Evaluation of the Milgram Obedience Studies

A major criticism of Milgram’s study was his unrepresentative sample. Milgram chose to study only American men (thus he was deliberately ethnocentric), but from a variety of backgrounds and different ages. It could be argued that by using men this produced a sample that was biased, or did not reflect the general population. The study was also limited to those people who read the advertisement and were prepared to participate in a laboratory experiment. These men who replied may have been somehow different from the general population.

Because of such an unrepresentative sample the results cannot be generalised to all people. Despite this, Milgram concluded that ‘obedience to authority is not a feature of German culture but a seemingly universal feature of human behaviour’. A number of cross-cultural replications of Milgram’s experiment have been done (e.g. Italy and Australia) gaining similar results.

Another main criticism of Milgram’s experiment was that it was not ecologically valid. It can be argued that Milgram’s work was carried out in an artificial setting and has little relevance to the real world. However, less artificial studies have been carried out gaining similar results. For example in Hofling’s study (1966), nurses were asked to give potentially lethal injections to patients, and 21 out of 22 appeared prepared to do it. A further study was carried out by Sheridan and King (1972), where people were asked to give real electric shocks to a puppy. The participants obeyed even though they could see the distress of the animal.

A main strength of Milgram’s experiment was the amount of control he was able to administer. For example, participants believed they were being randomly assigned to either the teacher or learner, they believed they were actually administering electric shocks, they all used the same apparatus, had the same prods from the same person and so on.

A further strength of this study is that it collected both quantitative and qualitative data which it can be argued increases the validity of the study. Quantitative data included the level of shocks administered and qualitative data was provided through interviews and observation.