Moscovici designed an experiment to investigate the influence of a stooge minority , that is a group of people who have been ‘planted’ in the experiment. The stooges will already have been told what to say by the researcher.
In this experiment, volunteers had to judge the colour of slides that were blue-green. If the minority were consistent, for example, saying “green” all the time, they had a definite influence in changing the opinions of others in the group.
Obedience
Obedience is compliance with an order issued by an authority figure.
Obedience is not as general as conformity, it is related to specific instruction from another person.
Criticism of Sherif’s work:
The ‘group’ used consisted of three people. They may not have considered themselves to be a group.
There was no right or wrong answer, it was an ambiguous task, and Sherif told them that he was going to move the light, so they were more likely to chane their minds anyway.
Criticism of Asch’s work:
Some critics thought the high levels of conformity found by Asch were a reflection of American, 1950’s culture:
'It was time-consuming and uneconomical'. (Crutchfield)
'Tasks set not like real-life situations'. (Crutchfield)
'It did not account for minority'. influences
Criticism of Milgram’s work
Milgram was fiercely criticised.
His results upset people - this may have been because they felt uncomfortable with what it showed about ordinary Americans. Maybe if they had not been so shocking (excuse the pun!) people would not have given Milgram’s work a second thought, perhaps the unpalatable findings made people seek to discredit the procedures.
Milgram’s work on obedience was attacked on ethical grounds, saying he deceived people and caused unreasonable distress. Volunteers often showed extreme stress – sweating, trembling, stammering, even having uncontrollable fits.
The APA decided that Milgram’s work was ethically acceptable.
On practical grounds, people argued that demand characteristics created the high rates of obedience. It was a highly artificial setting and in a prestigious location, but even when Milgram moved the experiment to a downtown location, obedience rates were still alarmingly high.
However, Zimbardo defended Milgram and has said his work is “the most generalizable in all of social science… dozens of systematic replications with a 1000 subjects from as diverse backgrounds as possible….”
Were Milgram and Zimbardo unethical?
There is no doubt that both Milgram and Zimbardo caused great distress to volunteers in their studies of obedience and conformity to social roles.
The two studies show us, very dramatically, the power of the situation on human behaviour.
Milgram and Zimbardo chose ordinary people, of a sound psychological profile, not sadists and put them into challenging situations. In spite of their distress, or that of others, many volunteers continued in their violent behaviour.
Volunteers were deceived and offered money to take part, In itself this is not unusual, deception of some sort is a feature of almost all psychological experiments, and small payments encourage people to take part.
It may be argued that the volunteers were not reminded of their right to withdraw from the experiments at any time, in fact, they were encouraged to keep going, in order to see what happened.
It is important to remember that neither Milgram nor Zimbardo expected their experiments to have such dramatic effects, although this does not absolve responsibility!
To this end, Milgram consulted psychiatrists before carrying out his experiments - he debriefed and followed people up– even after a year - to make sure they weren’t hurt by the experience. Most volunteers said they were pleased that they took part.
Before his prison experiment, Zimbardo used personality tests on volunteers to select stable characters.
Milgram and Zimbardo were very mindful of the state of mind of their volunteers and followed them all up carefully afterwards. Their work has had important implications for the way in which we view cases of blind obedience in real life, for example, the Jim Jones cult suicides and the running of prison systems.
