Evaluation of the Meeus and Raaijmakers study

It could be argued that the methodology used by Meeus and Raaijmakers was fairly ecologically valid as it was testing a type of obedience which is fairly true to life and also that the study had high experimental validity as since the majority of participants said in follow up questionnaires that they did believe in the set up however the external validity is questionable since this was a laboratory experiments and behaviour may have resulted from the unusual request of being asked to directly insult a stranger. It is possible that in a real life situation where participants did not know they were part of a study then disobedience would have been higher.

The generalisability of Meeus and Raaijmakers (1986) study is questionable as they used a self selected/volunteer sample. This was done in order to replicate Milgram as closely as possible, which as part of their aims, but this means that the sample may well not be representative of the Dutch people. It will only include readers of a specific newspaper and also people who volunteer to take part are likely to be more compliant, obedient, willing and motivated than those who do not volunteer.

The study is strong in that the standardised [procedure means that it could be replicated with ease and thus the reliability could be checked. There are many studies which replicate Milgram’s findings of high obedience in other non-US cultures, including collectivist cultures such as Jordan (Shanab and Yahya, 1977) and this suggests that these findings may well be reliable.

Ethically the study is also highly questionable since the majority of participants said they did not enjoy delivering the insults and would have preferred not to have done so. This may have caused them some degree of psychological distress. Also the study deceived the participants and generally speaking this should be avoided. However, this was necessary to preserve the integrity of the findings and was dealt with through the debriefing. However, the lack of informed consent, deception and distress caused suggest that this study could be seen as unethical. On the other hand considerable debriefing was carried out with the participants.

The findings of this study are particularly useful as they demonstrate that Milgram’s findings are not culture or era bound. They also support his claims about the circumstances that reduce obedience leading to further support for agency theory since when the legitimacy of the authority figure is decreased due to his inability to control the behaviour of the disobedient stooges, obedience decreases.