Importance of Situational Factors

Milgram's studies of obedience to authority (1974)

• Aim: The aim of this study was to observe how far would people go in obeying instructions if it involved other people to get hurt. He got the idea after Eichman's defense(WWII) that he was simply following instructions when he ordered the deaths of millions of Jews aroused Milgram’s interest.  "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"(S.Milgram,Obedience to Authority,1974)
• Participants
• Who were they? They were males between the age of 20 and 50, whose professions ranged from unskilled to professionals.
• How many were there? There were 40 men.
• How were they selected? They recruited them using newspaper ads, however the add said it was a study of memory.

• Procedure There were three roles; the Experimenter, the Teacher and the Learner. The Experimenter was portrayed by Milgram, the Learner was an actor Mr. Wallace and the Teacher was the participant, however the participant had no idea that the learner was an actor and that it was all staged. The learner was put into a different room and electrodes were put on him. The teacher who is in another room is told to administer a shock if the learner says a wrong answer. The range of the "shocks" was from 15 to 450Volt. The learner did not actually receive any shock, but the teacher had no idea. After the levels were increased the learner started to bang on the door asking them to stop. Most participants asked the experimenter if the should continue, his response was : 1.Please continue, 2.The experiment requires that you continue, 3.It is absolutely essential that you continue, 4.You have no other choice, you must go on. If the learner still wished to stop after these four prods, the experiment was halted. If not the experiment was halted after the learner had received 450Volt shock three times in succession.
  
• Results  The levels of shock that the teacher was willing to deliver was used as a measure of obedience. About 65% of participants continued to the highest voltage. All the participants continued to 300Volts. Milgram did more experiments of this sort, he only altered the situations to see how this effects the obedience.
• Conclusion Ordinary people are more likely to follow orders given to them by an authority. Even if it means killing a human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.
• Limitations It lacks Ecological Validity, and also it broke several ethical principles.
• Strenghts It had a high level of control due to it being conducted in a laboratory, also it shows high experimental realism.

Asch's studies of conformity (1956)

• Aim The aim of this study was to investigate the extend to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform.
• Participants
• Who were they? They were male students from Swarthmore College in the USA
• How many were there? They were 123.
• How were they selected?  I believe that they used a newspaper add, but i cant say for sure.

• Procedure Ash put a participant in a room with four to six confederates (actors). They agreed on their responses before the experiment. Participants were shown a card with line on it, followed by a card with three lines labelled A, B and C. They were asked to say aloud the letter that matched the line on the previous card. The group was seated that way that the "real" participant was the last one to respond. For the first two trials the confederates answer the correct answer, however there were 19 trials in total and the participant gave wrong answers to 12 of them. Asch wanted to see if the real participant would change his answer to satisfy the majority, despite being  it the wrong answer. After the experiment was completed, the real participant was individually interviewed, the participant was explained the real purpose if this experiment. His experiment had also a control condition where there were no confederated, only the real participant. That meant the he answered all 19 trials by himself  without the influence of the group.
• Results  Nearly 75% of the participants went along with the rest of the group at least once. After combining the trails, the results showed that the participants confronted the incorrect group answer approximately 1/3 of the time. 25% of participants never comforted the group.
• Conclusion When they were individually interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did no longer believe their own answers. That they had gone along with the group, because of the fear to be ridiculed or thought peculiar. Few of them also said that they really believed that the groups answers were correct. This experiment showed that people conform for two main reasons: because they want to fir in with the group and because they believe the group is better informed than they are.
• Limitations Its low in ecological validity, the participants were only males
• Strenghts  Provided important insight into how, why and when people conform and the effect of social pressure on behavior.

Zimbardo's Stanford Prison experiment (1971)

• Aim The aim of this study was to investigate how people would conform to the roles of guard and prisoner in a role-playing exercise that simulated prison life. Zimbardo wanted to find out whether the brutality reported among guards in the prisons was due to sadistic personalities of the guards or had more to do with the prison environment.
• The researchers set up a mock prison in the basement of Standford University's psychology building, and then selected 24 undergraduate students to play the roles of both prisoners and guards. The participants were selected from a larger group of 70 volunteers because they had no criminal background, lacked psychological issues and had no major medical conditions. The volunteers agreed to participate for a one- to two-week period in exchange for $15 a day.
• Participants
• Who were they? Male undergraduates.
• How many were there? 24.
• How were they selected? They were selected out of 70 volunteers, because they had no criminal records and lacked psychological issues, also they gad no major medical condition. They agreed to be part of this experiment for one to two weeks and got paid 15dollars a day.

• Procedure For this experiment there was stimulated a prison in the psychology building at Standford, which included three six by nine foot prison cells. Each cell held three prisoners. Other rooms that were across from the cells were utilized for the prison guards and warden. The 24 volunteers were randomly assigned the roles of guards and prisoners. Prisoners were to remain in the stimulated prison for 24hours a day for the duration of the study. Guards were assigned to work in three-man teams for 8-hours shifts. After every shift they were able to return home. Researchers were able to observe the behavior of the prisoners and guards using hidden cameras and microphones in the utility. The "prisoners" were arrested in their homes, this study wanted to be as real as possible. The guards wore khaki uniform, whistles, handcuffs and dark glasses. No physical violence was permitted. The prisoners were treated like any other criminal.
• Here they were treated like every other criminal.  They were fingerprinted, photographed and ‘booked’.  Then they were blindfolded and driven to the psychology department of Stanford University, where Zimbardo had had the basement set out as a prison, with barred doors and windows, bare walls and small cells.  Here the individualization process began.
• Results This experiment resulted in such dimensions that had to end a week earlier. The prisoners began to show extreme stress and anxiety, the guards were becoming abusive towards them. Five of the prisoners began to experience severe problems and had to be released from the study early. This abusive behavior was overlook by Zimbardo, who acted as the prison warden. After it was pointed out to him by his student about the conditions in the stimulated prison and the morality of continuing the experiment. "Only a few people were able to resist the situational temptations to yield to power and dominance while maintaining some semblance of morality and decency; obviously I was not among that noble class," Zimbardo later wrote in his book The Lucifer Effect
• Conclusion  When a person is placed in a position of power, they began to abuse the power and aggressive towards the people with no power at all. The prisoners, who had no power over anything became depressed and passive.
• Limitations
• Strenghts