Outline and evaluate research into obedience

This study used a volunteer sample which is not representative to the population as a whole; therefore it has low population validity. The sample also only contained male volunteers, therefore the study is androcentric and not representative.

This study has many ethical issues that need to be taken into consideration. The study did not gain fully informed consent; therefore the participants were deceived and were not told the nature of the experiment. They were told the study concerned the role of punishment in learning and did not know it had anything to do with obedience. The participants were put under huge amounts of stress which could have caused some serious psychological damage. Participants were not allowed to withdraw from the experiment, this put pressure on them to continue with giving the shocks even if they did not want to.

The study gained lots of qualitative data, Milgram was able to operationalize obedience and form consistent increments of shocks given. He used standard procedures in which he recorded screams, used scripted ‘rods’ and ensured participants were exposed to similar conditions. However the study was in a lab setting measuring obedience in a systematic and controlled way. Milgram asked the participants to be there, they were not naturally occurring, this means the study has low ecological validity and cannot be generalised to other real life settings.

Participants sometimes only went along with the act when shocking the learner, they weren’t really distressed, and they pretended to be distressed to please the experimenter. This lowers internal validity and makes the experiment less reliable. The participants may not have been fooled into thinking the shocks were real. The situation within Milgram’s laboratory bore little resemblance to real-life situations where obedience is required and so it lacked ecological validity.

Even though 65% of participants completely obeyed, there was still 35% didn’t obey at all, this could suggest there are certain individual differences in obedience. For example, there are certain personality types that obey more than others. This factor was not taken into account when carrying out the experiment, therefore the results could have been affected and made less reliable.

A study that supports Milgrams study in that certain factors lead to people obeying. In this particular study, they looked at the effect of uniform on the amount of people who obey a certain order. Bickman (74) carried out a field experiment in New York in which he asked people on the street to pick up rubbish, stand on the other side of bust stop sign or lend a stranger money for a parking meter. Half of the time, the experimenter wore a uniform and the other half just normal clothes. This formed the 2 conditions of the independent variable. 92% of people obeyed the orders when he wore a uniform. This study has low population validity as his sample is ethnocentric, people are from New York. This response in obedience may be different in different countries. There are ethical issues in that the participants didn’t know they were in research however this would have lowered the demand characteristics and increased internal validity. The study had good ecological validity as it was conducted in a naturally occurring setting with naturally occurring participants who jut happened to be there at that time. However there would have been large individual differences with people off the street, some might have different personality types that obey more than others to people in uniform. Some people may have personality types that never obey to people even if they are in a uniform.

Olivia Compton        Psychology 13/02/2012