A warm welcome students.
This module is for the second year BA students of psychology of
semester four. The course code is PSC 104 and the course title is social psychology two.
This is a part of your second chapter that is social influence and the name of this module is
obedience to authority. I am Sibyl Fernandes, assistant professor at Carmel College of Arts,
Science and Commerce for Women, Nuvem- Goa. The outline of the lecture is obedience to
authority and obedience in the laboratory. By the end of this module you will be able to
understand why people obey authority figures. You'll also be able to describe Stanley Milgram's
experiment on obedience to authority.
If you have ever been told to do something by someone, which you did not really want to do,
may be this person was an authority figure, like a teacher or a parent. You are already familiar
with one social psychology concept of social influence, which we call as obedience. Obedience
is a concept in which one person directly orders one or more others to behave in specific ways.
It is seen that obedience is less frequent than conformity or compliance. It also occurs in many
settings. It ranges from schools to military bases and so on.
Let us move on further and look at the next topic that is obedience in the laboratory. Do
individuals obey a powerless stranger? This is one very interesting question that Stanley
Milgram wished to find out and because of which he designed an interesting laboratory
experiment. In this particular experiment that he designed, he wanted to find out how a person
would go on inflicting considerable amount of pain on a totally innocent stranger who has done
them no harm. So the design of the experiment is as follows. The experiment consisted of all
males. It was designed to study the effects of punishment on learning. Now, in this experiment,
one person in each pair of participants would serve as a learner, and they both had to perform a
very simple memory task. The other participant that is, the teacher would read out words to the
learner and the teacher was instructed to punish any errors that were made by the learner with
the help of electric shock.
The two people then drew out slips of paper and the drawing was rigged. It was rigged in such a
way that the teacher would always be the participant. This teacher was then told to deliver an
electric shock to the learner if the learner made any error in the task. The teachers were also
instructed to increase the strength of the shock each time the learner made any error. If the
learner made any errors, he would soon be receiving strong jolts of electricity, but in reality, this
information was not true. There were no electric shocks that were given to the learner. The only
real shock that was ever used was a mild pulse that was given to convince the participants that
this equipment that they were using was real. Now during the session as the experiment began,
the learner made many errors and the participants, that is the teacher, soon found themselves
facing a dilemma.
What should we do? Should we continue? Should we stop? But if they ever hesitated at any
point in time, the experimenter of pressured them to continue with the graded series of prods,
some of which are. Please continue, the experiment requires that you continue. It is absolutely
essential that you continue. You have no other choice. By the end of this experiment, the results
were as follows. It was noted that 65% of people showed total obedience. Many participants did
protest and asked for the session to be ended. But when they were ordered to proceed, a
majority of them yielded to the experimenter's influence and they did continue to obey. They
continued doing so even when the victim pounded on the wall and then no longer responded
with the shocks that were given. In the other sense, the teacher thought that they were
delivering shocks to a person who is totally unconscious. The experimenter told participants to
treat failures to answer as errors. Now this particular study, which was conducted by Milgram
was replicated in many different conditions and it was found that the study had similar results.
The pressures to obey in a situation like the one Milgram created are very difficult to resist. The
people do it, even if this means that they have to harm a totally innocent stranger who has done
nothing bad to them. So, what are these pressures? Why do people obey such authority
figures? What are the factors that lie behind? This tendency to obey such authority figures? This
is something that we are going to look at in the next module which speaks about why do people
obey destructive commands? Why do people obey authority figures? With this we come to the
end of this particular module.
Your books for reference are Social Psychology, by Baron. Also you can refer to another book
which by Crisp. Which is called as essentials of social psychology.
Thank you, students.
