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Milgram's research on obedience - A03 ONLY
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Describe and evaluate Milgram’s research into obedience (16 Marks)A03:
One problem with Milgram’s research is that it is androcentric, this is because the research was
mainly focused and produced by male participants. Due to only using male participants, obedience
was generalised to women as well and assumed that women would obey in the same way as men
but that isn’t necessarily the case. Also, as well as using only male participants they were all from
America making the results culture biased. The research was conducted in an individualistic culture
of the US so by generalising findings to collectivist cultures it creates an imposed etic. In order to
solve this Milgram should have stated that his results only apply to the male American population.
Milgram’s research seems at first to have low ecological validity due to being conducted in a lab.
However, it has since been argued to have good ecological validity because it relates to real life
situation as Milgram argued that the lab-based relationship between the experimenter and
participant reflects wider real life authority relationships. Research by Hofling et al (1966) supports
this argument, he found that 21/22 nurses on a hospital ward as part of a field experiment obeyed
unjustified demands by a doctor. This does support the fact that Milgram’s study did have ecological
validity because obedience in Milgram’s lab to authority was shown in real life.
A strength of Milgram’s research is that replications have supported his research findings. A French
documentary showed contestants in a reality TV game show being paid to give electric shocks (fake)
when ordered by a presenter to other participants, 80% gave a maximum of 450 volts to an
apparently unconscious man. This suggests that this was a replica about obedience to authority like
Milgram’s study. This is a strength because it gives further support to Milgram’s research as his
findings of obedience to authority were similar and reliable.
One problem of Milgram’s research is that he used deception towards his participants. This was
because participants were made to believe that the research was about a memory game and the fact
that the electric shocks used in the study were not actually real despite participants thinking they
were shocking the other participant. The deception would be the cost in this research, however
there were benefits such as the fact we thought only 3% of people were to not carry along but
instead over 60% did and we would not have known about that without this research being done.
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