Obedience as investigated by Milgram, including the baseline procedure and findings, and the situational variables affecting obedience: proximity, location and uniform.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to describe Milgram's baseline obedience study and explain how proximity, location and uniform change obedience levels, with evaluation. The exam skill is to know the baseline figures, to give the figure and reason for each variable, and to evaluate the study's ethics and validity.

The baseline study

Milgram (1963) recruited 40 American men to act as teachers, ordered by an experimenter in a grey lab coat to deliver shocks (15-450 volts) to a learner (a confederate) for wrong answers.

The baseline study was prompted by Milgram's wish to understand how ordinary people could have carried out atrocities in the Holocaust. Participants believed they were giving real, increasingly dangerous shocks to a learner, and were kept obeying by four standardised verbal prods (for example "the experiment requires that you continue" and "you have no other choice, you must go on"). The striking result was that 65% continued to the maximum 450 volts and all of them reached at least 300 volts, even though many were visibly distressed, sweating, trembling and protesting, yet did not stop. This showed that obedience to a perceived authority can override personal conscience to a degree that surprised the psychiatrists Milgram had asked to predict the outcome (they had predicted almost no one would go to the maximum).

Situational variables and evaluation

• Proximity: when teacher and learner were in the same room, obedience fell to 40%; when the teacher had to force the learner's hand onto a plate, it fell to 30%.
• Location: moving from prestigious Yale University to a run-down office lowered obedience to 47.5%.
• Uniform: when the experimenter was replaced by an "ordinary member of the public" in everyday clothes, obedience dropped to 20%.

The variations reveal why people obey. Reducing proximity to the victim's suffering (or increasing it, by forcing the hand onto the plate) changes obedience because closer proximity makes the consequences of the action harder to ignore and reduces the ability to deny responsibility. Lowering the prestige of the location reduces the perceived legitimacy of the authority, so obedience falls. Removing the experimenter's uniform (the lab coat) removes a powerful symbol of legitimate authority, producing the largest drop, to 20%. Evaluation centres on ethics and validity. Ethically, the study used deception (participants thought the shocks were real) and caused severe psychological distress, and the right to withdraw was undermined by the verbal prods. On validity, Orne and Holland argued participants may not have believed the shocks were real (low internal validity), although Milgram's own data and Sheridan and King's study using real shocks to a puppy suggest the obedience was genuine. A strength is the high control of the variables and the replicability, and cross-cultural replications have produced broadly similar results, supporting the situational explanation.