obedience.. ie milgrams study
The situational/contextual account of Milgram’s study (1963) says that obedience is due to someone’s surroundings, not their personality, and argues that obedience in such situations may be synthesised in a lab. Milgram’s study seeked to show that maybe we are all capable of terrible actions (e.g. when the Germans killed shedloads of people in the war) under the right circumstances.
Milgram’s study involved advertising for participants to take part in a ‘memory’ experiment and paying them $4 an hour for their time. The participants were given the role of ‘teacher’ who was required to ‘punish’ the ‘learner’ for every incorrect answer that learner gave. The punishment was a supposed electrical shock which increased with every wrong answer. There is a lot more interesting detail to be read about this bit but I suggest you look it up yourself. There’s no shortage of interesting detail in sociology and psychology textbooks. (NB// the ‘learners’ where only actors and not really getting shocked)
Milgram predicted that the majority if ‘teachers’ would stop shocking the ‘learner’ well before the maximum voltage which would have been lethal had it really been administered. Yet 65% of ‘teachers’ obeyed the experimenter and continued to the highest shock level. Therefore, people would obey a malevolent authority even when it collided with a moral prohibition of hurting and even killing others. This reflected the power of social influence on obedience.
The social explanation for this obedience is that as children, we learn to act as agents of authorities. Obeying these authorities is our moral imperative. Thus, we become used to having other people in authoritative positions, telling us what to do.
As a result, if what we are doing for this authority goes against our morals, we locate responsibility for our actions in that authority, not ourselves. This is because by obeying, we are not acting on our own initiative.
Obedience increased to 93% in Milgram’s studies when the responsibility for actually flicking the switch that supposedly administered the electrical shock was removed. That is, when direct responsibility was removed, obedience was increased.