Contemporary study: Bocchiaro et al. (2012), Disobedience and whistle-blowing. Aim, method, results and conclusions, evaluation, and links to the social area and Milgram.

What this dot point is asking

Bocchiaro et al. (2012) is the contemporary study in the social area for "responses to people in authority", paired with Milgram. You must know its aim, method, results and conclusions, evaluate it, and explain what it adds to the social area and how it compares with Milgram.

The answer

Aim and method

Participants could obey (write the persuasive statement), disobey (refuse) or whistle-blow (alert the research ethics committee using a provided postbox and forms). A separate comparison group of 138 students predicted what they would do.

Results and conclusions

Evaluation

• Ethics. More ethical than Milgram: no physical harm was involved (the harm was a hypothetical future study), participants were debriefed, and the design used a verbal rather than a physical act of harm. Some mild deception and stress remained.
• Internal validity. High control over the standardised scenario supports the conclusion, and the predicted-versus-actual comparison neatly demonstrates that self-report cannot capture real behaviour.
• Ecological validity. The scenario was somewhat artificial (writing a persuasive statement about a fictional study), so generalising to real-world whistle-blowing is limited.
• Generalisability. The sample was Dutch undergraduates (mostly young, educated, and female-skewed), limiting how far findings extend to other ages and cultures, although it broadens Milgram's all-male American sample.

Examples in context

Example 1. What the predicted-actual gap shows. Almost everyone in the comparison group thought they would resist, yet over three-quarters of real participants complied. This gap is powerful evidence that people have an "illusion of moral superiority": we overestimate our own ethical courage. OCR uses this to teach that self-report about hypothetical situations is an unreliable guide to actual behaviour, reinforcing why controlled studies matter.

Example 2. Why whistle-blowing stayed rare despite an easy channel. Bocchiaro deliberately made whistle-blowing simple and safe (a postbox and forms on the spot), yet only about 1 in 10 used it. This suggests the barrier to challenging authority is psychological (the social pressure of the situation), not just practical, which has real implications for designing organisations where staff feel able to report wrongdoing.

Try this

Q1. State the percentage of Bocchiaro's participants who obeyed by writing the statement. [1 mark]

• Cue. About 76.5 per cent.

Q2. Explain one way Bocchiaro et al.'s study was more ethical than Milgram's. [2 marks]

• Cue. No physical harm was involved (the harm was a hypothetical future study), and participants were debriefed, so the risk of psychological damage was lower than in Milgram's shock procedure.

Q3. Explain what the difference between predicted and actual behaviour suggests. [3 marks]

• Cue. People badly overestimate how much they would disobey or whistle-blow; in reality situational pressure produces far more obedience, showing that self-report about hypothetical moral choices is an unreliable guide to real behaviour.