Social Influence Overheads - 2004 - PART 3

Obedience - changes in behavior produced 

by commands of an authority

Background to Milgram Studies

• -Stanley Milgram was interested in why people in Nazi Germany followed immoral orders: was it something about the people or something about the social dynamics with which they were confronted?

• -Worked with Asch as a graduate student but wanted to examine social influence situations that were more consequential

Basic Procedure

• -Participant takes part in a study ostensibly on the effects of punishment on learning
• -Participant believes he/she is administering electric shocks to another participant (actually a confederate) for incorrect answers on a memory test
• -Each incorrect answer must be punished with a successively higher level of shock

• -Goal of the study is to determine how high participants will go in shocking the learner

Factors Affecting Obedience Examined by Milgram:

• -Proximity of Victim

- Remote with no voice feedback 65%

- Remote with voice feedback 63%

- Same Room 40%

- Touch 30%

• -Characteristics of Authority

- Proximity of Authority (phone) 21%

- Prestige of Institution (unknown) 48%

- Prestige of Authority (ordinary) 20%

- Conflicting Authority Figures 0%

- Learner Demanding Shock 0%

• -Group versus Individual

- Peer Administers Shock 93%

- Group Members Rebel 10%

• -Participant Characteristics

- Women 65%

Additional Issues in the Milgram Paradigm:

• -How good are people at predicting levels of obedience in the Milgram paradigm?

• -some variability in results but people generally underestimate obedience levels (estimates about 11%)

• -Are there sex differences in obedience?



• -Milgram found no differences
• -8 of 9 subsequent experiments replicated this effect

• -Have obedience rates changed over time?



• -no evidence that obedience levels in later studies were lower (most recent study was 1985)

• -Obedience levels in other cultures



• -hard to directly compare studies because of confounds
• -Italy 85%
• -South Africa 88%
• -West Germany 85%
• -Australia 28%
• -Jordan 63% & 73%
• -Spain 50%
• -Austria 80%

Criticims of Milgram Experiments:

• -Methodological

- subjects did not believe they were doing harm

- subjects had no choice

- escalation of shock not realistic

- subjects had no responsibility for actions

• -Ethical

- no informed consent

- extreme trauma for subjects

- subjects were told they could not leave

Assessing the Significance of the Milgram Studies:

• -Milgram (1974): "What have I learned from my investigations? First that the conflict between conscience and authority is not wholly a philosophical or moral issue. Many of the subjects felt, at the philosophical level of values, that they ought not to go on, but they were unable to translate this conviction into action...It may be that we are puppets-puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation."

• -Milgram (1979): "I would say on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town."

• -Studies cited in virtually every major introductory text of psychology and social psychology



• -Cited in a wide range of disciplines including business, military psychology, economics, holocaust studies, philosophy, and law



• -Remain the definitive set of studies on obedience processes



• -One of the most powerful demonstrations of the ability of laboratory experiments to capture powerful social dynamics in controlled settings



• -Influenced development of more thorough ethical screening procedures for psychological research

Overview The Stanford Prison Experiment:

• -Conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971
• -Simulated prison environment by randomly assigning people to guard and prisoner roles
• -Participants signed an informed consent form in which they were informed that some civil rights would be violated
• -Study cleared ethics review board
• -Over the course of several days, guards demonstrated increasingly aggressive behaviors and prisoners began to show signs of severe distress
• -Experiment was intended to last 14 days but was stopped after 6 days

Goals of the Prison Experiment:

• -To examine the impact of deindividuation and dehumanization processes in a highly isolated environments
• -To examine the ability of the social situation to overcome individual dispositions in the absence of direct face-to-face imposition of authority

Zimbardo's Conclusions:

• -Situations can exert powerful influences over people that can cause them to behave in ways that they would not predict

• -Situational power is most salient in novel settings in which people can not call upon previous guidelines
• -Situational power involves ambiguity of role boundaries and institutionalized/authoritative permission to behave in prescribed ways
• -Role playing can sometimes have a realistic impact on actors

• -Good people can be induced to perform anti-social behaviours when placed in highly isolated environments
• -Controlled experiments can be created to capture essential features of real-world psychological processes
• -Prisons are really bad places!!!

October, 2004