Milgram Studies of obedience to authority (1974)
Aim: Milgram was interested in
researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it
involved harming another person. Stanley Milgram was interested in how
easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities
for example, Germans in WWII.
Participants: Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. Milgram selected participants for his
experiment by advertising for male participants to take part in a study
of learning at Yale University. He tries to focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.
Prodedure: Volunteers were recruited for a lab
experiment investigating learnin.
At the beginning of the
experiment they were introduced to another participant, who was actually
a confederate of the experimenter (Milgram). They drew straws to
determine their roles – leaner or teacher – although this was fixed and
the confederate always ended to the learner. There was also an
“experimenter” dressed in a white lab coat, played by an actor.
The “learner” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped to a chair in another
room with electrodes. After he has learned a list of word pairs given
him to learn, the "teacher" tests him by naming a word and asking the
learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.
The teacher is told to administer an
electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the
level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator
marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).
The learner gave mainly wrong answers and for each
of these the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher
refused to administer a shock and turned to the experimenter for
guidance, he was given the standard instruction consisting of 4
prods:
Prod 1:
Please continue.
Prod 2: The experiment requires you to continue.
Prod 3:
It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Prod 4:
You have no other choice but to continue.
Result: 65% of participants (i.e. teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts.
All the participants continued to 300 volts.
Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18
variations of his study. All he did was alter the situation (IV) to see
how this affected obedience (DV).
Conclusion: Ordinary people are likely to follow orders
given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent
human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the
way we are brought up. Such as parents, teachers, anyone in authority.
Strenghts: As the experiment was conducted in a laboratory setting, it allowed the
experimenter to have a high level of control. This is useful as it makes
the results more reliable as we can say that we can observe the effects
of Milgram’s commands to the participants clearly.
Weakness: Participants of Milgram’s study were deceived as they were told the
experiment was about “the effects of punishment on learning” and were
made to believe that they were giving real electric shocks to
participants. (Milgram thought this necessary for the study because if
the participants knew about the true aim of the study, demand
characteristics would be introduced, and the findings of the study would
be useless.)
Asch's Studies of comformity (1956)
Aim:
Solomon Asch
(1951) conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to
which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to
conform.
Participants: There were 123 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA
participated in a ‘vision
test’. They believed they were participating in a visual discrimination task.
Procedure: Asch
used a lab experiment to
study conformity, whereby
123 male students from Swarthmore College in the USA
participated in a ‘vision
test’. Using the line
judgment task, Asch put a naive participant in a room with
four to six confederates. The confederates had agreed in
advance what their responses would be when presented with the line
task. The real participant did not know this and was led to believe
that the other seven participants were also real participants like
themselves. Each person in the room had to state aloud which comparison
line (A, B or C) was most like the target line. The answer was always
obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or
her answer last. In some trials, the seven confederates gave the wrong
answer. There were 18 trials in total and the confederates gave the
wrong answer on 12 trails
(called the critical trials). Asch was interested to see
if the real participant would conform to the majority view.
Results:
Asch measured the number of times each participant conformed to the
majority view. On average, about 32% of the participants
who were placed in this situation went along and conformed with the
clearly incorrect majority
on the critical trials.
Over the 12 critical trials about 75%
of participants conformed at
least once and 25% of
participant never conformed.
Conclusion: Why did
the participants conform so readily? When they were interviewed after
the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their
conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being
ridiculed or thought "peculiar". A few of them said that they really
did believe the group's answers were correct.
Apparently, people conform for two main reasons: because
they want to fit in with the group (normative influence) and because
they believe the group is better informed than they are (informational
influence).
Strengths: The strength of this study is that the experiment was simple so it was
easy to record the results. The experiment also well demonstrated Asch’s
theory.
Weakness: The weakness of Asch’s study is that it was not completely controlled. Another weakness is that it deceivable.
Zimbrado's Stanford Prison experiment (1971)
Aim: To investigate how readily people would
conform to the roles of guard and prisoner in a role-playing exercise
that simulated prison life.
Zimbardo (1973) was interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American
prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards or had more to do with the prison environment.
Participants: From
more than 75 people who responded to the ad, 24 students were chosen: 12
to role play prisoners (9 plus 3 alternates) and 12 to role play guards
(also 9 plus 3 alternates). These students had no prior record of
criminal arrests, medical conditions, or psychological disorders.
They played the roles of prisoners and guards.
Students were screened for psychological normality and paid $15 per day to take part in the experiment.
Procedure: Participants were randomly assigned to
either the role of prisoner or guard in a simulated prison environment. Prisoners were arrested at their own homes, without warning, and taken to the local police station.
Guards were also issued a khaki uniform,
together with whistles, handcuffs and dark glasses, to make eye contact
with prisoners impossible. No physical violence was permitted. Zimbardo
observed the
behavior of the prisoners and guards.
Here they were treated like every other criminal. They were
fingerprinted, photographed and ‘booked’. Then they were blindfolded
and driven to the psychology department of Stanford University, where
Zimbardo had had the basement set out as a prison, with barred doors and
windows, bare walls and small cells. Here the deindividuation process
began.
When the prisoners arrived at the prison they were stripped
naked, deloused, had all their personal possessions removed and locked
away, and were given prison clothes and bedding. They were issued a
uniform, and referred to by their number only. Their clothes comprised a
smock with their number written on it, but no underclothes. They also
had a tight nylon cap, and a chain around one ankle.
There were 3 guards to the 9 prisoners, taking shifts of eight hours each (the other guards remained on call)
Results:
Within a very short time both guards and
prisoners were settling into their new roles, the guards adopting
theirs quickly and easily.
Within hours of beginning the experiment some guards began to harass prisoners.
They behaved in a brutal and sadistic manner, apparently enjoying it.
Other guards joined in, and other prisoners were also tormented.
The prisoners were taunted with insults and petty orders,
they were given pointless and boring tasks to accomplish, and they were
generally
dehumanized.
The prisoners soon adopted prisoner-like behavior too. They
talked about prison issues a great deal of the time. They ‘told tales’
on each other to the guards. They started taking the prison rules very
seriously, as though they were there for the prisoners’ benefit and
infringement would spell disaster for all of them. Some even began
siding with the guards against prisoners who did not conform to the
rules.
Over the next few days the relationships between the guards and
the prisoners changed, with a change in one leading to a change in the
other. Remember that the guards were firmly in control and the
prisoners were totally dependent on them.
As the prisoners became more dependent, the guards became more
derisive towards them. They held the prisoners in contempt and let the
prisoners know it. As the guards’ contempt for them grew, the prisoners
became more submissive.
As the prisoners became more submissive, the guards became more
aggressive and assertive. They demanded ever greater obedience from the
prisoners. The prisoners were dependent on the guards for everything so
tried to find ways to please the guards, such as telling tales on fellow
prisoners.
One prisoner had to be released after 36 hours because of uncontrollable bursts of screaming, crying and anger.
His thinking became
disorganized and he appeared to be entering the early stages of a
deep depression. Within the next few days three others also had to leave
after showing signs of emotional disorder that could have had lasting
consequences. (These were people who had been pronounced stable and
normal a short while before.)
Zimbardo (1973) had intended that the experiment should run for a fortnight, but on the sixth day he closed it down.
There was real danger that someone might be physically or mentally
damaged if it was allowed to run on. After some time for the researchers
to gather their data the subjects were called back for a follow-up,
debriefing session.
Conclusion:
- Some situations can exert powerful influences over individuals,
causing them to behave in ways they would not, could not, predict in
advance.
- Situational power is most salient in novel settings in which the
participants cannot call on previous guidelines for their new behavior
and have no historical references to rely on.
- Situational power involves ambiguity of role boundaries,
authoritative or institutionalized permission to behave in prescribed
ways or to disinhibit traditionally disapproved ways of responding.
- Role playing -- even when acknowledged to be artificial and
temporary -- can still come to exert a profoundly realistic impact on
the actors.
- Good people can be induced, seduced, initiated into behaving in evil
(irrational, stupid, self destructive, antisocial) ways by immersion in
"total situations" that can transform human nature in ways that
challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual
personality, character, and morality.
Strengths: A
further strength was in the way that Zimbardo collected data.
He used a number of qualitative approaches such as
observation (sometimes overt and sometimes covert) interviews and
questionnaires.
Weakness: The
only deception
involved was to do with the arrest of the prisoners at the beginning
of the experiment. The
prisoners were not told partly because final approval from the
police wasn’t given until minutes before the participants decided
to participate, and partly because the researchers wanted the
arrests to come as a surprise.
However this was a breach of the ethics of Zimbardo’s own
contract that all of the participants had signed.
