This study is good because it is a laboratory experiment therefore extraneous variables could be controlled, and it also has high ecological validity because the participants believed they were administering real electric shocks, so their reactions would have been provoked by how they felt in what they considered a real life situation. Milgrams study is also supported by others such as Hoffling et al, this was similar to Milgrams study but applied to a real life situation where nurses were asked to administer a potentially dangerous dose of medicine by a ‘ doctor ‘, 95% of the nurses were willing to carry out this instruction, which supports Milgram. On the other hand, it could be suggested that the very fact that Milgrams study was conducted in a laboratory could mean the behaviour and obedience was artificial, nullifying the results. The study was also unethical, it would have caused great amounts of stress to the participants because they believed they were causing pain, they were deceived for the most part of the experiment, and the fact that the experimenter encouraged them to continue made it hard for them to withdraw.
There was a buffer in the experiment; this was something that created a barrier between the participant, and the learner (they were placed in adjacent rooms). In the case of Milgrams study, because the participant could not directly see the electric shocks he thought he was administering, this added to the levels of obedience because he would not have seen the consequences of what he was doing. Without the buffer the participant would have found it harder to continue.
Gradual commitment would have also played a part in the levels of obedience. Gradual commitment means slowly agreeing to something in smaller steps, this can be applied to Milgrams study because the levels of electricity the participant thought he was administering started at a low level and increased in a low level (15V), because it was a relatively small increase it would not seem as bad as administering 450V straight away, also gradual commitment makes refusing the next instruction harder because it seems like such a small difference. It would mean you could end up agreeing to something that you wouldn’t have originally, this can also be known as the ‘foot in the door ‘effect.
The fact that the participants were told they would be paid, regardless of whether they finished the experiment or not could have contributed to the high levels of obedience. When the participant got to the point (around 300V) where they started to object, the fact that they knew the experimenter was paying them may have made them feel as though they had an obligation to continue the experiment regardless of the fact they thought it was wrong, the fact they were getting money could have influenced their decision to continue.
Another factor is that the participants obeyed because they believed that the experimenter had 'Legitimate Authority'. That means they believed that the experimenter had power and they were obliged to do what he said.
Milgram developed his own theory to explain the obedience levels called the agency theory. He proposed social consciousness can operate in two ways. The autonomous state, when an individual assumes responsibility for their own actions, because they are guided by their own morals and values they are more likely to act in a pro-social way. The agentic state is when individuals feel that they have diminished responsibility because they are the ‘agents’ of an authority figure and are acting on their behalf, thus they are less likely to feel guilt about their actions as they do not feel fully responsible. The participants in Milgrams study were said to be in the agentic state because they were told the responsibility did not lie with them, but the experimenter. This theory is supported by Bickmans study on the effect of uniforms on obedience, where people were more likely to obey someone who was wearing an authoritive uniform (i.e. policeman) rather than someone who was not. It also is backed up by how people act in social situations, in school as children we are taught to be agentic, to be under the influence and obey the commands of teachers, but as we grow older we are to be more autonomous and to take more responsibility for ourselves. A weakness of agency theory, however, is that there is little evidence that an 'agentic shift' actually takes place and it is not clear how this could be measured.
The social impact theory can also help explain the levels of obedience Milgram found. This theory states that the likelihood that a person will respond to social influence will increase with:
-
Strength: how important the influencing group of people are to you.
-
Immediacy: how close the group are to you (in space and time) at the time of the influence attempt.
-
Number: How many people there are in the group.
Presence of allies means that when there are more people in the same position as you, if they refuse to obey, you would be less likely to obey. The number of authoritative figures would make you more obedient if there were more of them. The proximity of the victim means that in the Milgram study, if the learner was in the same room, the shocks were less likely to be administered, because their suffering was harder to ignore.
In conclusion, obedience and how it is seen and understood is hard to fully explain, studies such as Milgram focus on and deduce that it is the pressure of the situation that produces such high levels of obedience, But Adorno suggested that the personality of the individual could influence the levels of obedience that resulted, and also the attitude and personality of the authority figure present. There are many complex factor that contribute to how obedience comes about, factor which probably cannot be explained by one theory alone as there are many different things, not just situation, that should be taken into account, especially because obedience is very difficult to actually measure properly.
