obedience to authority.In 1963, Milgram submitted the results of his Milgram experiments in the article 'Behavioural study

Situational factor: is anything in the environment, including the behaviour of other people.

Dispositional factor: is an enduring aspect of an individual's behaviour - his or her disposition or personality.

A study which has investigated obedience to authority is Milgram 1963. It makes sense to be obedience in some situations; obedience is a healthy and necessary social behaviour. But why do people obey when the action required is inhumane? This experiment was set up by Stanley Milgram who wanted to whether ordinary people will obey a legitimate authority even when required to injure another person- i.e. obedience to unjust authority.

The procedure that was carried out was that Milgram recruited 40 male participants by advertising for volunteers to take part in a study of how punishment affects learning. This was to take place at Yale University. Everyone was told that they will be paid $4.50 and they would receive this even if they quit during the study. There was two confederates: an experimenter and a learner (a 47 year old accountant). There participant drew lots with the confederate and always ended up as the 'teacher'. he was told that he must administer increasingly strong electric shocks to the participant each time he got a question wrong. The machine was tested on the participant to show him that it worked.

The learner, sitting in another room gave mainly wrong answers and received his fake shock in silence until they reached 300 volts. This is a strong shock. At this point the pounded on the wall and then gave no response to the next question. He repeated this at 315 volts and from then on said or did nothing. If the 'teacher' asked to stop, the experimenter had a set of 'prods' to repeat, such as saying: 'It is absolutely essential that you continue' or 'you have no other choice, you must go on'.

Prior to the actual study Milgram asked psychology students to say how they thought participants would go. They estimated that few than 3% would go to the maximum level. The findings that was discovered after this experiment was carried out was that 65% of the participants continued to the maximum voltage, far beyond what was marked 'Danger: sever shock'. Only 5 participants, a 12% stopped at 300 volts, the point when the learner first objected.

In conclusion, the findings propose that ordinary people are amazingly obedient to authority when asked to act in an inhumane manner. This suggests that it is not evil people who commit evil crimes but ordinary people who are just obeying orders. In other words, crimes against humanity may be the outcome of situational rather than dispositional factors. It appears that an individual's capacity for making independent decisions is suspended under certain situational constraints - namely, being given an order by an authority figure.

The criticisms of this experiment are as follows.

The demand characteristics display that it is possible to explain the unexpectedly high level of obedience in terms of demand characteristics. These are types of the experiment that provide cues about how to behave. Most people found these hard to resist, but this does not mean they would always be so obedient to unjust authority. Subsequent replications showed that obedience rates drop when these demand characteristics are changed. this means that the baseline study only tells us about obedience in one particular setting. This findings mat not generalise to real life.

Individual differences portray interviews with participants after the experiment showed considerably different attitudes about what they were doing. Some of the participants showed no emotion and were 'happy' to go along with what they were told to do. Others showed clear signs of being very uncomfortable. Some participants stopped relatively early on whereas as we know, a number went all the way. When the experiment was repeated with different people it was found that educated people were less obedient, and military people where more obedient.

What all of this tells us is that the simple conclusion that situational factors cause obedience is wrong. Dispositional factors are important as well because not everyone obeys.