Obedience

Obedience is a type of social influence where a person follows an order from another person - who is usually an authority figure.

Milgram's Shock Study

AO1Milgram wanted to know why Germans were willing to kill Jews during the Holocaust. He thought that it might have been because German's were just evil. He thought that Americans were different and would not have followed such orders. To test this "Germans are evil" hypothesis, he carried out the shock study.Procedure:Milgram wanted to see whether people would obey a legitimate authority figure when given instructions to harm another human being. To test this he created a set up in which two participants were assigned to the role of teacher (this was always given to the true participant) or learner (this was always a confederate, called Mr. Wallace). The teacher and learner were put into separate rooms. The teacher was then asked by the experimenter (who wore a lab coat) to administer electric shocks (which were actually harmless) to the learner each time he gave the wrong answer. These shocks increased every time the learner gave a wrong answer, fro, 15-450 volts - 450 being a deadly shock.The experimenter (Mr. Williams) wore a grey lab coat and his role was to give a series of orders when the participant refused to administer a shock. There were 4 orders and if one was not obeyed, then the experimenter said the next one.There were four orders: "Please continue." "The experiment requires you to continue." "It is absolutely essential that you continue." "You have no other choice but to continue." Results:The results were that all participants went to 300 volts, and 65% were willing to go all the way to 450 volts. Milgram did more than one experiment - he carried out 18 variations of his study. All he did was alter the situation (IV) to see how this affected obedience (DV). For example, when the experimenter instructed and prompted the teacher by telephone from another room, obedience fell to 20.5%.

AO3A limitation is that this study lacked ecological validity, as it was carried out in a lab, under artificial conditions. This means that it might not be possible to generalise the findings to a real-life setting, as people do not usually receive orders to hurt another person in real-life.Another problem is that the sample was biased. Milgram only used males in his study and this means we cannot generalise the results to females.Milgram's work has provided a great deal to social psychology. For instance, Milgram's work gives an insight into why people under the Nazi reign were willing to kill Jews when given orders to do so. It also highlights how we can all be blind to obedience - often doing things without question.Another strength of the study is that, because it was a lab experiment, it used a standardised procedure. This is good because it improves the reliability of the study and helps establish a causal relationship.Ethical Issues:Deception - the participants actually believed they were shocking a real person, and were unaware the learner was a confederate of Milgram's.However, Milgram argued that "illusion is used when necessary in order to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at truths".Milgram also interviewed participants afterwards to find out the effect of the deception. Apparently 83.7% said that they were "glad to be in the experiment" and 1.3% said that they wished they had not been involved.Protection of participants - participants were exposed to extremely stressful situations that may have the potential to cause psychological harm. Many of the participants were visibly distressed.Signs of tension included trembling, sweating, stuttering, laughing nervously, biting lips and digging fingernails into palms of hands. Three participants had uncontrollable seizures, and many pleaded to be allowed to stop the experiment.Full blown seizures were observed in three participants; one so violent that the experiment was stopped.In his defence, Milgram argued that these effects were only short-term. Once the participants were debriefed (and could see that the learner was actually OK) their stress levels decreased. Milgram also interviewed the participants one year after the event and concluded that most were happy that they had taken part.However, Milgram did debrief the participants fully after the experiment and also followed up after a period of time to ensure that they came to no harm.