AO1, Description – Obedience to Authority, Milgram, 1963:
Key Definition – Obedience: Complying to the demands of a perceived authority figure, often resulting the individual behaving in a way they would not normally
AO1, Description – Obedience to Authority, Milgram, 1963:
Key Definition – Obedience: Complying to the demands of a perceived authority figure, often resulting the individual behaving in a way they would not normally.
Milgram (1963) aimed to test the ‘Germans are different’ hypothesis with his study at Yale University (a prestigious setting).
40 male participants, aged between 20-50 were selected to take part in the study.
Milgram used a volunteer sample, he advertised in a local newspaper for male participants to take part in his study and offered all participants a payment for their participation.
Milgram used a confederate and fixed the selection of roles so that the confederate was always the ‘learner’ and the participant was always the ‘teacher’. He used a fake set up whereby the teacher was instructed by an authority figure (the experimenter) to punish the learner (by electric shock) for incorrect responses on a memory test. The shocks ranged from 15V (labelled ‘slight shock’) and increasing in 15V increments to 450V (labelled XXX). Milgram was interested to see how far the participants would go in order to comply with an unreasonable order (to deliver an electric shock to another human) from an authority figure.
During the experiment many of the participants showed signs of extreme tension. They shook, sweated and stuttered. Many of the participants repeatedly argued with the experimenter yet all participants continued to deliver the shocks up to 300V, and a staggering 62.5% continuing to 450V. This was unexpected, as before conducting the research, people had estimated that most would stop at 100V.
Milgram was therefore able to accept a situational hypothesis rather than a dispositional hypothesis, concluding that Germans are not different and in fact we are all capable of blind obedience to unjust orders due to the setting.
Evaluation, AO3 of Research into Obedience
Point: The results obtained in Milgram’s study of obedience has been replicated in real-life settings. Evidence: For example, Hofling (1966) conducted a study in a hospital. Nurses were telephoned by a ‘Dr Smith’ who asked that they administered a drug to a patient. This order went against hospital regulations in a number of ways; (1) nurses were not suppose to take instructions over the phone, (2) the instructions were from an unknown doc