Obedience

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Milgram - Obedience Study:

Milgram wanted to find out how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it meant harming another person

Participants were 40 males aged between 20 and 50

At the beginning of the experiment the participant was introduced to the confederate they would be working with

The participant was assigned role of teacher and the confederate was assigned role of learner

The teacher was told they had to teach the learner a set of word pairs and test them. Every time the learner got an answer wrong, the teacher had to give them an electric shock, increasing the severity each time from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 volts (severe shock)

The confederate gave mainly wrong answers and pretended to be in pain - they weren't actually given an electric shock

If the teacher disobeyed, an experimenter in the room had to give 4 commands/prods; please continue, the experiment requires you to continue, it is absolutely essential that you continue and you have no other choice but to continue

All participants continued to at least 300 volts

12.5% of participants stopped at 300 volts

65% of participants continued to 450 volts

Holland argued that participants continued to give high voltage shocks because they guessed the shocks were not real, therefore Milgram was not testing what he intended to test so the study lacked internal validity

The lab experiment accurately reflected wider authority relationships in real life, giving the experiment good external validity

A documentary about reality TV repeated the experiment and got very similar results showing that Milgram's findings were not just a one off chance occurrence

The experiment involved deception - participants were led to believe that the allocation of roles was random but it was fixed. They were also led to believe that they were shocking and hurting the other person