Topic Summaries

Milgram’s study into obedience

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  • Aim: 👥 Milgram (1961) wanted to understand why Nazi soldiers in WWII were so obedient.It was assumed that German soldiers were less moral than Americans and that is why they obeyed commands so willingly (i.e.more dispositional factors than situational factors). Milgram wanted to test this in a lab experiment at Yale university.
  • Participants: the experiment was conducted with 40 males using volunteer sampling (an advert in the newspaper and leaflets).
  • Method: a naïve participant was the ‘teacher’ who tested the learner with basic questions. The ‘learner’ and the ‘experimenter’ were both confederates. The learner was attached to electrodes which would ‘shock’ him for a wrong answer. The naïve participant was told that the study was about how punishment can improve memory, but the true aim was to test whether a person would obey an authority figure by electrocuting a stranger.
  • Results: participants showed signs of stress when eliciting the shocks but still followed through. All participants shocked up to 300V after hearing the learner scream.65% of participants shocked to the maximum of 450V.
  • Conclusion: Milgram disproved the dispositional factor.

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