Essay
Outline and evaluate situational variables affecting obedience
- Module
- Social influence
- Institution
- AQA
A level 16 marker full mark essay on social influence
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Outline and evaluate research into obedience. (16 marks)The idea of obedience towards authority was investigated by Milgram in 1963. He was
interested to see whether it was evil people, such as those who participated in the
holocaust, who obeyed the most atrocious commands, or whether it was normal people just
obeying orders.
Milgram asked 40 participants to take part in a study which they were told was on how
punishment affects learning. They were made to draw lots with a confederate which were
rigged to ensure that the participant was always the teacher, and the confederate was
always the learner. The participant was told that he was to test the learner on his ability to
learn word pairs and, if the learner was to get one wrong, he must administer increasingly
strong electric shocks. The maximum shock was 450v and went up in 15v increments. The
learner would give mainly wrong answers and receive his shocks in silence until he got to
300v. When this voltage was reached, the learner would pound on the wall and become
unresponsive. If the teacher asked to stop at any point, the experimenter would prod him to
continue, for example, by saying ‘you have no other choice, you must continue’.
Initially, many people who Milgram asked, predicted that very little people would go passed
150v, and only 1 in 1000 would go all the way to 450v. However, contrary to these
expectations, 65% of participants went to the full 450v with only 12.5% stopping at 300v.
Milgram proposed that there were several situational factors that determined obedience
and so further investigated them to see how much of an effect they had. Firstly, to assess
how proximity would affect obedience, the teacher and learner were placed in the same
room, enabling the teacher to experience the learner’s anguish more directly. Obedience
levels fell to 40% and then to a further 30% in the touch-proximity condition, where the
teacher had to place the leaners hand directly onto the shock plate. Milgram also found that
the proximity of the experimenter also affected obedience levels, with only 21% going to the
maximum shock level with the experimenter absent. Secondly, the location was also
assumed to be important in obedience levels. To change the location of the original study at
Yale University, Milgram decided to conduct the experiment in a run-down office block in
Bridgeport where obedience levels only fell to 48%. Finally, uniform has a powerful effect on
obedience. This was demonstrated in a study by Bushman, in which he found that when a
female researcher asked for some money for a parking ticket dressed as either a police
officer, a businesswoman or a beggar, obedience was highest for the police officer.
Unfortunately, Milgram’s study on obedience has been criticised for its breaching of ethical
issues. Diana Baumrind claims that he had an apparent lack of concern for the well-being or
his participants. For example, he firstly deceived his participants by telling them that they
were involved in a study on punishment and learning, rather than telling them the true
purpose of the study. This made it impossible for the participants to make a fully informed
decision before giving consent to participate. A part of informed consent is allowing the
participants a right to withdraw at any point if they changed their mind. Although Milgram
claimed he did this, the prods from the experimenter made it more difficult for some
participants who were made to believe that they have no other choice but to continue.
However, it could be argued that these measures were necessary to truly measure
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