These notes include content from AQA A-level Psychology and focus on 'Milgram's obedience study'. It covers all AO1 content, as well as evaluations (AO3) and application (AO2). The main points include Milgram's study and its evaluations. I have made notes on the other Social influence content, so p...
Paper 1 - SOCIAL INFLUENCE
Obedience: Milgram’s research
What do I need to know?
What was Milgram’s aim, procedure, findings and conclusions?
How can Milgram’s research be evaluated?
Questions to answer in class:
1. Evaluation Grid
Title Strength / Key terms / explanation
limitation?
Historical limitation Milgram’s research is over 50 years old. It has been argued that
Validity people are less obedient today, so would not behave in the same
way as Milgram’s participants. However, Burger (2009) found
levels of obedience almost identical to those found by Milgram.
This shows that the research is still useful and can still be applied
to society now.
Obedience Alibi Limitation Some people consider a situational perspective on the Holocaust
offensive because it removes personal responsibility from the
(does it excuse perpetrators. To suggest that Nazi executioners of Jews were
terrible only doing their duty by obeying orders; implies that they were
behaviour) also the victims of situational pressures, and that anyone faced
with a similar situation would have behaved in the same way. It
runs the risk of trivialising genocide
Ethical Issues limitation .Milgram led participants to believe that the allocation of roles as
‘teacher’ and ‘learner’ was random, but in fact it was fixed.
Participants also believed the electric shocks were real. While
Milgram claimed they had the right to withdraw, the prods from
the experimenter made it more difficult for them to leave.
External Validity . Milgram argued that the lab environment accurately reflected
wider authority relationships in real life. Other research supports
Strength this argument. For example, Hofling et al. studied nurses in a
hospital ward and found that levels of obedience to unjustified
demands by doctors (who phoned and ordered them to
administer a lethal dose of medicine to a patient) were high
(21/22 nurses obeyed).
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