...100 Investigating Psychology 1 TMA02 Outline the similarities and differences between Milgrams (1963) obedience study and Burgers (2009) replication. This essay will look at an important key psychological experiment carried out by the renowned social psychologist Stanley Milgram which was carried out in the early 1960’s (Banyard 2012) to determine how far ordinary people would go to inflict pain to a fellow human based on instruction from an authority figure, and that of the replication of the experiment which was carried out by Burger in 2009 (Byford 2014) to determine if the same level of obedience was still applicable in the 21st Century, as was observed in the original study some 40 years earlier. The essay will look at some of the key similarities and differences between the two studies. For the purpose of this essay only the base studies will be discussed. Milgram’s motivation to study this trait in human behaviour came from the atrocities that took place during WW2, and the trial of Adolph Eichmann who in his defence said he was ‘simply following orders’ (Banyard 2012) to carry out the mass murders. Milgram asked himself ‘how can ordinary people who are courteous and descent in everyday life act callously, inhumanely without limitations of conscience?’ Milgram on Milgram (part 1): Obedience experiments (The Open University, 2014) Milgram devised his obedience study. He developed a laboratory based experiment to determine how far a participant in the experiment would...
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...Obedience to Authorit Obedience to Authority Obedience is a term that can take place in many forms and with diverse individuals, especially with those who are authoritative figures. With many forms of destruction and life-threatening violence taking place during the middle part of the 20th century, many psychologists and scientists took interest in how ordinary individuals reacted to individuals in authority. One psychology in particular, Stanley Milgram, conducted a series of experiments investigating individuals’ obedient behavior to authoritative figures, whether positive deeds or acts of violence. This paper will summarize Milgram’s famous research as well as analyze the most current research of conforming to authority. Additionally, this paper will examine the current research on Milgram's findings from the early part of the 1960s. Summary of Milgram's Research Stanley Milgram (1963) was a social psychologist who set out to investigate human obedience, especially following the Second World War and in particular, the Holocaust (Milgram, 1963). Milgram’s interest was to conduct a study to answer the research question, are Germans different? However, as Milgram began to develop a tool used for studying obedience, he soon discovered that all individuals are remarkably obedient to people in authority. Milgram chose a naive subject to administer a dangerous electric shock to a victim, which releases voltage ranges from 15 to 450 (Milgram, 1963). Throughout the experiment...
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...Running Head: POWER OF SITUATION AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY The Power of the Situation in Milgram's Obedience Experiments Ahsan Chishty Ohlone College POWER OF SITUATION AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY The Power of the Situation in Milgram's Obedience Experiments Stanley Milgram is a name universally known for the Yale professor who shocked the world with his experiments on obedience. In 1961, Milgram along with many other colleagues devised an experiment after receiving a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct an experiment in response to the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Milgram wanted to know if Germans under the rule of authority figures did exactly what they were instructed to do by those of higher power than them due to the fact that many of the explanations for the Nazi atrocities was simply that Nazi soldiers were following orders. After placing an ad in the New Haven Register for a learning experiment on the study of memory. According to Thomas Blass (2009), offering participants $4.50 and a paid bus fare for an hour of their time seemed to be the biggest factor that attracted people to the ad but several of the participants also agreed to be a part of the study to learn something about themselves, expand their curiosity about psychology, or because they were fascinated by memory and hoped to understand it better through an experiment like Milgram's. The subjects were introduced to a man in a lab coat who...
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...Discuss. This essay will discuss obedience in authority, considering why people can do terrible things when instructed to by someone of a higher standing. It will first discuss social psychological explanations into obedience, outlining and evaluating agency theory and legitimate authority. It will then go onto evaluate the contrasting research of Milgram and Hofling’s studies into obedience, also looking at other similar studies. The third section will discuss and analyse the ethical issues into social psychological research referring to the specific issues contained in the studies of the previously mentioned psychologists. A conclusion will sum up the entirety...
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...Milgram (1974) conducted many experiments based on obedience the most familiar experiment is experiment 5 which took place in 1963. The objective of experiment 5 was to see what factors would influence an individual to obey, the situational factor in the experiment using electric shocks shows although the situation from an outside perspective may seem morally wrong, for example, inflicting pain on another person is something that people would not choose to do unless put under a difficult situation like the participants were. The fact that Milgram researched this topic gives us great insight on human behaviour. According to Milgram a cause of obedience is authority, indicating the environment and individuals a person is surrounded by dictates how obedient a person can be. In 1971 Zimbardo also carried out research on obedience conducting a prison experiment....
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...experiments on the obedience to authority. His work, along with the likes of Zimbardo (1969) and Asch (1951) revolutionised the field of psychology and our understanding of the influence situations have on an individual’s behaviour. As in Altemeyer’s study on teachers and learners above, Milgram’s results, which inspired Altemeyer’s study, also indicated that the most significant factor driving a person to commit violent acts is not the individual, but rather the situation they are placed under. This explains why an increased number of teachers were able to cause pain to the learners when separated from them. Milgram’s work provided a number of key insights about the power of the situation. In particular, while individual background slightly influenced how likely an individual would obey authority, the impulse to obey cut across gender, nationality, education, religious affiliation, and personality type (Kressel, 1996, p146 ). In addition, Milgram proposed that when confronted with a legitimate...
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...of study; the ethics for individual and social are undefined. Though ethical codes could stretch back through history of the Ancient Greek. There have been many up to date versions of ethical codes since then, such as being respected when taking part in psychological research conducted (McGaha & Korn, 1995). Within the departments of psychology there are various ethics committee, the aim of every department is to avoid participants experiencing distress and making sure participants welfare and dignity is kept. Ethics within psychology means the researcher’s key focus have to be to reduce any sort of discomfort or risks which are involved within the study. Also preventing the participants from experiencing any long-term undesirable consequences as well as having to notifying participants on all features of the study which could have an influence on their decision to take part (Hobbs, 1948). Throughout the psychological history many research studies have been conducted by various psychologists. There have been some which have been ethically critisied, with the lack of ethics taken into consideration. The most commonly discussed research study which has many ethical issues is known to be conducted by a behavioral psychologist Stanley Milgram (1963). Leading to many discussions Milgram (1963) purpose of his study was to investigate how far an individual would obey a figure of authority (Bernstein, 2011). Stanley Milgram (1963) introduced his well-known study on obedience within...
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...Running Head: Psychological and Motivational Factors Involved with Obedience Psychological and Motivational Factors Involved with Obedience Crimes The dynamics of obedience have been researched for decades in an attempt to explain what causes humans to commit atrocious acts such as the Holocaust and why crimes of obedience are so prevalent in society. Are all people capable of committing crimes of obedience given the right situation? Is there a certain disposition or combination of personality traits that leads to crimes of obedience? Situations are unique and dispositions vary; attempting to distinguish what causes these occurrences is a complex task that has been the subject of numerous studies, yet no concrete answers are found. Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments ignited the flame of a subject that, instead of diminishing over time and becoming obsolete as a result of improved methods and new ideologies, has remained at the forefront of social and behavioral psychology. Modern research faces the critical challenge of attempting to study obedience under much more restrictive guidelines than previous studies; the results that are produced can only hope to shed light on one component of obedience and use other studies to synthesize a more complete explanation. The predecessor to all of this modern research was the Milgram obedience experiment and all of its variations. It has remained a fixture of social psychology for so long for several reasons: the...
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...Questioning Authority: A Rethinking of the Infamous Milgram Experiments By Liliana Segura, AlterNet Posted on February 12, 2009 Between 1963 and 1974, Dr. Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments that would become one of the most famous social psychology studies of the 20th century. His focus was how average people respond to authority, and what he revealed stunned and disturbed people the world over. Under the pretense of an experiment on "learning" and "memory," Milgram placed test subjects in a lab rigged with fake gadgetry, where a man in a lab coat instructed them to administer electrical shocks to a fellow test subject (actually an actor) seated in another room in "a kind of miniature electric chair." Participants were told they were the "teachers" in the scenario and given a list of questions with which to quiz their counterparts (the "learners"). If the respondent answered incorrectly to a question, he got an electric shock as punishment. The shocks were light at first -- 15 volts -- and became stronger incrementally, until they reached 450 volts -a level labeled "Danger: Severe Shock." The actors were never actually electrocuted, but they pretended they were. They groaned, shouted, and, as the current became stronger, begged for relief. Meanwhile, the man in the lab coat coolly told the test subjects to keep going. To people's horror, Milgram discovered that a solid majority of his subjects -- roughly two-thirds -- were willing to administer the highest levels...
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...Zimbardo provide evidence for identification? 7. What is meant by normative social influence? 8. What is meant by informational social influence? 9. What were the findings from Asch’s experiment? 10. What was Asch’s procedure? 11. Describe Milgram’s procedure for his obedience experiment. 12. What were the findings from Milgram’s experiment? 13. Describe Milgram’s variation where proximity was changed, and state the findings. 14. Describe Milgram’s variation where location was changed, and state the findings. 15. Describe Milgram’s variation where uniform was changed, and state the findings. 16. What is the agentic shift explanation of obedience? 17. What does the dispositional explanation of obedience say about obedience? 18. What is meant by Locus of Control? And how does it affect resistance to obedience? 19. What features of a minority are needed for social change? 20. What was Moscovici’s procedure? 21. What did Moscovici’s results tell us about minority influence? Memory 1. Draw a diagram showing the MSM and the processes involved. 2. What is the coding, duration and capacity of Sensory, Short-term and Long-term memory? 3. Describe two research studies that support a distinction between the STM and LTM. 4. Draw a diagram showing the WMM and the sub-sections of each slave system. 5. What is the role of the central executive? 6. What are the following slave systems responsible for: phonological...
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...Milgram’s Agency Theory |Following on from his research, Milgram proposed the Agency Theory as an explanation for why people behave the way they do, | |especially when it comes to being obedient. He suggested that participants in his studies were in an agentic state, acting as | |an agent for the experimenter even though they were under moral strain. There is an EVOLUTIONARY aspect to Agency Theory – | |likely that humans who worked on a hierarchical social system were more likely to survive. It is also likely there is a | |LEARNED aspect to being in an agentic state, as schools and other social systems rely on power structures and on people | |obeying those in authority. | [pic] [pic] [pic][pic] | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ...
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...Milgram conducted an experiment directed on the differences in obedience to an authority figure and a person’s personal conscience. Milgram examined these traits by using people accused of crimes during World War II and Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Milgram found that the soldier’s defense was based on strictly obedience and that they were just following orders of their superiors. Milgram’s experiments began a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann who was being accused of coordinating deportations of Jews from killing centers. He also was the mastermind behind deportation plans down to the last detail. Milgram formulated his experiment to answer the question "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (Milgram, 1963). Milgram also wanted to...
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...clearly explain the outcome of the experiment. Qualitative data is needed to understand they way the participants behaved in the way that they did and why they obeyed. Quantitative date is need to give accurate results and so that they can be used to compare the results if the experiment is repeated. 5. One reason why it is important to evaluate studies is to see if they are valid and if they can be generalised to real social situations. Milgram’s study on obedience had no ecological validity as it is only generalising to American adult men, because of this we can’t say that women or people from different ages and nationalities would have acted the same way. Another reason it is important to evaluate studies is so that we make sure the participants were treated well and if they weren’t, were the finding of the study worth going against ethical guideline. Milgram’s study did break ethical guidelines as his participants were put under extreme stress and were deceived. It is also important to evaluate to ensure no lasting damage was done to any participant. 6. * I think that Milgram’s original study only concentrated on the obedience of a certain group of people all in the same...
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...public knowledge that the detainees were being tortured and dehumanised by the American soldiers. Newspapers were filled with photographs and descriptions of the torture of the Iraqi detainees and there was public disapproval of what was evidently intolerable treatment inflicted on them. One theory that could be used to explain the issue is Milgram’s agency theory of obedience. This theory could be used because the soldiers are trained to be agents of authority and believe they have a duty to protect America as agents of society thus as soldiers, they would be agents obeying the orders rather than autonomous individuals making their own decisions. The soldiers would not have been in an autonomous state, and would have therefore be more able to carry out the orders given to them by an authority figure. This may have been because the soldiers were under the impressions that they would not be held responsible for their actions hence they thought it was acceptable to torture the Iraqi detainees as well as degrading them in the process. The study that supports this theory is Milgram’s study of obedience. In Milgram’s experiment participants, who were the ‘teachers’, were wiling to electrocute other participants, who were the ‘learners’, if they provided incorrect answers to what the ‘teachers’ asked them, when being coaxed to do so by an authority figure. Therefore this suggests the soldiers would be prepared to obey...
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...Obedience is a form of social influence that occurs when a person yields to explicit instructions on orders from an authority figure. Obedience is compliance with commands given by an authority figure. In the 1960s, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram did a famous research study called the obedience study. It showed that people have a strong tendency to comply with authority figures. Milgram’s Obedience Study Milgram told his forty male volunteer research subjects that they were participating in a study about the effects of punishment on learning. He assigned each of the subjects to the role of teacher. Each subject was told that his task was to help another subject like himself learn a list of word pairs. Each time the learner made a mistake, the teacher was to give the learner an electric shock by flipping a switch. The teacher was told to increase the shock level each time the learner made a mistake, until a dangerous shock level was reached. Throughout the course of the experiment, the experimenter firmly commanded the teachers to follow the instructions they had been given. In reality, the learner was not an experiment subject but Milgram’s accomplice, and he never actually received an electric shock. However, he pretended to be in pain when shocks were administered. Prior to the study, forty psychiatrists that Milgram consulted told him that fewer than 1 percent of subjects would administer what they thought were dangerous shocks to the learner...
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