PSYC203: Week 11

History and Social Psychology: the

importance (and near impossibility!) of
knowing what actually happened
Week 11 – Lecture 1
Dr Chris Walton
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Welcome to PSYC203
• Lectures - Mondays 1-2pm in Faraday LT and Wednesdays
9-10 am in Faraday LT

• Online Q&A - Fridays 4pm – Access via the link on the

Moodle page

• Seminars - weeks 12-17 – check your timetables – do the

preparation, attend and engage (talk!)
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WEEK LECTURES SEMINARS

History of Social Psychology (CW)
11
Social Psychology of Emotions (CW)
12 Applying social
Social Identity and Self Categorisation (ML) psychology to everyday
13 life: Part 1
14 Prosocial Behaviour (ML) Applying social
psychology to everyday
15 Coursework Guidance (CW) life: Part 2

16 Social Beliefs & Judgements (CW) Evaluating an article

Evaluating an argument
Crowd behaviour (ML)
17

18 Prejudice and Intergroup Contact (ML)

19 Social Representations and Discursive Social

Psychology (CW)
20 Course overview and exam preparation
(CW/ML)
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Welcome to PSYC203
Assessments
• Coursework (50%)
Critically assess the relevance of social psychology to events
relating to the Black Lives Matter movement from one of
the following two perspectives:
• Intergroup Relations
• Collective Behaviour
Deadline: Friday 17th March by 12 noon (week 19)

• Term 3 Exam (50%) Short answer questions

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Aims of this week’s lectures

• To establish the relevance and value of history to social
psychology and vice versa
• To establish the value of historical and archival analyses in
determining the value of psychological theories and knowledge
• To say something about the various levels of analysis and
methods employed in social psychology
• To do all this with reference to one ‘exemplary’ study and its
legacy
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What is social psychology?

“social psychology is the scientific attempt to explain how the

thoughts, feelings and behaviors of individuals are influenced
by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human
beings” (Allport, 1954, p.5)
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Obedience to authority (OTA)

“Milgram’s obedience experiment is
the single greatest contribution to
human knowledge ever made by the
field of social psychology, perhaps
psychology in general”
Muzafer Sherif, 1975, cited in
Takooshian, 2000, p.13))
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OTA: an enduring legacy

Milgram, S. (1963) Behavioral study of obedience. The Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378
8309 citations, Google Scholar
As of March 2014, “Obedience to Authority” (1974)
6000 citations, Google Scholar.
Milgram’s 1965 film of the studies “Obedience” has been watched in
various forms over 2 million times on YouTube (Perry, 2015)
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OTA: an enduring legacy

Special issues of American Psychologist (2009), The Psychologist
(2011), Theoretical and Applied Ethics (2013), The Journal of Social
Issues (2014), Theory and Psychology (2015) have been dedicated to
discussion of the OTA studies.
The studies have been dramatised in two films and inspired other film
and television work.
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OTA: the standard view (PYSC101 2014-15)

• Stanley Milgram, like many people, was troubled over the Nazi war criminal
defense “I was just following orders.” He designed a landmark experiment to
determine how often ordinary people will obey an authority figure, even if it
means hurting another person.

• His experiment consisted of 40 men from the local community recruited to

participate in a psychology experiment, supposedly on the effects of
punishment on learning. The men were given the role of “teacher” in the
experiment, while a confederate was given the role of “learner.”

• The teacher was seated before an apparatus that had 30 switches ranging from
15 to 450 volts, with labels of slight shock, danger: severe shock, etc. Although
the apparatus looked and sounded real, it was fake.
The learner was never shocked.

• Milgram found that 65% of the men administered all 30 levels of the shock,
even though they displayed considerable distress at shocking the learner.
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OTA: the “standard” view

Griggs & Whitehead (2015a, 2015b)

Analysed coverage of Milgram in 10 recent (post-2012) US introductory social

psychology text books
On average 7.4 pages devoted to coverage of the OTA studies
None included coverage of recent (post 2011) criticisms (e.g., Nicholson, 2011,
Perry, 2013), or any of the other recent reinterpretations of what was
happening in the OTA experiments (e.g., Burger et al (2011); Reicher et al, 2012,
Gibson, 2013).
Instead, what they provide is what Stam et al (1998) termed the “standard”
view of the OTA studies.
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OTA: the “standard” view

“The obedience research is no longer a case study of the importance of
obedience to authority but an important promoter of the importance and
necessity of experimental social psychological research. [] Within the discipline,
Milgram is valorized for his contributions but the recurring appearance of
discussions of methodology and ethics indicate that in order to valorize
Milgram’s studies social psychologists must continuously engage in damage
control. It is this combined valorization/defensiveness that we take to be the
standard view of the obedience experiments.” (Stam et al, 1998, pp.162-163)

E.g., “What we need, though, are not simply ethical solutions. We need to
rediscover the vision, ambition and epic sense of scale that Milgram embodied.
We need to go back to that heroic era of great field studies where researchers
were able to manipulate whole social worlds.” (Reicher & Haslam, 2011, pp.
652)
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OTA: The “standard” view

Exp.1 Exp.2 Exp.3 Exp.4 Exp. 5

Proximity Remote Voice- Proximity Touch- New baseline

condition Feedback Proximity (voice – heart)

Number of 40 40 40 40 40
subjects

% obedient 65.0 62.5 40.0 30.0 65.0

subjects

Results from Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper & Row. pp.35
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OTA: The “standard” view

Exp.7 Exp.8 Exp.10 Exp.12 Exp. 13

Condition Experimenter Women Bridgeport Learner Ordinary

absent Office demands man gives
to be orders
shocked
Number of 40 40 40 20 20
subjects

% obedient 20.5 65.0 47.5 0.0 20.0

subjects

Results from Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper & Row. pp. 60-
61 & 94
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History and Social Psychology

Gergen (1973) argued “that social psychology is primarily an historical inquiry”
(p.310).
The topics of and forms of knowledge developed in social psychology are
responsive to historical and cultural change.
1920-40s – globalisation, immigration, political upheaval, rise of fascism – focus on social
attitudes and prejudice
1950-60s – post WWII – social influence, intergroup relations, obedience to authority
1960-70s – social unrest, civil rights, continued gender inequality – continued focus on racism,
aggression and sexism (feminist research)
1980s to present – immigration, multiculturalism, social and economic inequality and
exclusion, sustainability
Also, that social psychological knowledge has the potential to impact on social
behaviour, e.g., “models of social conformity sensitize one to factors that might
lead him into socially deplorable actions. In effect, knowledge insulates against
the future efficacy of these same factors.” (p.311)
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History and Social Psychology: The OTA studies

Adolf Eichmann and Hannah Arendt’s “The banality of evil”.
Obersturmbannfuhrer in the SS.
Headed the department of Jewish affairs and
evacuation.
Recording secretary at the Wansee
Conference, at which the Final Solution to the
Jewish question was agreed.
Organised the transportation of over 6 million
Jews to the death camps.
Escaped to Argentina, captured in 1960 and
taken to Israel.
Tried, found guilty of crimes against humanity
and sentenced to death. Hanged on June 1st
1962.
Hannah Arendt coined the phrase ‘the banality
of evil’ to describe Eichmann.
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Milgram’s interpretation of the OTA experiments

Milgram advanced a situationalist account for the OTA findings.

This contrasts with the more individualist, personality-based account for those
same historical events e.g., the Authoritarian personality (Adorno et al, 1950).

As Milgram put it “The Nazi extermination of European Jews is the most

extreme instance of immoral acts carried out by thousands of people in the
name of obedience.” (1974, pp.2)

Note: Milgram takes at face value the defence of Nazi’s tried for war crimes
that they were “only following orders”.
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Milgram’s interpretation of the OTA experiments

“the social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often, it is not so
much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds
himself that determines how he will act.” Milgram, 1974, p.205.

This Milgram refined into the concept of the Agentic State:

“From a subjective standpoint, a person is in a state of agency when he

defines himself in a social situation in a manner that renders him open to
regulation by a person of a higher status. In this condition the individual no
longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as
an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others.”
Milgram, 1974, p.134

Entry into and maintenance of the agentic state depends upon:

• Antecedent conditions, e.g., perception of and entry into authority system;
• Binding factors, e.g., sequential nature of task and situational obligations.
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Unethical practices and new interpretations

There are, of course, a host of ‘old’ ethical criticisms beginning with Baumrind
(1964) relating to the threats to the participants dignity, self-esteem and trust
in rational authority (resulting from the use of deception).

New criticisms and reinterpretations have arisen by virtue of the availability of

the Milgram Archive at Yale to social psychologists and historians.
• Examination has revealed misreporting of:
• debriefing “dehoaxing” of participants
• extent of harm done to participants
• number of conditions; 18 in the book, 24 according to the archives

The new interpretations hinge on:

• Non-standard procedures/Improvisation
• Sceptical participants
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Unethical practices
According to Perry (2013), Nicholson (2011) and others, Milgram strategically
misreported the:

• debriefing “dehoaxing” of participants

Approx. 600 participants left the lab believing that they had administered real
shocks, most did not learn otherwise until a year later (Nicholson, 2011; Perry
2013)

• number of conditions; 18 in the book, 24 according to the archives

Milgram chose not to report a number of conditions including a relationship

condition, in which the teacher and learner were known to each other, in which
the disobedience rate was 85%.
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Unethical practices
• the extent of harm done to participants

In response to early criticisms, Milgram minimized the extent of the harm done
to participants, claiming “at no point did they run the risk of injurious effects”
and suggesting that critics should not confuse “momentary excitement” with
“harm” (1964, p.849).

This despite earlier writing “we observed a seizure so violently convulsive that it
was necessary to call a halt to the experiment” (1963, p.371) and reporting the
following statement by an invited observer:
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OTA: Countering the “standard” view

Quick summary:

From archival analysis we know the following:

• Milgram and his researchers did not behave ethically, either in the
debriefing of or in the distress that they caused to their participants

• Milgram did not behave ethically in his reporting of the methodology and
findings of his research

• Milgram’s account of the OTA studies, and the “standard view” that is based
upon it, are partial at best.

• But there are bigger issues with OTA studies, find out what they are in Part
2!