Obedience: Complying with or deferring to a request or order from a legitimate authority.
Aim:
- How far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person.
- How easily ordinary people could be influenced onto committing atrocities?
- To see how large an electric shock participants would give to a helpless man when ordered by a scientist in the lab.
Sample:
Newspaper and mail advertisement
– Volunteers to take part in a study on “memory and learning”
at Yale University.
Final Sample: 40 males (20-50 years old) from New Heaven and surrounding areas.
- 5% were manual labourers
- 40% were white-collar workers
- 5% were professionals
They were paid $4.50 for participating and for coming to the laboratory. THEY DID NO NEED TO TAKE PART.
Procedure:
Participants put in twos – “teacher” and “learner”
Learner = Always an Actor.
The real participant – teacher – sees the actors – learner – strapped into a chair with electrodes.
Learner had to recall a pair of words from the list given to him previously
– Teacher told to give an electric shock every time a
mistake was made – each time bigger.
Electric shock from 15-450 Volts – NOT REAL, BUT PARTICIPANT THOUGHT THEY WERE.
Learner gave wrong answers on purpose – if teacher refused to give a shock = experiment was to give him series of orders.
4 prods, if one was not obeyed the experimenter would go to next: Independent Variable
- Please Continue.
- The experiment requires you to continue.
- It is absolutely essential that you continue.
- You have no other choice but to continue.
After experiment:
- Participant were debriefed = given an open-ended questionnaire.
- Psychometric tests taken to make sure there was no emotional harm.
- Participant met Learner – make sure he was not in danger.
- Told their reaction was normal.
Observations behind one-way mirror:
- Participants exhibited nervous behaviour = sweat, tremble, biting of lips, nervous laughter.
- Three participants had seizures.
- Some participants got up and left.
- Some participants expressed reluctance after 300V.
- Participants who left before 450V = “Oh I can’t go on with this”, “This is Crazy”.
Results:
- 65% of participants continued to the highest level of 450 V = Obedient participant
- All participants gave a minimum of 300 Volts = Defiant participant
- 5 participants went no further.
Conclusion:
Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.
People tent to obey orders from other people if they recognise their authority as morally right or/and legally based.
Milgram’s Agency Theory:
- Autonomous state: people direct their own actions and they take responsibility for the results.
- Agentic state: people allow others to direct their actions and pass of the responsibility for the consequences.
Two things must happen:
- The person giving orders is perceived as being qualified to direct other people’s behaviour.
- The person being ordered is able to believe that the authority will accept responsibility.
Follow up Experiments:
- Change of Location – run down offices = obedience dropped to 47.5%
- Two teacher condition – participants could instruct assistant to press switches = 92.5%
- Touch Proximity condition – force learner’s hand onto a shock plate if refuse to participate = 30%
- Social support condition – two other teachers refused to obey = 10%
- Absent experimenter condition – instructed the teacher by telephone = 20.5%
Strengths:
- High Level of control: Experiment conducted in a laboratory, therefore there was a lot of control over extraneous variables, decreasing the chances of results being unreliable.
- High level of experimental realism: The men believed the experiment was happening and they were electrocuting another person.
- Replicable: The experiment can be replicated – has been. This is because it was conducted in a laboratory, therefore it was strictly standardised so other researchers can repeat the procedure.
Weaknesses:
- Not generalizable: The participants were all males and from the same area (New Heaven) , therefore we cannot apply the results of the study to females or people living in other countries.
- Lack of ecological validity: Since the experiment was conducted in a laboratory, it was in an artificial setting. This means that participants knew they were part of a study and might have behaved unnaturally and acted differently if they had been in a natural setting.
- Demand characteristics: Participants may have behaved in a way they felt was being asked from them. They may have done it to be socially desirable or “normal” – answering a social cue.
CIE A Level Psychology 