Social Science - Sociology Homework help

Milgram odds & ends

If you’ve looked at the Burger and Twenge articles, you’ll have noticed that they are not popularizations but serious academic articles written by and for professionals, and are not easy going. The authors present their information in terms and in an order that students have sometimes found confusing. The following notes are an attempt to head off some of the difficulties that many of your predecessors have had.

The Power of the Situation

Milgram in the short video, Burger, and Twenge all use the phrase “the power of the situation,” a central concept in the field of social psychology, but not used that much in sociology. It refers to the question of which is more important as the cause of our behavior – the situations we find ourselves in, or the individual personality traits we bring to those situations. When Burger writes about “the situation” and Henslin writes about “conformity to norms,” they’re asking us to pay more attention to the social pressures on us than we usually do when we think about our and others’ motives.

Burger’s Cast of Characters

Burger ran his 2006 replication with two different scripts, and Milgram ran his larger, 1961-62 experiment with many more. In Burger’s first version (the “base condition”) there are just three characters: (1) the “ experimenter” who is the “authority figure,” the guy in the white lab coat. By the way, he was a colleague of Milgram’s, not Milgram himself. Milgram was filming everything from behind the two-way mirror. (2) The “ learner” or “ confederate,” who was an actor, and a pretty good one. He did not receive any shocks, but he sure sounded like he did. (3) The “ teacher,” whom Burger usually calls “ the participant.” It was his reaction to the situation that was the real object of the study.

Burger ran a second version of the script, “the modeled refusal condition,” with a fourth character – a second “ teacher,” who was also an actor and confederate, in cahoots with the experimenter and learner (and Burger). The role of the second teacher was to show the participant that it was possible to refuse to continue with the experiment without any consequences.

Independent and Dependent Variables

Burger doesn’t say much about it, but you can look at much of his replication as an experiment with independent and dependent variables (IVs and DVs). His dependent variable is how far a participant would go in shocking the “learner.” He measures this DV in two ways ( operational definition, remember?). First, what is the highest voltage shock a participant “inflicts” on the learner, after which the participant/teacher refuses to go on. The highest “shock” Burger allowed participants to use was 150 volts, at which the “learner” demanded to be let out. If the participant gave the 150-volt shock and then started to ask the next question, implying she or he was ready to use the 165-volt switch, Burger ended the little play and assumed that the participant probably would go all the way to 450. The second measure was Burger’s own invention; Milgram did not use it at all. It was the point at which the participant first hesitated or objected to giving any more shocks, which was also the moment that the “experimenter” gave his “first prod,” the first of his list of increasingly emphatic commands to continue.

Unlike Milgram, Burger asked the questions of what kind of people disobeyed the authority figure and was there any pattern to be found. He looked at six characteristics or traits of each of his “participants,” treating them as independent variables that influenced the dependent variable. He paid particular attention to three of them: sex (Burger calls it “gender”), capacity for empathy, and desire for control (pp. 4-5). His operational definition of empathy was the participant’s score on the “Interpersonal Reactivity Index.” For whether the participant was “laid back” or a “control freak,” he used the “Desirability of Control Scale.” You can check out those measures at the following URLs.

Empathy -- Interpersonal Reactivity Index -- https://www.eckerd.edu/psychology/iri/

Desirability of Control Scale -- https://www.midss.org/content/desirability-control-scale To see this scale, click on “files” at the bottom left

There were three other IVs, equally interesting, but Burger doesn’t say much about them: age, ethnicity, and education attained. He reports his results in just two sentences in the second paragraph on p. 9. I call your attention to them because literally every student who has written this assignment misses the fact that one of them is very important in Twenge’s disagreement with him.

Some Last Notes on Citations

Don’t cite the sources Burger and Twenge cite. For example: if you were paraphrasing an idea from Burger’s first paragraph on p. 4, in which he cites (Bandura, 1999), your citation should be (Burger, 2009, p. 4) with no mention of Bandura at all. If you cite Bandura, it means that you have tracked that article down and read it. Which I doubt you will do. I haven’t.

The dates in citations are the dates of publication, not the date the research was done. Milgram performed his experiments in 1961-62. (Milgram 1963, 1964, 1974) gives the dates he published his articles and book. (Burger 2009) is the date of his article. Burger carried out the replication in 2006 after several years of preparation.