Social approach: Milgram (obedience)

Psychology AS · The core studies. The idea in plain words, the rules to remember, the mistake to avoid and a worked example, written and checked by Mega Lecture.

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The idea

Milgram (1963) studied obedience: doing what an authority figure tells you to do. He wanted to know how far ordinary people would go when ordered to hurt another person. This fits the social approach, because behaviour is shaped by the presence and instructions of others.

Forty men came to a laboratory at Yale University. Each was the 'teacher' and gave what he believed were electric shocks to a 'learner', who was really a confederate. No shocks were real. An experimenter in a grey coat used four fixed prods to keep the teacher going.

Most obeyed fully, although they showed great stress. Milgram concluded that the situation, not an unusual personality, produces obedience.

Rules to remember

Aim: to find out how far people would obey an order to give increasingly strong shocks to another person.
Sample: 40 men aged 20 to 50 from the New Haven area, volunteers who answered a newspaper advertisement or a mailed invitation.
Shock generator: 30 switches from 15 volts to 450 volts, going up in 15 volt steps. Obedience was measured as the highest shock given.
No voice-feedback in this version: the learner pounded on the wall at 300 volts and then stopped answering.
Results: all 40 went to at least 300 volts; 26 of 40 (65%) went to 450 volts. Signs of stress included sweating, trembling, nervous laughter and three seizures.
Dispositional hypothesis: obedience comes from personality. Situational hypothesis: most people obey in that situation. The results support the situational one.
Ethics: deception, psychological harm and pressure against the right to withdraw; participants were debriefed afterwards.

Common mistake

Students often say that 65% of participants went to 300 volts. In fact all 40 (100%) reached 300 volts, and 65% (26 men) carried on to the 450 volt maximum.

Worked example

In Milgram (1963), 26 of the 40 participants gave the maximum shock. What percentage stopped before 450 volts, and what does the overall result suggest about the dispositional hypothesis?

Number who stopped early = 40 − 26 = 14.
Percentage = 14 ÷ 40 × 100 = 35%.
So 65% obeyed fully, and these were ordinary men with a range of jobs, not people chosen for a cruel personality.
If most ordinary people obey, personality alone cannot explain obedience.

Answer: 35% stopped before 450 volts. The high obedience of ordinary people goes against the dispositional hypothesis and supports the situational hypothesis.

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