Understanding and Applying Research Design

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EXPERIMENTS

Probably the most notorious example of a scientific experiment is Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment. A social psychologist at Yale in the 1950s and 1960s, Milgram wanted to design an experiment to help him explain the horrors of Nazi Germany. He wondered what would influence people to obey authority to the degree that they could willingly allow and/or participate in the extermination of millions of other human beings. Milgram designed his study to test how far an individual would go in obeying an authority figure when the results of this obedience could hurt another person.

Milgram’s experimental design was set up as a learning and memory exercise. Each subject was joined in the experiment by a confederate, a person who is in on the experimental design but pretends to be another subject. In the experiment, both men (confederate and subject) came to Milgram’s lab and “randomly” drew a piece of paper out of a hat. While both pieces of paper had the word “Teacher” written on them, the confederate (a middle-aged accountant) pretended that he received a piece of paper labeled “Learner.” The three men (experimenter, subject/Teacher, and confederate/Learner) then walked into a separate room where they saw a chair attached to electrodes. The experimenter explained that the Learner would be strapped to the chair while the Teacher, in another room, would read word pairs aloud over an intercom to the Learner. If the Learner answered incorrectly to the word cues, the Teacher ...