The Complete Companions for AQA A Level Psychology 5th Edition
Outline and evaluate Milgrams research into obedience. This is essentially a full 16-mark question which is all you need for the exam, you can also use it to answer all 4,6,8, 12 mark questions in the exam all you have to do is break it down. (A level) Milgram
Outline and evaluate Milgrams research into obedience. (16 marks.)
Obedience to Authority is a form of social influence when individuals follows a direct order
and person issuing the order is usually a figure of authority who has the power to punish
when obedient behaviour is not followed.
Milgram aimed to test the Germans are ‘different hypothesis.’ He recruited 40 male ppts,
aged between 20-50 to take part in the study. Milgrams used a volunteer sample he
advertised in a local newspaper for male ppts to part in his study and offered them $4.50 to
take part. Milgram used a confederate ‘Mr Wallace ‘and fixed the selection of roles so that
the confederate was always the ‘learner’ and the true participant was always the ‘teacher’
and experimenter wore white lab coat. 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 every incorrect response on the task (learning word pairs). The shocks ranged from 15V
labelled (‘slight shock’) and rose through 30 level to 450V labelled (‘danger severe shock).
AT 315 volts learner pounded on the wall and gave no response. Milgram was interested to
see how far the participants would go in order to comply with an unreasonable order from
an authority figure.
He found all participants continued to deliver the shocks up to 300V, 12.5% stopped at 300
volts and a staggering 65% continuing to 450V. Milgram concluding that Germans are not
different and in fact we are all capable of blind obedience to unjust orders due to the
setting.
A strength of Milgram’s study of obedience is that it has good external validity. For example,
Hofling (1966) conducted a study in a hospital. Nurses were telephoned by a doctor 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 supposed to take instructions over the
phone, (2) the instructions were from an unknown doctor and (3) the dosage of the drug
was twice the that advised on the bottle. Nevertheless, 21 out of 22 (95%) nurses did as
request. Thus, this is a strength because the research demonstrates that obedience to
authority figures does occur in real-life settings.
A limitation of Milgrams study is the ethical issues associated with it. For example, Milgram
deceived his participants as he said the experiment was about memory test, when in fact he
was measuring obedience, and he pretended the learner was receiving electric shocks. In
addition, it was very difficult for participants with withdraw from the experiment, as the
experimenter prompted the participants to continue. Finally, many of the participants
reported feeling exceptionally stressed and anxious while taking part in the experiment and
therefore they were not protected from psychological harm. This is a limitation, as Milgram
did not respect his participants, some of whom felt very guilt following the experiment,
knowing that they could have harmed another person. However, it must be noted that it
was essential for Milgram to deceive his participants and remove their right to withdraw to
test obedience and produce valid results. Furthermore, he did debrief his participants
following the experiment and 84% of participants said that they were happy to have taken
part in the experiment.
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