Describe and evaluate research into obedience.

Obedience is following the orders of an authority figure and has been the subject of much research. Milgram (1963) wanted to look at how so many people were capable of doing horrible things to other people during WW2. He took 40 male volunteers for a "Punishment and Learning" experiment where they were told they would be randomly assigned to teacher or student. In actual fact they were all assigned to "teacher" whilst a confederate was the "student". The student was to learn word pairs and for every wrong answer they were to be given a shock by the teacher which increased by 15V each time, until 450V. The confederate was to start complaining of a heart problem, followed by banging on the wall, and then silence. 65% of participants continued to 450V compared to the predicted >1% when told by the experimenter that it was necessary that they continued the experiment.This study has received many criticisms since it was published. One of them being that the study was only conducted on 40 males from one area of the USA and so lacks population validity. However, the participants were recruited from a variety of different backgrounds to be representative of the target population and it has since been replicated on different groups of people, with similar results. Another criticism has been aimed at the ecological validity of the study, in that the research setting and artificial nature of the task means that the study is lacking in ecological validity. Field studies such as Bickman's (1974) showed that 92% of people obeyed a request to lend another person money for a parking metre when the researcher was in uniform, and 42% still obeyed when they were in plain clothes. This indicates that the high levels of obedience shown were not due to the setting and can be generalised to the real world. A final criticism is that the study is highly unethical as it misleads the participants and several showed signs of extreme distress. This study is a good example of when it is necessary to mislead participants because if they knew the real aim of the study they may change their behaviour, reducing the validity of the study. This change in behaviour is called demand characteristics. In this study, knowing the real aim may have lead the participants to stop when they first protest as the authority figure would not hold as much influence because the participants would know it is a test of obedience.