if an authority figure like a scientist gave you an order to kill someone would you do it or if not killed directly do an action you thought would likely cause serious harm and just perhaps kill them what then well of course most of us would like to think that we would resist and refuse the order in fact while Milgram first suggested a study to test exactly this scenario most of the psychologists at the time argued only a few perent of likely psychotic people would actually Bay what Milgram found totally shocked the psychological Community with 65% of participants willing to give a potentially deadly electric shock to what they thought was another participant all on the orders of a scientist so in this video we'll discuss the power of an authority figure milgram's research and some ways mgrm altered his study to show how the legitimacy and power of an authority figure can be varied the psych boost app now has three features flash cards multiple choice quizzes and see if you can work out the key term from it definition with the key term tester try paper one for free right now and Patron supporters can watch psych boost videos ad free learn from over 17 hours of exclusive exam tutorial videos and access hundreds of digital and printable resources including my Maps quiz sheets worksheets teaching slides and more mrim study obedience to Authority we have a lot to cover in this video and it makes sense to start with Stanley milgram's original obedience experiment back in the 1960s mgrm was interested in why ordinary German people had followed the orders from native leadership in carrying out horrific crimes against humanity including the Holocaust why did they not rebel against these orders some people thought there was just something unique about the Germans perhaps they just had particularly obedient personalities mgram disagreed he thought most of us would be highly obedient if put in the right situation to test this Theory and the limit of obedience Milgram designed an experiment and placed an advertisement in the newspaper looking for participants of course this advertisement didn't say it was for a study on obedience as that would have given away the aim instead asked for participants for a study on memory when the participants arrived they thought of course they were about to take part in a memory study they met what they thought was a scientist dressed in a lab coat and another participant these people are what we call Confederates actors aware of the true nature of the study and playing along to a set role and script the real participant and the Confederate participant were assigned the role of learner or teacher this looked random but actually was fixed so the real participant was always given the role of teacher and the Confederate the role of learner the participant then watched the learner get strapped into a chair and have electrodes placed on them then the partis was taken to a second room and shown a device with switches the switches were labeled from 15 volts to 450 volts and a set of labels ranging from slight shock to Danger severe shock and finally XXX the participant was given a simple task ask the learner questions and whenever the learner got the question wrong shock them starting with the lowest level of shock and then moving up the line of switches to the highest shock level of course these were not real electric shocks but it was important that the participant thought they were so as the participant delivered the electric shocks for the wrong responses the participant would hear the Learner in the other room cry out in pain incorrect you'll now get a shark of 75 Vols soft hair he kind of did some yelling in there continue please incorrect you'll now get a shock of 105 volts hard head just how far can you go on this thing as far as it's necessary what do you mean as far as is necessary to complete the test I sure don't know the effect of this thing and I'm a little skeptical about electricity the experiment requires that you go on teacher please continue even at one point shouting out that he had a heart condition incorrect 150 volts sad face that's all get me out of here I told you I had hard trouble I aren't starting the bothering now get me out of here please my stting to B I refuse to go in and let me out after 300 vaults the shouting would stop with the obvious implication that the learner was unconscious or potentially dead if the participant asked the scientist who's responsible the scientist would say as the scientist he was responsible for the experiment Something's Happened to that man in that you better check in on him sir he won't answer me or nothing please continue go on please you accept all responsibility the responsibility is mine correct please go on gold dollar necklace Moon paint answer please are you all right 405 volts the answer is Moon an AC hard if the participant refused to continue then the scientist would try to convince the learner to continue giving the following scripted prompts please continue the experiment requires that you continue it's absolutely essential that you continue and finally you have no other choice you must go on answer is woman 450 volts that's it now continue using the last switch on the board please the 450 switch for each wrong answer continue please I not got no answer please continue the next word is white you think you should look in on them please not once we've started the experiment what if something's happened to man had an attack or something that the experiment requires that we continue go on please don't don't the man's health mean anything whether the learner likes it or not we must but he might be dead in there I mean some people can't take the shock sir I don't have to be rude but I mean I think you should look in on them all you got to do is look at the door I don't get no answer no noise something I think is happened to the gentleman in that that we must continue go on please you're going to keep giving them what 450 bolts every shot now that's correct continue the next word is white white if the participant could resist all four of these verbal prompts and continue to ask to end the experiment then the experiment was over so how many people continued to the full 450 volts well the answer is a frankly shocking 65% of participants and 100% of participants continued up to 300 volts now this may seem like the participants were heartless monsters but when we look at the original footage of the participants many of them showed signs of stress but the majority gave into the power of the authority figure explanations for obedience now we know the results of milgram's experiment we can start to ask how this setup works and why do people obey such extreme orders well one suggestion by Milgram is participants are in what is known as an agentic state in an agentic State people carry out the orders of an authority figure without feeling guilt personal responsibility or even thinking carefully about the consequences of those orders this is because they feel the authority figure who gave the order is the one responsible for the actions there's an opposite state to the agentic state and it's called the autonomous state and we're in the state most of the time feeling responsible for the actions we choose to do and acting according to our own moral rules but when an authority figure appears and gives an order we experience an agentic shift moving from an automous state to an agentic State legitimacy of authority we recognize if someone has legitimate Authority due to socialization as we grow up we learn which members of society we should respect and Obey such as parents teachers and police and who we shouldn't obey this process teaches us the social hierarchy of our society we learn to recognize the positions of different people including ourselves within it we recognize that those people above us in the social hierarchy as having legitimacy of authority but not those below us legitimacy of authority is often displayed and increased by the use of uniforms these act as visible symbols of authority so you can think of the uniforms worn by the police the Army and even doctors the setting is also essential to an authority figures legitimacy of authority you may obey the orders of a teacher when in school but not if you see them later in the supermarket situational variables affecting obedience in the years after his original experiment mgrm altered his experimental setup to test the limits of obedience and in this section we need to explain how we altered fre situational variables proximity location and uniform proximity is the distance between two things one way MGM varied proximity was to increase the distance between the participant and the authority figure instead of being in the same room to give instructions in this VAR iation the authority figure gave instructions through the telephone mgrm found that obedience dropped from 65% down to 21% so what's happening here why are people less obedient when they're further away from the authority figure well mgram explains this as participants no longer being in the agentic state and instead returning to a more autonomous state in the location variation of mgm's experiment he moved the study from Yale University to a rundown office block this led to reduction obedience down to 47.5% at the rundown office we can explain this drop in obedience Yale is a high status University and this status increased the scientist's legitimacy of authority by making them seem more genuine mgrm altered the variable of uniform the research in the gray lab coat received a phone call made an excuse to leave and was replaced by another Confederate dressed in regular clothes when this plain clothed Confederate attempted to give orders The Obedience rate dropped to 20% this finding suggests uniforms are a visible symbol of authority increasing the legitimacy of the authority of the person in the uniform evaluating explanations for obedience now you may need to evaluate explanations for obedience or mgm's research we can use some of the same points here but keep in mind the focus of the evaluation needs to be on whatever question we're answering so if you're asked to evaluate explanations for obedience you've likely realized that mg's original study and variations can be used to support both the idea of legitimacy Authority and the identic state I will re-explain them but they're written out here as an evaluation the research support by mgrm for the agentic state and legitimacy Authority has been criticized for methodological flaws firstly I doubt you've ever experienced something similar to what mgm's participants had to do using a shock generator lacks mundane realism it's a task that's not realistic compared to everyday tasks the environment was also not typical for most people so the study lacks ecological validity most people do obey but it's in places that they're familiar like work or school the task was so strange and extreme it's also been argued that the participants figured out they were not actually shocking anyone and simply acted to the band characteristics this means they guessed what mgr's aims were and act accordingly another issue is the gender bias of mgr's work his original experiments use entirely male samples it maybe his findings are not generalizable to women we could also use as kind of a free evaluation because we need to know anyway that there's a counter dispositional explanation for obedience suggested by adoro this suggests not all people are capable of going through in gtic shift displaying extreme obedience if they're in the presence of a legitimate Authority in the right situation but instead adoro argues as people with an authoritarian personality that are capable of extreme obedience I'm going to say a lot more about this in the last part of this video evaluating mgrm and variations there are certainly positive points we can make about the methodology of the milg experiment his use of standardized procedures led to a high level control and those clear instructions meant that he and other researchers could do it again and see if they got the same results and the results found in mri's experiments have been shown to be reliable both AC cross countries and time periods I'll put a link in the comments to a faithful replication of mgrm completed recently that I show to my own students of course we can reuse the range of methodological criticisms of mgrm that we've just talked through just be conscious of how you're wording it mgram is as you might have expected heavily criticized for his studies being unethical and he pretty much broke every r on the book his participants suffered emotional distress it was difficult for them to withdraw they were deceived about the type of study they were taking part in however you could argue that these decisions were necessary for mgrm to conduct his research and from a cost-benefit perspective any harm that came to his participants was worth it due to the impact of his studies I've given a wide range of methodological evaluations don't feel you need to list all of these in an exam you could decide to go into one or two in more depth however I wanted to cover the methological issues as I do have three other studies that support MGM and add more context to each point I wouldn't usually use so many extra studies but I do think they're all very interesting so you might want to hear about them but you might not necessarily want to memorize them all in huffling study 22 real nurses were called by an unfamiliar voice claiming to be Dr Smith Dr Smith ordered the nurses to give twice the daily dose of an unfamiliar drug to a patient an obviously dangerous order unknown to the nurse it was actually a perceiver it was against the hospital's policy for the nurses to give medicine unless the order was written down by a doctor but despite this 21 out of the 22 nurses complied with this order suggesting even in a situation with more ecological validity and a task with Munday realism people are highly obedient to those they feel have legitimacy of authority interestingly it also suggests legitimacy of the location a hospital setting is more important than proximity because of course the order was delivered over the tel phone so this is an evaluation you can use if you're comparing the situational variables the next study was by bman it was a field experiment conducted on the streets of New York passes by were approached by an experiment this experiment wore either a guard uniform a milkman's uniform or no uniform the experimenter gave one of three orders pick up a paper bag pay for a parking meter or stand on the opposite side of a bus stop bikman found people were significantly more likely to obey the experiment when he was dressed as the guard uniform than when he's dressed as a Milkman or no uniform this was as high as 89% obedience in the parking mut condition when dressed in the guard uniform compared to 33% when in no uniform this study supports mgm's theory that certain uniforms are a visible symbol of authority increasing legitimacy of the authority of the person in the uniform finally we have a somewhat disturbing study by Sheridan and King one of the issues in Milam study was demand characteristics well in order to avoid that possibility in this study participants using a similar devices in the milgrim study delivered real electric shocks to a very real puppy by electrifying the floor of the puppy's cage now the shocks were not deadly but they were painful and made the puppy run Yelp and howl and the puppy showed more pain the higher the voltage of the Shar so the participants had no doubt that the shocks are real and many of the participants showed distress even to the point of crying another aspect of this study is the study included both males and females you may want to pause a here and guess who was more likely to shock the puppy the male or the female participants well 54% of the male participants Shu the puppy to the end but 100% every single one of the 13 female participants shook the puppy to the maximum level you may find that surprising I certainly did and actually so did the researchers who for the women may be more naturally nurturing so less obedient dispositional explanation for obedience the authoritarian personality like MGM Theodor oono also want to explain the reason for the extreme obedience shown by the Nazis who committed the Holocaust his theory however was very different to mgram instead of all of us if put in the right situation being vulnerable to the power and authority figure Adon know claimed certain people obey because they're particularly vulnerable to authority figures and this is due to their disposition in other words their personality a set of internal traits he called an a authoritarian personality Adon who argued people formed an authoritarian personality early in life this was due to a harsh upbringing with physical punishments and using Freud's ideas the anger these people felt towards their parents was displaced away from authority figures and towards weaker targets usually minority groups someone with an authoritarian personality has excessive respect for people they see as having a higher Social Status in them making them obedient they are actively hostile to people they see as at a lowest social stat to them they have fixed stereotypes about groups of people often scapegoating society's problems onto minority groups these people are conformists with conventional beliefs and behaviors their views especially when about morality are dogmatic meaning a very clear set of ideas about what is right or wrong in the 1950s adoro created the f scale to study authoritarian personality the F in the f scale stands for fascism this questionnaire includes 30 questions those scoring highly had fixed stereotypes identified with strong people disliked weak people and were inflexible about ideas of right and wrong I provided a link in the comments to the original FS scale questionnaire you may want to have a go it yourself some of the language is strange as it's over 70 years old now and the questions refer to events current that time I still think it's worth completing there are nine factors at the f scale measures two of them are authoritarian submission this is having an uncritical attitude toward towards authorities question one's a good example of this participants will be asked how much they agree with the statement obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children to learn another factor is power and toughness this is about a preoccupation with the relationship between dominance and submission and how much people identify with power figures question 20 is another good example people can be divided into two distinct classes the weak and the strong just a quick note if you get a question in this area it's likely to ask you how the authoritarian personality explains obedience try to focus on obedience don't spend too much time on the f scale the authoritarian personality evaluations we can use this evaluation again this time as a positive milgram's finding that a significant proportion 35% resisted the authority figure can't be explained by situational factors alone it is a essential that you continue the experiment know it isn't essential I wonder you had no other choice teacher oh I have L Choice my number one choice is that I wouldn't go on if I thought he was being hard as each participant had precisely the same experience adorno's Theory argues instead that willingness to obey an authority figure is dispositional it can vary from person to person which may explain why there are extreme individual variations in mgm's participants mgrm was interested in why there was variation as participants and in support of the previous Point Elms of mgrm gave the es scale to 40 previous milgrim stud participants this included 20 obedient males who had given the highest level of Shar and 20 toight males who refused to continue before the 450 volt shock it was found that obedient males scored significantly higher on the f scale suggesting they had more far tear in person personalities additional findings include that they also tend to dehumanize or hold more negative attitudes towards the learner and see the experimenter as someone knowledgeable and trustworthy a problem with research supporting adon's theory of a link between an abusive childhood the development of authoritarian personality and obedience is this link can only be studied using correlation as of course you can't conduct a randomized trial with some children receiving an abusive childhood there may be other factors involved such as poverty or class however alternate situational explanations of obedience such as a gentic state and legitimacy of aity are backed up by significant experimental research we've discussed a range of experimental research by milgrim bickman huffling and others that show when plac in the right situation the majority of people have the capacity to be highly obedient the idea of the authoritarian personality as an exibition of obedience is supported by research that uses the f scale however there are criticisms of the questionnaire one issue is acquiescence bias people tend to agree to questions the f scale was written in a way that agreeing to all of the questions would artificially inflate their score on the authoritarian scale leading to an accurate measurement also adorner was a leftwing thinker and some questions are argued to be biased against people with a right-wing political view finally using the authoritarian personality as an explation for obedience is overly simplistic and can lead to stereotyping where complex historical events such as the horrors of World War II are simplified into personality flaws of the people involved this approach risks reducing the accountability of social structures and leaders it also ignores how societal Norms peer pressure or legal force can lead people with non-authoritarian personalities they feel they need to participate in widespread social obedience I want to thank everyone over on patreon for supporting the channel because of you I've been able to teach part-time I can make S boost on YouTube for everyone and a special thank you to azy Taylor for supporting at the developer level I do have extra resources that are exclusive to my patrons so if you do decide to sign up you can grab those over my website these include over a 100 exam question tutorial videos of course including questions on the social influence unit I hope this was helpful and I will see you in the next psych Boost video