Milgram’s research was fiercely criticised, he was criticised on two main counts. Firstly his work was not a valid research study, in that the deception had not worked (experimental validity) and the study had little relevance outside of the experimental setting (ecological validity). Secondly Milgram’s work was attacked on ethical grounds, saying he deceived people and caused unreasonable distress. Volunteers often showed extreme stress – sweating, stammering and even having uncontrollable fits. The APA decided that Milgram’s was ethically acceptable.
This was another study carried out on obedience. The experiment was conducted by Hofling and his colleagues. The setting; was a number of psychiatric hospitals in the USA. The participants were 22 staff nurses on night duty. Hofling et al arranged for nurses in a hospital ward to receive a telephone call from an unknown doctor. Each unsuspecting nurse was asked to administer a drug to a patient before the doctor arrived. Having done this the nurses were breaking a number of rules for example giving twice the maximum dose for the drug and also accepting a telephone instruction from an unknown doctor.
Despite this, 21 out of 22 nurses agreed to administer the, hence lending some support to Milgram’s claim that obedience would also be evident in natural setting.
Rank and Jacobson (1977) criticised the Hofling et al study because the nurses had no knowledge of the drug involved and also they had no opportunity to seek advice before giving the drug.
In a replication of the study where the common drug, Valium, was used, and nurses were able to speak to other nurses before proceeding; only 2 out 18 nurses gave the drug as requested by the absent doctor.
Internal validity measures what it s intended to measure, for example Milgram’s experiments were designed to measure obedience to authority. Milgram’s participants believe that they were inflicting painful electric shocks on a middle-aged man. Therefore the finding may not be as valuable, however with all laboratory experiments; participants may define the situation as ‘artificial’ or ‘unreal’. The advantage of doing a laboratory experiment is that he has full control over the independent variable and other variables therefore casual statements are more certain, this may not be the case in Hofiling’s experiment. The Disadvantage is the participants may know they are in an experiment and may adjust their behaviour or participants are not aware they are taking part in a study therefore there may be ethical problems, such as invasion of privacy.
Holland (1968) claimed that Milgram’s research lacked experimental validity, because participants had not been mislead into an experiment. Therefore conclusions drawn from the study were inappropriate. Milgram defended his original claim through evidence from debriefing sessions (participants admitted they had believed they were giving shocks), and through film evidence where participants appeared in considerable distress when delivering the shocks. Holland’s second claim was that the study lacked ecological validity, having been carried out in the psychology laboratory. Milgram carried out a replication in some run-down office buildings and found that obedience levels, although lower, were still far higher then predicted at the beginning of the research.
Ethical criticism of Milgram’s research, Baumrind criticised Milgram’s research on the ground that it was not ethically justified. She claimed that participants suffered considerable amount of distress, which was not the aim of the study. Participants suffered permanent psychological harm from their participation in the study, including loss of self-esteem and distrust of authority. Milgram failed to obtain ‘informed consent’ from his participants, because they may not have volunteered had they known what to expect.
In a study by Bickman, which was carried out in the real world, and his aim was how an individual would stand up to an authority figure. Bickman conducted many experiments on the streets of New York, for example dressing up in different uniforms, to see if people reacted if he said “Please could you pick up that litter, which you dropped”. Bickman found out that uniforms are another symbol of authority that can bring on mindless compliance; basically people obeyed Bickman according to his uniform. In one study, a confederate wearing a security guard’s uniform asked strangers to do such things as pick up a paper bag on the street, stand on the other side of a bus stop, and place money in an expired parking meter that wasn’t their own. When wearing the uniform rather than street clothes, the confederate could produce significantly more compliance with requests, even thou the jobs were irrelevant to a security guards authority.
Gamson’s (1982) aim was to encourage an individual to stand up to an authority figure. Participants working for MHRC were told about a case regarding a Petrol Station manager who had been sacked for cheating on his wife by his company because it damaged their image in the local community. They were each asked to represent different sides of the agreement and be videotaped doing this. They were then asked to sign legal documents to say that they would allow MHRC to edit the video and use it as evidence in court. There were 33 groups, in 16 nobody would sign the legal document, in 9 the majority refused to sign and in the final 8 a minority refused to sign. Apart from being morally wrong, the participants had other people to support them when standing up to their employer. This proves that most people resisted the authority and because of this the experiment achieved what it set out to do. The organisers found out that the experiment did encourage resistance also in the studies of authority there are many different factors involved, and because of this experiment lacks ecological validity.
External validity refers to the extend, to which the findings of an experiment can be generalised; the extend to which they apply outside the laboratory. As the study was carried out in the real world, the finding are believed to be valuable, because people behave in there natural way, when told to do something.
Obedience can be changed in various ways for example the people, setting and time. Milgram used 40 female participants in his second experiment and found 65% continued to the highest voltage level. These differences may reflect differences in culture between the participants.
Milgram’s findings were conducted in the 1960’s and the last experiment was carried out in the 1976. Because of changing ethical standards, researchers prefer up-to-date evidence, the reason for this is that our standard of living has changed and will continue to change.
Most of the participants have tended to be white American middle-class males. This leads to many questions because culture varies from society to society. Many of the experiments have been conducted in different countries; the findings were that the obedience level varied from country to country. The psychology of obedience has been largely based on studies conducted in American society. Therefore more research is needed if the findings apply to different societies with different cultures.
Individuals can be reminded that it is they who are responsible for their actions, not authority figures. The presence of disobedient models can also serve to reduce obedience. There is growing evidence that that knowledge of results such as Milgram’s may change people’s behaviour. Knowing about the process of obedience may enhance people’s ability to resist destructive obedience.
Research such as Milgram’s has changed the way in which we view the nature of destructive obedience. It appears from these research studies that many of us are capable of committing destructive acts, and that we fail to recognise our susceptibility to such influence. Prior to this research, it was traditional for social scientists to explain behaviour such as the Nazi war crimes in WWII in terms of the actions of deviant personalities.
Obedience to an authority figure also removes the responsibly from the individual who can claim they were following orders. If someone’s authority is seen as morally right or legally right then people are more likely to obey. By making a person become an object and stripping out the emotional aspects about them, people are more able to obey orders that involve harming someone else.
The experiments which are carried out in the laboratory, the finding aren’t valuable and the experiments which are carried out in the real world are valuable, also the findings show that more people obey more in the real world experiments rather then the laboratory experiments.