Provide a brief description of the study in your own words (this should be no more than 350 words). Milgram started his obedience study experiments in 1961.He was highly influenced by the defense of criminal Adolph Eichmann used second world war that he was simply following instruction when he ordered death of millions of jews. He carried out his experiment in Yale University to check whether people obey the orders of authority figure to cause pain to a stranger. The participants of this experiment were recruited through newspaper ads and each person was paid for their participation. Milgram stated that the experiment was subjected to study the punishment on learning. The teacher was asked to administrate the electric shocks of increasing voltage to learner for every wrong answer he made in word-memory experiment. A fake lottery was conducted to select the learner and teacher. But participants are always asked to take the role of teacher and learner was a confederate who was pretending to be shocked. Milgram developed intimidating shock equipment with shock levels starting from 30 volts to 450 volts. Some switches were named us “slight shock”, ”moderate shock” and “Danger- severe shock”. As the experiment progressed , the "learner" would begin to grunt at 75 volts; complain at 120 volts; ask to be released at 150 volts; and let out screams at 285 volts. Eventually, the learner was to yell loudly and complain of heart pain. At some point the actor would refuse to answer any more questions. Finally, at 330 volts the actor would be totally silent-that is, if any of the teacher participants got so far without rebelling. Teachers were instructed to treat silence as an incorrect answer and apply the next shock to the student. If at any point the teacher hesitated to inflict the shocks, the experimenter would pressure him to proceed. Almost all participants showed some distress or fear about the health of learner but they continue to give shock till the end. Contrary to expectations participants continued to give ‘shocks’ to the maximum 450 volts, in spite of protest from the Learner. |
Give five strengths of the study and five weaknesses of the study based on the evidence Strengths of study | Limitations/weaknesses of study | Strong control. | Ethical issue | High experimental realism. | “Freedom of withdraw” is violated at some points when participants where told “you must carry on”. | Study clear and findings reported appropriately | Lack of informed consent. | Volunteered participants. | Unrepresentative sample. | Replicable & further variations were possible | Not ecologically valid. |
Discuss the ethics of the study such as consent, right to withdraw, deception, debrief or other issues The criticism of Milgram study is on its ethical grounds. In this study, Milgram didn’t explained the details of the experiment to participants and they were not aware of the electric shock was unreal. But Milgram had the presumptive consent from the participants. There was a high level of deception but this was inevitable for the validity of the experiment. Milgram gave the withdrawal right to his participants but at certain level of experiment the participants were strongly encouraged to carry on with the experiment. Debriefing was done after each session in order to ensure they are in safe mental state because the experiment was highly stressful to participants and involved a lot of deception. |
Provide two other studies in the last 10 years that have looked at these concepts. Provide the reference and link Slater M, Antley A, Davison A, Swapp D, Guger C, et al. (2006) A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments. PLoS ONE 1(1): e39. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000039 Dambrun, M., & Vatiné, E. (2009). Reopening the study of extreme social behaviors: Obedience to authority within an immersive video environment. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(5), 760-773. | Provide examples of how these concepts could be either applied in a real world issue or can help explain an issue. (this should be at least 200 words but no more than 350) Stanely Milgram obedience study make a lot of controversy but by his study made a shocking result to the society. Based on the Milgram obedience observation a study was done by Eugon Tarnov in 2000 about “TOWARDS THE ZERO ACCIDENT GOAL: ASSISTING THE FIRST OFFICER MONITOR AND CHALLENGE THE CAPTAIN ERRORS”.685A number of flight accidents are taking place because the first officer failed to correct the orders of captain in the cokepit. There are four milgram findings that can explain the lack of monitoring and challenging in the airplane cokepit. Excessive obedience, hesitant challenging, lack of monitoring and physical closeness of authority towards the participant are the four factors. When the study make a correspondence between Milgram experiment setting and the cokepit , the experimenter become the erroneous captain and the participant is first officer. Observation made on this setting reveals that always first officer –captain relationship is authoritarian. And in many situations the error done by the captain are not questioned by the first officer because of hesitant challenging. By the help of voice recording device they studied the conversation between captain and first officer. And later found out their hypothesis was true in many accidents. This study is a perfect example of applying Milgram`s obedience study in a real world issue. |
Reference
Eugon Tarnov,(2000).Towards the zero accidental goal : Assisting the first monitor and challenge the captain errors.volume 10,No:1:Journal of aviation/aerospace education and research.
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