A Child’s Obedience to Authority: Child Growth and Development and Stanley Milgram.

A Child’s Obedience to Authority:

Child Growth and Development and Stanley Milgram

• Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little

Prince

Basis of the Experiment: Milgram• Stanley Milgram (1933-1983) was a social

psychologist famous particularly for two experiments: the small world expriment at Harvard (famous for the six degrees of seperation idea) and his experiments with obedience to authority at Yale.

• He received a bachelor’s in political science at Queen’s College and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard.

• His experiments on obedience to authority were inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. They were extremely influential and later used to explain the My Lai massacre in 1968. It later inspired similar experiments such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and Asch’s Conformity Experiments.

• After Milgram released the results of his experiments, the American Psychological Association at first held up his application over the many questions about the ethics of the experiment.

• In his own words: “I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not…Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.”

- Stanley Milgram

• The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the subject believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks, but in reality there were no shocks. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level.– Wikipedia

• Milgram polled Yale psychology professors and all believed that only about 1.2% of subjects would use the maximum voltage.

• 65% of subjects did. Only one refused to administer shocks before the 300-volt mark. Later variations on the same study worldwide found similar results. The 61-66% of subjects who administered a supposedly fatal voltage remained constant.

• Example of Milgram’s Experiment:• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjCxY42PO_0

Solomon Asch and Conformity• Solomon Asch (1907 – 1996)• Born in Warsaw, Asch received a

bachelor’s degree from the College of the City of New York in 1928. He received his master’s degree from Columbia University in 1930 and his Ph.D. in 1932 and was a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College for 19 years.

• In the 1950’s he conducted experiments showing that social pressure can make a person say something that is obviously false when confronted with pressure from a group.

• Asch conducted experiments with 123 people, in groups with 4 – 7 confederates The participants were shown a card with a line on it, along with another card with 3 lines on it labeled a, b, and c. The participants were then asked to say which line matched the line on the first card in length. The subject answered last or pen ultimately. For the first two trials, the subject would feel at ease in the experiment, as he and the confederates gave the obvious, correct answer. On the third trial, the confederates started giving the same wrong answer.

• There were 18 trials in total, the confederates answered incorrectly for 12 of them, these 12 were known as the "critical trials". The aim was to see whether the real participant would change his answer and respond in the same way as the confederates, despite it being the wrong answer. Solomon Asch believed that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong, but the results showed that participants conformed to the majority on 36% of the critical trials. 24% of the participants did not conform on any trial. 76% conformed at least once, and 6% conformed every time.

Critical Terms:– Authority - An individual cited or appealed to

as an expert, power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior.

– Obedience - Obedience occurs when you change your opinions, judgments, or actions because someone in a position of authority told you to. The key aspect to note about obedience is that just because you have changed in some way, it does not mean that you now agree with the change.

– Conformity - Adjusting one's behavior or thinking to match those of other people or a group standard.

– Conditioning - A process of behavior modification by which a subject comes to associate a desired behavior with a previously unrelated stimulus. (Example: Driving better when a police officer is driving behind you)

Our Experiment• Children will be told they are taking

part in an experiment on the nature of learning. The two instructors will present an image of authority to the subjects.

• The children will be given a pre-test in order to determine their knowledge prior to the experiment. The questions will be empirical facts with an obvious right or wrong answer.

• The questions the children answer will then be given as a slide show lesson with incorrect answers being given. The instructors will show approval or disapproval depending on the children’s answers, with false answers being presented as true.

Obedience Applied to Children• This experiment is meant to test the

validity of Milgram’s experiments on authority when applied to children. Given that children are used to being subject to authority, whether that of their parents or their teachers, will they cave when presented with wrong-thinking authority? Or will children, less conditioned to obey authority than adults, particularly that of a stranger, reject such an imposition?

• Will the lack of an obvious moral dilemma in the experiment make a difference? Will the presence of other children or the viewing of media supporting a view make a particular difference? Most importantly, will the children view the instructors as authority figures who should be obeyed even when their argument goes obviously contrary to what the child has learned?

2 + 2 = 5

51 States

A

Horse

Variations on Experiment:• Popular media is often given much

credit for children’s behavior. In one variation, the children will view a clip of some media promoting obedience to authority and membership in some group structure prior to participating in the experiment, or will view media that conversely portrays rebellion against authority in a positive light.

• In the other variation, multiple subjects participated in the experiment at once. This altered the experiment from a purely authority-oriented project to one also involving ideas of conformity similar to Solomon Asch’s experiments.

• Examples of clips:• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aYl7N0JPWs

Hypothesis• Children will be more likely than

adults to question authority when it conflicts with a previously-held view of theirs due to a lack of conditioning for social obedience. The younger the children, the more likely they will be to disagree with false data. The presence of other children will make some more likely to challenge the instructors and others less likely. Either way, they will be more likely to go along with what the majority of the group appears to do. The media will make a significant difference in results depending on which clip is shown to the subject(s).

Results

• There was little prior research we could find on obedience to authority as applied to children, particularly to a child-teacher relationship. As such we had little but Milgram’s data and our own research on education psychologists like Piaget to help us formulate a hypothesis.

• Of the 8 children who took the test, who ranged in age from 8-13, who all came from middle-class backgrounds, none ever agreed with the instructors on any of the questions. Though several, particularly younger children, admitted to not knowing answers, none changed answers from the pre-test to conform to the instructors’ authority except for a few instances when the instructor pressed them on their answers.

Subjects• Nearly all of the children who

participated in the experiment, when questioned by the instructors on their “false” answers, replied that the instructors’ answers were, to quote one child, “ridiculous”. Other notable replies for the 1st question included: “You’re wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong. How does it equal 5?”, “If you take two Candies and two candies you have four.” and “I’m positive that it’s 4. Everyone’s always taught me that. You’re a bad teacher.”

0102030405060708090

100

1st Q 2nd Q 3rd Q 4th Q

8 YO (1)

10 YO (1)

11 YO (2)

12 YO (3)

13 YO (1)

• Rather than judge compliance, like Milgram, we used 100 as a rating of absolute non-compliance. The only exceptions were the 8 year-old child who did not know there were 50 United States of America and who gave in to the instructors who answered that 2 + 2 = 5 “because you said it was.” None of the variations produced different results.

Analysis• The children probably did not view the

instructors as viable authority figures and hence did not obey them when confronted with obviously untrue “facts”. Still, the fact that so many children were automatically resistant to authority shows that children, if anything have been conditioned not to obey authority but to question it. Whether the variations with media and conformity could have helped support this idea if given a larger cross-section of subjects is unknown. Any proposed media (and therefore cultural influence) still influences the children whether it is a direct part of the test or not.

"I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals."

-Stanley Milgram