compare and contrast milgrams behavioural study of obedience with zimbardos study of compliance
2007-01-01 08:01:43 · 4 answers · asked by Anonymous in Social Science ➔ Psychology
You what?
Not even 10 points will tempt me to help you out on homework i'm afraid ... not on New Year's Day anyway :-)
2007-01-01 08:10:23 · answer #1 · answered by Part Time Cynic 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Well, the comparisons are easier: look at things like the level of shock in Milgram increasing with distance (highest with separate rooms, lowest if the participants had to put the hand on the shocking plate) and the Stanford Prison Project's use of numbers, sunglasses, uniforms and stocking caps. It's the dehumanization element that they have in common, so try looking up dehumanization in your texts.
Here's the main difference: In Milgram's experiments, the participant was the one doing the shocking; in Zimbardo's study, the guards and the prisoners were randomly selected and were all test subjects. So, look at the guards and prisoner's behaviors. Milgram was focused on post-Holocaust obedience (what variables make people do horrible things) while Zimbardo looked at the behaviors of the guards and prisoners.
2007-01-01 08:48:42 · answer #2 · answered by Angry Daisy 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I'm not going to do your work for you but to get you started.
Think about organising the experiments into:
Aim
Volunteers
Procedure
Predictions
Results
With Zimbardo think about these questions:
What does Zimbardo's study teach us about police procedures?
What are the effects of living with no windows or clocks?
Why were prisoners dressed in smocks with no underwear and given stocking caps and ID numbers?
Why did guards wear mirrored sunglasses?
What instructions were the guards given?
How much had the prisoners given informed consent to?
What sort of punishments did the guards give to the prisoners?
How did guards deal with an initial rebellion?
As you know Milgram was fiercely criticised for his work.
His results upset people - this may have been because they felt uncomfortable with what it showed about ordinary Americans. Maybe if they had not been so shocking (excuse the pun!) people would not have given Milgram’s work a second thought, perhaps the unpalatable findings made people seek to discredit the procedures.
Milgram’s work on obedience was attacked on ethical grounds, saying he deceived people and caused unreasonable distress. Volunteers often showed extreme stress – sweating, trembling, stammering, even having uncontrollable fits.
The APA decided that Milgram’s work was ethically acceptable.
On practical grounds, people argued that demand characteristics created the high rates of obedience. It was a highly artificial setting and in a prestigious location, but even when Milgram moved the experiment to a downtown location, obedience rates were still alarmingly high.
However, Zimbardo defended Milgram and has said his work is “the most generalizable in all of social science… dozens of systematic replications with a 1000 subjects from as diverse backgrounds as possible….”
2007-01-01 08:22:42 · answer #3 · answered by themessiah2257 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Which Milgram are you talking about ?
2007-01-01 09:49:02 · answer #4 · answered by Scotty 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋