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Summary AS level Cambridge Psychology / Milgram
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Summary of the Milgram study for AS Psychology
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Psychology MilgramObedience
• Title:
• Behavioural Study of Obedience.
• Year: 1963
Psychology being investigated
• In this study, Milgram was testing the situational hypothesis.
• Agency theory:
• Agentic state: People see themselves as agent of another and will blindly accept orders
because they are not personally responsible for their actions. Arises from fact that obedience is
rewarded and disobedience punished. We give up our free will.
• Autonomous state: Behaviour is voluntary; people are aware of their decisions and
consequences of those decisions. We choose to be obedient.
• Moral strain: We experience this in the agentic stage when we go along with the demands of the
authority even through we know it is wrong and dod not agree with it.
Background
• Destructive obedience: When people obey orders which cause harm or distress to another
person.
• Early psychological research into the Holocaust focused on the idea that something distinctive
about German culture or personality leads to the high levels of conformity for the genocide to
take place. This is known as the dispositional hypothesis.
• Milgram set out to question this dispositional attribution of the Germans. He believed that the
situation had led to the inhumane behaviour of the Nazis and therefore that anybody in the same
situation as those committing such atrocities would have done the same in the same
circumstances. Milgram argued that people would commit atrocities if required to do so by an
authority gure. This argument is an example of a situational attribution as it is arguing that the
behaviour resulted from the situation a person was in.
Aims
• Overall aim: To investigate how obedient people would be to orders from a person in authority
that would result in pain and harm to another person.
• Speci c aim: To see how large an electric shock participants would give to a hapless man
when ordered to.
Procedure
• Research Method: Lab Experiment. However, as there is no control condition (i.e. all of the
participants took place in all of the same experimental procedure) it is not strictly speaking an
experiment. (More accurately it is a controlled observation)
• Experimental Design: N/A
• IV: ‘Prods’ given
• DV: Degree of obedience (how high voltage did participants go to)
• Sample: 40 males between the ages of 20-50 were drawn from the New Haven district of
Connecticut. USA. They were recruited by means of a newspaper advertisement, which
promised $4.50 for their time if they turned up to participants in the study and that the money
was theirs no matter what happened after they arrived. Participants believed that they were to
participate in a study of memory and learning at Yale University. Participants were from a range
of backgrounds: 37.5% were manual labourers, 40% were white-collar workers and 22.5% were
professionals.
• Sampling Technique: Volunteering
• Milgram created a phoney ‘shock generator’ which in the 1960s looked very impressive and
realistic. The phoney shock generator had 30 switches marked clearly in 15-volt increments
from 15 to 450 votes. It also had buzzers, ashing lights and moving dials.
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