Research Methods for Management

Seminar 4: The Milgram Experiments

School of Business & Management

 Q&A about Literature Review

Key principles in research ethics

Overview
Milgram Experiments

Q&A about assessment

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Any Questions about
Literature Review?

Reference
Management –
Endnote, Mendeley,
Zotero, etc.

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 Key principles in research ethics
Protection of research
participants
1. Ensuring that no harm comes
to participants
2. Respecting the dignity of
research participants
3. Ensuring the fully informed
consent of research
participants
4. Protecting the privacy of
research participants
5. Ensuring the confidentiality of
research data
6. Protecting the anonymity of
individuals or organisations
Protection of the integrity of
the research community
7. Avoiding deception about
the nature of the research
8. Declaration of affiliations,
funding sources and
conflicts of interest
9. Honesty and transparency in
communicating about the
research
10.Avoidance of any
misleading or false reporting
of research findings
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Milgram Experiments: The perils of obedience
Contextual Background
• World War II Nuremberg War Criminal trials
• Defense offered: obedience – that they were just following orders
from their superiors.
• Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ thesis: senior Nazis in Germany
were obedient bureaucrats acting under orders.
• Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University (1961), was
interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into
committing atrocities, for example, Germans in WWII.

Research Question: What can explain the willingness

of ‘ordinary people to engage in acts of cruelty when
ordered or asked to do so?

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Milgram Experiments: The perils of obedience

Theoretical Grounding: Agency Theory

• Individual behaviour: Autonomous state and Agentic state

• Conditions for the agentic state:

 The person giving the orders is perceived as being
qualified to direct other people’s behaviour. That is, they
are seen as legitimate.
 The person being ordered about is able to believe that the
authority will accept responsibility for what happens.

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Milgram Experiments
Methodology

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 Milgram Experiments
Results & Conclusion
Results
• 65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to the
highest level of 450 volts.
• All the participants continued to 300 volts.
• Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations
of his study. All he did was alter the situation (IV) to see how this
affected obedience (DV).
Conclusion
• People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their
authority as morally right and/or legally based. This response to
legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, for example in
the family, school, and workplace.

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 Questions for Discussion
1. What issues of interpretation and meaning do the
experiments, and the subsequent attempts to repeat them,
raise?
- Do you agree with Haslam’s reinterpretation of
Milgram’s findings? (i.e. ‘obedience’ v. ‘engaged
followership’)?
2. What are the methodological issues? How much can we
learn from laboratory-based experiments on human
behaviour?
3. What do the experiment and the related controversies
suggest about how the social sciences develop?
4. What ethical issues do the experiments raise?

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 Videos and Readings

Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment: Summary, Results, & Ethics

Video: The Psychology of Tyranny: Did Milgram Get It Wrong?

(18 min)

Video: ABC Channel's Milgram Experiment remake (27 min)

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 Q & A / Assessment
• Please read assessment and submission
guidelines provided on QMplus.

• Questions about the seminar, drafting your

assignment, etc.

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Thank you ….

Office hours: Monday, 1 – 2 pm

Any queries or schedule meeting via: m.afzal@qmul.ac.uk

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