A consideration of the ends justifying the means of Milgram's research into obedience.

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A consideration of the ends justifying the means of Milgram's research into obedience.

Milgram (1963)

Stanley Milgram carried out a series of studies in 1963 and 1973 related to obedience to authority. These studies have been viewed as controversial ever since, mainly because of the ethical issues they raise. Although he was able to obtain conclusive results and discover that under certain situational influences anybody might obey orders that went against their conscience; the way in which he carried out his studies was arguably unethical and contributed to the BPS Ethical Principles.

What are the implications of this study?

* That at that time, people were very willing to follow the commands of an authority figure even if that meant harming another person. This did not occur in a time of crisis or war, but in an apparently everyday psychological experiment.

* This research suggests that ordinary people can be instructed to carry out atrocities and they will be likely to follow those instructions, provided that they are given by a legitimate authority figure. This might suggest that the acts of genocide we have witnesses through history may be part of human social behaviour. Perhaps we should be teaching people to challenge authority where they are placed in such a situation.

* The study also has implications for organisations, which require obedience, such as the military. The research implies that leaders should be seen as legitimate authority figures, and that they should position themselves as close to their soldiers as possible, with support from other compliant soldiers.

What methods have been used to investigate obedience/human social behaviour?

* The original study was a lab based experiment

* The conditions were standardised for all the subjects as Mr Wallace's reactions to the shocks were taped, and the authority figure responded in a set way at each new prompt.

* The IV was the presence of the authority figure and the DV was the obedience rate.

The experimenters used a deception to get subjects to act in a natural way. How did social and political issues affect the study at the time?

Milgram's work was inspired by his interest in the behaviour of war criminals at war crimes trials after the WWII. Many of the defendants had argued that they had simply been following orders. Milgram was interested in seeing if this obedience was a German trait, but he never got to Germany because the results of his preliminary research in the USA were so unexpected.

Informed Consent

Milgram's participants were not offered the choice of informed consent, they were told the experiment was being conducted for a different reason, that the hypothesis was to see if people learn better if they are punished when in fact it was to observe obedience in relation to authority. However, it was necessary for Milgram to use this "single blind" method to make the experiment valid, had the participants been aware of the hypothesis they may have exhibited "demand characteristics". Milgram also sought the advice and opinions of forty other psychiatrists before carrying out his studies, though it may have been more judicious to consult a cross section of the general public, the type of people who would make up his participants.

Comment on the generalisability of the finding

* In the original study, the subjects were all male volunteers (self-selected sample) they had been obtained by an advert with a promise of a payment of $4.50 for participation. The study was located in the USA.

* The profile of the sample raises certain questions over generalisability. The results may not generalise to women, to other cultures and to people who were not willing to volunteer. The size of the original sample was 40, which was relatively small, also raising the possibility of unrepresentative ness and therefore a lack of generalisability.

However, it has been criticised for being unethical. The participants believed that they were causing serious harm to the 'victim'. Many suffered symptoms of tension through the experiment. Some suffered full-blown, uncontrollable seizures. And one even had a fit so violent that the experiment had to be cancelled. The experiment has been criticised for lack of ecological validity. Due to it being an artificial test of obedience and therefore lacks 'mundane realism'.
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In 1974, Milgram conducted a study to see whether participants would obey an experimenter - a person of authority, when instructed to administer potentially dangerous electric shocks to another person. The "learner" was connected to the shock equipment and asked a series of questions in which wrong answers resulted in a shock given by the participant. No shocks were actually given though, since the learner was a confederate of the experimenter and was pretending to receive the shocks. Obedience rates indicated that 65% of the participants were willing to give a potentially lethal shock to the learner. If ...

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