Describe_&_Evaluate_the_Psychological_Research_Into_Obedience.

Describe & evaluate the psychological research into obedience. Obedience the Dictionary tells us is, “The act of obeying, or the state of being obedient; compliance with that which is required by authority; subjection to rightful restraint or control” Stanley Milgram performed experimental research in order to define the psychological reasoning behind the apparent ease of which people succumb to obedience or authority. This essay will outline and discuss the facts and findings of his research and experiments, and touch on the ethics of his experiment and look at the real life applications his findings have had on our modern psychological understanding of obedience. The experiment discussed in this essay was carried out and completed in the Department of psychology at Yale University in 1960-63 and emerged from a seventy-five year tradition of experimentation in social psychology, starting with the experiment Boris Sidis carried out on obedience in 1898. Stanley Milgram sought to discover in his experimental research if the average American would obey an unjust order to inflict pain on someone else, he devised this experiment in order to investigate claims made by the Nazi officer's tried at the Nuremberg trials that they were only following order and were therefore free from blame for the despicable acts they performed during the second world war “The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the question: "Was it that Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust had mutual intent, in at least with regard to the goals of the Holocaust'" In other words, "Was there a mutual sense of morality among those involved'"”Milgram experiment, Wikipedia, 24/11/09 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment Milgram recruited the people whom took part in his experiment by means of a newspaper advertisement offering participants $4.00 if they took part in a memory experiment, unbeknown to the participants were the real intentions of the experiment to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Before undertaking his experiment Milgram performed research in the form of a poll of fourteen psychology majors that were studying at Yale University in order to gauge the opinion of like minded psychologists as to how far they thought the majority of people would go in the experiment, “Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors as to what they thought would be the results. All of the poll respondents believed that only a few (average 1.2%) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock” Milgram, Stanley (1963). "Behavioural Study of Obedience". Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67: 371–378. The study often described as an experiment, however there were no control conditions (i.e. all the participants took part in the same experimental procedure) it was not strictly a conventional experiment. Although the independent variable could be considered to be the prods provided by the Experimenter for the participant to carry on, and the dependent variable could be considered to be the degree of obedience. That is, how far up the shock scale the participant went. The study participants that were recruited by the newspaper advert were asked to pick a piece of paper from a hat to determine which role he would play. The draw was rigged so the participant was always the Teacher and Mr. Wallace (the Confederate) was always the Learner. In all cases, the actual subject was the Teacher the Learner was taken to an adjacent room. There, the Teacher helped the Learner into the shock apparatus. Electrode paste was applied to prevent burns from the shock. The Teacher received a sample 45 volt shock, , applied by pressing the third switch on The shock box which was to be used in the experiment which was actually powered by a 45-volt battery and not wired to the mains, (non of the shocks that the Teacher thought he was delivering during the study were actually real this was all an elaborate rouse and part of the experiment) the Experimenter and Teacher returned to the first room. The Teacher sat before an intercom and a shock box. The shock box contained 30 switches. The switches had both numerical labels indicating the voltage and verbal descriptions of the intensity of the shock. The voltages produced by the switches ranged from 15 to 450 volts. The Teacher administered a paired-associates task to the Learner He was instructed to give a 15 volt shock for the first error the Learner made and to increase 15 volts for each subsequent error. If the "teacher" hesitated or protested the experimenter provided a verbal prod (e.g., "Please continue" or "The experiment requires that you continue). At no time was the "teacher" threatened. The Learner reactions varied as the level of shock increased. At 75 volts he grunted, at 120 volts he shouted that the shocks were painful, at 150 volts he begged to be let out of the experiment, at 180 volts he yelled that he cannot stand the pain, at 270 volts there was an agonizing scream, at 300 volts a desperate shout that he refused to continue, at 315 volts a violent scream, at 330 volts a shriek and thereafter silence. In Milgram's baseline procedure, 100% of the subjects gave 135 or more volts, 75% gave 285 volts or more, and 63% gave all 450 volts. Milgram carried out many more variations of his experiment, for example in one variation to his experiment Milgram altered the location to a run-down office building in down town Bridgeport, Connecticut. In this setting the obedience rate was 47.5%, suggesting that the original location had played some part, but it was not a crucial factor. Milgram was therefore arguing that an important factor influencing behaviour is the situation a person is in. He believes that we often make dispositional attributions about behaviour, which are incorrect. That is, we often believe a person has behaved the way they do because of their personality when in fact it was the situation which shaped their behaviour, one final variation of the experiment that depicts a dilemma that is more common in everyday life. The subject was not ordered to pull the lever that shocked the victim, but merely to perform a subordinate task (administering the word-pair test) while another person administered the shock. In this situation, thirty-seven of forty adults continued to the highest level of the shock generator. Predictably, they excused their behaviour by saying that the responsibility belonged to the man who actually pulled the switch. This may illustrate a dangerously typical arrangement in a complex society: it is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of actions. In evaluation, the most important criticism of Milgram’s work is concerned with its ethics: Participants were deceived as to the exact nature of the study for which they had volunteered, and by making they believe they were administering real electric shocks to a real participant. However Milgram could not have found results that truly reflected the way people behave in real situations if he had not deceived his participants, all of whom were thoroughly debriefed afterwards. Perhaps one of the reasons Milgram’s research has been so heavily criticised is that it paints an unacceptable picture of human beings, “Thus it is easier for us to believe that a war criminal like Adolf Eichmann was an inhuman monster than that ‘ordinary people’ can be destructively obedient, yet atrocities, such as those committed in Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor, continue to occur. “According to Hirsch (1995), many of the greatest crimes against humanity are committed in the name of obedience.” Richard Gross (Author), Hugh Coolican (Author), Julia Russell (Author), Alan Clamp (Author), Dr Rob McIlveen (Author), Psychology: A New Introduction For A Level [2nd Edition], Hodder & Stoughton, (23 Jun 2000) Because laboratory experiments are to some extent open to criticism of lacking both internal and external validity. The following study of obedience is a field experiment, conducted in a normal, everyday social setting. The experiment was conducted by Hofling and his colleagues; the setting was a number of psychiatric hospitals in the USA. The participants were 22 staff nurses on night duty. An unknown ‘Doctor’ (actually a confederate of Hofling) telephoned each staff nurse with instructions to give medication to a patient. The medication was a drug with a maximum daily dosage of 10mg. this was clearly marked on the label. The ‘Doctor’ asked the nurses to administer 20mg, twice the recommended maximum. The ‘Doctor’ said he would sign the necessary papers when he arrived, 21 out of the 22 nurses obeyed the telephoned instruction and prepared the medication before they were stopped and the situation explained to them. Why were the nurses prepared to obey the doctor' In their role as nurses, it is the norm to accept orders from a higher authority such as a doctor, in addition the doctor who phoned promised to take responsibility by signing the paperwork when he got there, when questioned later the nurses said the doctors often telephoned instructions and got very annoyed if they attempted to stick to the hospital regulations. Hofling’s research is important because it studied obedience in a real life setting; as such it is more realistic than the relatively artificial context of a laboratory. One strength of laboratory experiments is that they consist of standardised procedures and measures which allow them to be easily repeated, However a weakness of laboratory experiments can be that they are not typical of real life situations. These types of experiments are conducted in strange and contrived environments in which people are asked to perform unusual or even bizarre tasks. The unnaturalness of the laboratory, together with the unnatural things that the subjects may be asked to do, jointly produces a deformation of behaviour. Therefore it should be difficult to generalise findings from laboratory experiments because they are not ecologically valid. Milgram believed that it is the position that people find themselves in rather than their temperaments that best explain their actions This argument gains support from many studies in social psychology, and there are real life examples of this such as at football matches where the police instigate crowd control, or customs at an airport where people are ordered to empty bags and undergo sometimes invasive body or strip searches, by people in uniform that are very much in control of those situations and are the figures of Dominance. The majority of normal people would not perform such degrading and humiliating acts if asked by someone not in uniform and a position of power. However this argument can be seen as too deterministic. For example in Milgram’s experiment not all of the participants were willing to go all the way to 450 volts. Perhaps the reason why some of the participants were less willing was something to do with their personalities. It can also be argued that we are socialised to be obedient and that it is therefore easier to conform than refuse to comply. References Milgram, Stanley (1963). "Behavioural Study of Obedience". Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67: 371–378. Milgram experiment, Wikipedia, 24/11/09 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment Richard Gross (Author), Hugh Coolican (Author), Julia Russell (Author), Alan Clamp (Author), Dr Rob McIlveen (Author), Psychology: A New Introduction For A Level [2nd Edition], Hodder & Stoughton, (23 Jun 2000) Bibliography GROSS, R. (1999) Key Studies in Psychology, 3rd Edition. London: Hodder and Stoughton BANYARD, P. AND GRAYSON, A. (2000) Introducing Psychological Research; Seventy Studies that Shape Psychology, 2nd Edition. London: Macmillan