Milgram Experiment

1. Deception-Milgram did not tell the participants that the "learner" was an actor and that they were not really shocking anyone. Milgram later stated "illusion is used when necessary in order to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at-truths"(McLeod, S.A. (2007). The Milgram Experiment. Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html)

1.1. Deception

2. Protection of Participants-Participants were under significant amounts of stress because they believed that they were harming a person. The article written on his study describes the acts that the participants were going through. "Signs of tension included trembling, sweating, stuttering, laughing nervously, biting lips and fingernails. Three participants had uncontrollable seizures, and many pleaded to be allowed to stop the experiment"(McLeod, S.A. (2007). The Milgram Experiment. Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html)

2.1. Ethical Issues

3. Ethical Issues

3.1. Ethical Issues

4. Procedure- Volunteers were recruited, participants were 40 males, aged between 20 & 50 whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. They were paid to show up. Introduced to fellow participant (milgram). They drew straws to determine roles learner or teacher. It was fixed so the confederate always ended to the learner. Two rooms in the Yale Laboratory were used. The learner had an electric chair and the teacher had an electric shock generator. The learner was strapped to a chair with electrodes. He learned the list of word pairs given to him an the teacher tests him by naming a word and asking the learn to recall a pair from a list of 4 choices. The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake increasing the level of shock each time. 30 switches on the shock generator ranged from 15 volts to 450 volts. When the teacher refused to administer a shock the experimenter was to give a series of prods to ensure they continued. (McLeod, S.A. (2007). The Milgram Experiment, Retrieved from http://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html)

4.1. Procedure

5. Validity of the study

5.1. The study lacks ecological validity. Participants would not normally shock a person because they got an answer wrong.

5.2. The study also lacks cross-cultural validity. Milgram only used male participants between the ages of 20 and 50 years old. Their jobs were anything from unskilled to professional. This leaves out females, and this was only advertised in America, so someone can logically assume that only Americans were participants. Therefore, this leaves out other ethnicity.

6. Conclusion

6.1. The findings conclude that people are going to follow orders that are given to them by authority. This is in bedded in our behavior as we grow.

7. Reliability of the Study

7.1. The study is reliable. Milgram completed eighteen more variations of this one study. This study is reliable because it is simple to replicate and the study findings would come out close to the same as this study.

8. Target Population/Sample - The target population for this experiment was truly supposed to be Germans, however, Milgram conducted this experiment using forty American males ages 20 - 50 from all skill groups and social classes

9. Milgram conducted this experiment because he wanted to know if the millions of Germans that took part in the Holocaust were innocent because they were just following orders and they did not really want to commit horrendous crimes against humanity

10. Aim

10.1. The aim of the study was to see if people would obey figures of authority even if it meant harming innocent people.

11. Justification: Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are bought up. The outcome of the situation was people regularly tend to obey order from other people who they recognize as an overhead authority figure. Milgram came to the conclusion that Authority is learned depending on the situation.

11.1. th

12. Finidngs

12.1. The experiment concluded that 65% of the participants shocked the learner at 450 volts. The other participants left the study at 300 volts.