3 The Influence of Other People on Attitudes and Behaviour

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Obedience to Authority Experiment See Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (Harper and Row, 1974) Stanley Milgram was a professor of

Psychology at Yale University in New Haven Connecticut.

He placed advertisements in local newspapers in New Haven to recruit volunteers for an experiment on ‘learning and memory’

The Background

Two people at a time are asked to take part in the experiment

An experimenter dressed like a scientist was present throughout the exercise

One is designated ‘Teacher’ and the other ‘Learner’ They are told that the experiment is designed to test

the effects of punishment on learning They were set a paired-association learning task

Paired Association Learning Task The teacher read a series of word pairs to the

learner, eg Blue box Nice day Wild duck etc Then in the testing sequence the teacher would

read: Blue: sky, ink, box, lamp The learner then had to indicate which of the four

terms had originally been paired with the word ‘Blue’

The Setup

The learner is strapped into a chair and has an electrode attached to his wrist

There were different setups but in one the teacher sits in front of a control panel next to the learner and reads out the word pairs while recording the responses

If the learner makes a mistake in pairing the words, then the teacher administers an electric shock

The shock starts at 15 volts and is increased each time an error is recorded by 15 volts

The Control Panel

The Role of the Experimenter

Since the learner was more and more distressed each time he received an electric shock, and the teacher would often turn to the experimenter for advice

The experimenter would respond with a series of ‘prods’ Prod 1 ‘Please continue’ Prod 2 ‘The experiment requires that you continue’ Prod 3 ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue’ Prod 4 ‘You have no other choice, you must go on’ The prods were used in sequence, so if prod 1 was

unsuccessful, the experimenter would use prod 2 and so on. If the teacher refused to comply after prod 4, the experiment was terminated.

Experimental Treatments

Treatment 1: The learner is in a different room from the teacher where he cannot be seen and his voice cannot be heard – the learner’s answers flash up on a screen

Treatment 2: The same as Treatment 1, except voice protests were included

Treatment 3: The same as Treatment 2 except the learner was placed in the same room as the teacher

Treatment 4: The same as Treatment 3 except the teacher was asked to force the learner’s hand on to a ‘shock plate’ to receive the electric shock

The True Purpose of the Experiment The aim was to find out how far the teacher

would go in administering shocks to the learner before abandoning the experiment

With this setup the teacher could abandon the experiment before stage one – refusing to administer any shocks at all – or he could continue up to stage 30, supposedly 450 volts or XXX on the control panel

How Far Would You Go?

How far would people go?

Different Groups of individuals were invited to a lecture at Yale on ‘Obedience to Authority’ and the set up of the experiment was described to them

They were then asked how far they thought they would go in administering shocks if they were participants in the experiment

The three groups were psychiatrists, college students and middle-class adults

The Learner’s response

The learner was in fact an actor paid to follow a script and actually received no electric shocks at all

He gave a predetermined set of responses to the word-pair tests, based on a schedule of approximately three wrong answers to one correct answer

When shocked below 75 volts the learner would not protest From 75 volts to 90 volts he would grunt At 120 volts the learner would shout at the experimenter, saying

that the shocks were getting painful At 150 volts the learner would shout out ‘Get me out of here! At 300 volts he would refuse to cooperate with the teacher At 315 volts he would scream loudly and still refuse to cooperate At 330 volts he fell silent

How Far Did People Actually Go?

How did the ‘Teachers’ feel about the experiment?

Conclusions

Individuals are inclined to obey authority, even when it means doing something they intensely dislike

The same type of influence can exist between peers – ‘significant others’. So it is not just confined to people in authority

It even exists in a weaker form between strangers – we are influenced by other people