Stanley Milgram's Experiment On Obedience

You are responsible for setting up a replication of Milgram’s experiment on obedience. What would you change and why?

The concept of obedience can be determined by a type of behaviour or social influence of which is subsequent to a perceived authority figures order. In terms of aims and context Stanley Milgram’s (1963) objective was to observe direct social influence to unjust authority. Primarily Milgram’s aim was to create research to support Solomon Asch’s (1955) study of opinions and social pressure, however alternatively he wished to direct his studies toward making his research more humanly significant due to the fact that the results of Asch’s (1955) tests of conformity were difficult to generalise to real world situations (Hock, 2005).

Milgram’s experiment was centred on the concept of the authoritarian personality of which was historically relevant to an early 1940’s German society and more specifically ‘The Germans are different Hypothesis’ (Adorno et al, 1950). Aldorno proposed that we can explain authoritarian personality in terms of an idiographic view point and thus in this instance the totalitarian figure is only prevalent due to society perceiving it in that way. This is a concept which also translates to Milgram’s study, as he aimed to test this hypothesis in terms of dispositional factors. However within Milgram’s experiment the authority figure /experimenter can also be seen as an extraneous variable, with many critics arguing that the extreme levels of obedience are purely due to demand characteristics. (Orne and Holland, 1968) Argued that the participants did not truly believe that the experimental situation was real, thus only acted in a way of which the experimenter suggested. Thus we are lead to believe that we are not truly witnessing the effects of the independent variable (orders from the authority figure) on the dependent variable (maximum voltage administered), and so a consequence the results may be invalid. Consequently I believe that a ‘Double Blind’ method would be well applied to this research, meaning

(Baumrind, 1964) criticised Milgram on the terms of which his experiment caused unjust psychological damage to his participants, however it could be argued that the benefits of understanding a behaviour such as obedience outweighs the costs of ethical issues . However Berscheid et al (1973) used a role playing paradigm to determine whether potential participants would provide informed consent to participate within Milgram’s experiment subsequent to being given different levels of information concerning the procedures of the experiment, and found that most participants were willing to participate after only being given the cover story. Thus supporting that any remaining ethical issues were due to the nature of the unexpected results (Milgram,1963) . An alternative way to tackle ethical issues could be to introduce a two-step screening process, for example individuals whom had been treated for mental illnesses previously would not be used within the experiment. It may be argued that the sample may not be truly representative however more importantly unnecessary psychological damage with be kept to a