with and little time to reflect on what they were doing.
Conclusions:
He concluded that there were 13 elements of this situation that had contributed to these levels of obedience, including:
· Taking place at Yale which had an “unimpeachable reputation”.
· Experimenter carries “weight of scientific authority”.
· The participant has volunteered, so they feel obliged to aid the experimenter. Having made this commitment, disrupting the experiment would repudiate this process.
“The individual who is commanded by a legitimate authority ordinarily obeys. Obedience comes easily and often. It is a ubiquitous (everywhere) and indispensable (essential) feature of social life”.
Alternative and complementary research findings:
Alternative:
Rank & Jacobson (1977) repeated Hofling’s et al (1966) study (see below) and found when the doctor asked the nurses to give the drug valium at 3 times the recommended dose, only 2 out of 18 nurses prepared the medication as requested. So the nurses disobeyed the real life doctor’s instructions and were not obedient.
Orne & Holland (1968) said the experimental situation is so unique that we can’t generalise findings from it i.e. that people will be obedient in other situations, so it therefore has low ecological validity.
Orne & Holland also believe that the subjects do not take the experimental situation for what it is, i.e. it is not realistic and so fail to believe the learner is receiving electric shocks. They think the subjects were pretending to sweat and tremble and stutter to please the experimenter.
Mandel (1998) found that Officers in a battalion in Poland in World War 2 obeyed orders to kill Jews without an authority figure being about, so there must be other factors than an authority figure which influences people to be obedient in real life.
Mandel also stated that from his research, Nazi Officers in WW2 were eager to torture and humiliate their victims before killing them, so their motives went beyond just following orders. He believes racism, discrimination and prejudice are to blame for war crimes against Jews in WW2.
Gamson et al (1982) in a study that aimed to find out under what circumstances people will refuse to go along with an unjust authority, got p’s to make a video and then asked them to sign statements that could be used in courts. Gamson found 76% of p’s disobeyed pressure to sign a written statement made on oath, which would have given the experimenters the permission to use their opinions in a trial (or that’s what the p’s thought). P’s realised they were being manipulated into producing tapes that an oil company could supposedly use in court. (This was not true of course). They had time in this study to share their suspicions and discuss information, which they did not have the ability to do in the Milgram study, they were tested alone. So once enough group members make a stand, the whole group will resist authority as a result of minority and majority influence.
Venkatesan (1966) found that when people felt forced to do something, they reacted by being independent and not agreeing to majority opinion.
Kilham & Mann (1974) in an Australian study on obedience found low obedience levels of only 16% with female students as participants. This was lower than males in the same study so we need to take into account differences between groups (e.g. males and females) in an explanation of obedience.
Complementary:
Hofling et al (1966); the situation was a field experiment in a hospital. They arranged for a nurse (the participant) to receive a ‘phone call from an unknown doctor who asked her to give 20 mg of a drug called Astroten, (a drug not known to the nurses) to a patient so it would have taken effect before he arrived. Results were that 21 out of 22 nurses started to give the drug, until another nurse stationed nearby stopped them. So these nurses were obedient to an authority figure.
Bickman (1974) - he did a field experiment where 3 male experimenters dressed as a guard or as a milkman or a member of public in shirt and tie. The experimenters asked passers by on a street of New York to pick up a bag for them, or give money for a parking meter. People were most likely to obey the experimenter who was dressed as a guard and least likely to obey the experimenter dressed as a member of the public. Strength of the study is the real life setting. These results still support Milgram that people will obey someone who they think is an authority figure.