Posts tagged with Milgram
Many of you will be familiar with the excellent BBC radio series called Mind Changers which has included programmes on Milgram, Piaget, Ainsworth, Bartlett, Kohlberg, Zimbardo, Harlow, Asch. Some of these are currently available as podcasts here or you can go to PsychBLOG where Jamie has downloaded some and there are also some available on Spokenword (free subscription for teachers).
If anyone finds copies elsehwere, let us know!
Just found this excellent set of ‘Mind Bites’ – funky little poster style summaries of psychological research. Excellent I think for lessons on hypothesis formulation and testing.
There’s also a brilliant photo archive here, containing hundreds of images of old psychological research equipment. (Including Milgram’s fake shock machine). I love all this stuff…. maybe it’s a bloke thing, but I love the aesthetics of it… all that wonderful old brass gadgetry and paraphenalia, all a bit Heath Robinson or old skool Doctor Who… Certainly useful in illustrating the empirical, laboratory-based aspects of psychology.
An Australian radio programme has recently broadcast a programme (11 October 2008) which went in search of some of the original subjects and interviewed them. There is an option which allows you to download it too! Here’s the link. There are also audio clips from the original experiment. Quite fascinating.
You can also read interviews with Milgram’s subjects in the book by Laren Slater called Opening Skinner’s Box.
It’s not that I am obsessed with Milgram (see my previous posts); his work just seems to attract a lot of attention – and now a US research team has conducted a replication of the original experiment!. Jerry Burger and his colleagues felt that since this classic study is so often used to explain human obedience to unjust authority (e.g. the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib) there was good reason to see whether the same results would be produced today. In the original experiment (and subsequent replications) once a participant had continued beyond 150 volts they almost invariably continued to the end as if, at this point, an unconscious decision was made to follow the experimenter’s lead rather than being concerned about any harm done to the ‘learner’. Therefore Burger identified 150 volts as a critical point of no return and they designed their experiment so it was stopped after the 150 volt point. In all other respects the procedures were identical to the original and participants were carefully screened to exclude anyone who was psychologically vulnerable or was aware of the original experiments.
The results were just about the same – 70% of the 40 participants who took part were willing to go beyond 150 volts. Participants who indicated a greater desire for control were less likely to obey but empathy levels had little effect on obedience. In another condition the study showed that participants who witnessed another participant (a confederate) who refused to continue did not show any greater disobedience, unlike the original trials.
If you want to read more, look here and here and here (in this last link you can also read about a real life prank call to a children’s home ordering a supervisor to deliver electric shocks, shades of the McDonald’s story).
Since Stanley Milgram first published his classic study on obedience an enormous number of people have offered comments and reinterpretations of his work. Perhaps the most recent come from Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher (famous for their adaptation of Zimbardo’s prison study). Haslam and Reicher suggest that there are several problems with the concept of the agentic shift. For example, how does this explain why subjects were less likely to obey in the run down office? Logically we might expect an increased agentic state (and higher obedience) because the relative authority of the experimenter was greater in a less prestigious environment.
Haslam and Reicher use a different explanation – social identity theory. They argue that the degree to which we obey someone depends on the extent to which we identify with them. The more you identify, the more you obey. They use this to explain Zimbardo’s experiment and also the obedience of guards in the Second World War. They may have been ordinary people (as Hannah Arendt proposed) but the reason for obedience was less to do with an agentic shift and more because they identified with the Nazi movement and believed it to be right.
The importance of this interpretation is that it may lead us to understand obedience to unjust authority better, in terms of identification rather than lack of autonomy.
In April 2004 the manageress of a McDonalds restaurant in the US received a phone call from a man claiming to be a police officer, ‘Officer Scott’, telling her that one of her employees had been accused of stealing a purse. He said the girl could be searched at the store or taken to jail and searched there. The manageress agreed to perform the search in her locked office, directed at every step by Officer Scott. The ‘thief’ was stripped naked and her clothes removed from the office. The manageress asked why it was taking the police so long to turn up but Officer Scott said they were very busy. The ‘thief’ later said she was scared to leave because she felt she had to obey a higher authority.
When the manageress said she had to get back to work, Officer Scott asked if she had a boyfriend who could come in and take over. The manageress called her fiancé who came in and continued to obey Officer Scott’s instructions over the next two hours. The instructions included making the ‘thief’ do knee bends and stand on a desk, and slapping her backside if she refused. The series of humiliating ‘tasks’ culminated in forcing the girl to behave in a sexually indecent manner, all of which was recorded on CCTV.
A clip from the classic obedience studies conducted by Stanley Milgram. If you haven’t studied this experiment already on your psychology course, you can pretty much guarantee that you will at some point.
The studies are controversial because of ethical concerns: Did Milgram do enough to look after his participants? The conventional argument is no, he did not, mainly because he deceived his participants and this was morally wrong. He didn’t tell them what the study was about, they thought they’d harmed someone and so on….
But there’s another point of view that says something along the lines of :‘Y’know what?, maybe this is something psychological thinkers and writers worry about, whereas the people actually involved in the studies really aren’t that bothered. In fact, if anything they enjoy being deceived and feel they learn more from such studies’…
What do you think?
Psychology: The Online Companion
