Diadelisse Davila
University of Phoenix
Social Psychology
PSY/285
Dr. April Kindall
August 28, 2014
Obedience CheckPoint
Milgram’s aim was to find a way to understand why people obey to an authority figure. By gaining helpers he advertised in the local newspapers, asking if people would participate in a study regarding the effect of punishment on learning. The ‘real’ participants in the study considered that they were casually given the role of either the ‘teacher’ or the ‘learner’ but actually it was fixed that every time they were the learner, the other participant was actually a ally. The participants were instructed to give electric shocks to another individual, who was the learner, the learner was the ally but the participant was unaware of this. Each shock would be increased by 15 volts each time a learner would give an wrong answer to a question. no electric shocks were actually given, with the exception of one administered to the real participant to deceive them into thinking the shock machine actually worked. By giving clear suggestions of distress, the learner would shout and complain and then go silent suggesting they were did. If the participants refused to manage an electric shock the experimenter would sternly order them to continue with the experiment. The experimenter, who was the authority figure in the experiment used a number of verbal prompts to encourage the participants to continue with the experiment. After the experiment had been done the participants were fully interrogated on what Milgram’s true intention was and followed up a year later to check on their psychological states.
Milgram remarkably found that 100% of the participants administered electric shocks that were up to 300 volts. Before performing the experiment a guess was made by top psychologists that only 1% of the participants would have done this, and the 1% would’ve been those of a psychopathic nature. 65% of the participants gave the shocks up until the maximum 450 volts. These results suggested that obedience happened down to the situational factors perceived authority and not the nature or personality of the participant.
Regardless of Milgram’s study being heavily critiqued, you cannot fault some of his organizational factors of the study. There is a high internal legitimacy with this study and a lot of effort went into making sure there was a high control inside the lab conditions. An example of this is when the real participants were deceived to make sure they believed the situation they were in was real. Milgram made them believe that the roles of teacher and learners were picked casually when actually the roles were fixed every time. They were also given an electric shock beforehand to prove it worked, from an authentic looking piece of equipment. The level of obedience could be accurately measured by the voltage that the participant would go up to giving. The investigation was also high in reliability because the scripted verbal prompts given by the experimenters were identical when a person defied, so each person received the same orders from them.
Issues with this experiment concerning the ethical factors have been frequently critiqued and negatively looked upon despite this
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