Obedience to authority Social Influence Obedience to authority

Findings of Milgram’s study

Evaluating Milgram (1963): A question of validity Orne and Holland (1968)

Internal validity The extent to which any change in the DV has been caused by the manipulation of the IV; was the obedience caused by the presence of the experimenter (authority) and their belief in the situation?

Argument 1 The Pps were not deceived; they worked out that the shocks were not real and this caused them to ‘play along’ with the experimenter i.e. experimental realism was poor thus lowering internal validity

Evidence against: Pps were taken in by the deception Rosenhan (1969) replication – 70% said they believed the whole set up. Turner and Solomon (1962) found that Pps were even willing to receive strong shocks! Coolican (1996) agrees with Milgram, the film footage shows that Pps were clearly very distressed (driving nails into their skin, one had full blown seizure etc) Conclusion: Orne and Holland argument about internal validity is fairly weak.

Argument 2: Obedience was caused by demand characteristics Pps were cued by the experimenter to act in a certain way May be Pps obeyed because it was an ‘experiment’; this would not have happened in real life. Evidence to support: Cues such as the white coat were clearly responsible; when it seemed more like a formal experiment obedience was greater

Argument 3: They only obeyed because they were being paid Payment caused a social contract with experimenter Obedience was high in a contractual agreement involving money but may not be without this incentive.

External validity Refers to the extent to which the findings can be generalised to settings outside the immediate context of the experiment, e.g. Population validity (would results be the same with different age group, gender, etc) Cultural relativism; do the findings generalise to other cultures Do they generalise to other more life-like situations, outside the psychologist’s lab? (ecological validity)

Argument 1: Results are generalisable and help explain death camp behaviour (Milgram) Evidence to support; obedience is higher when there are overt signs of authority/differences in power Hofling (1966) Yes, obedience was in fact even higher with the nurses in a real hospital setting, 95%. Bickman (1975) Yes, people would obey trivial orders particularly when person giving orders is dressed in uniform suggesting authority. Meeus and Raaijmakers (1995) Dutch study 92% obeyed orders to make 15 insulting remarks to a supposed Pp (confederate) in an interview mock up. Results do generalise across cultures; Smith and Bond (1993) found 80% willing to give 450V in Italy, Austria (85%) also high in Spain and Germany