Evaluate Milgram's(1963) research on obediece (12)

Milgram's (1963) electric shock experiment aimed to investigate whether people commit atrocities due to obedience to an authority figure or simply because they were evil. He used a volunteer sample of 40 male students from Stanford university recruited via a newspaper advert and paid them $4 for their participation in what he explained was a 'memory experiment'. His sample was both androcentric and ethnocentric, making the results harder to generalise to the wider population. Participants were also deceived through being told it was a memory experiment rather than a study in to obedience, which also means that they weren't given informed consent. Deception and informed consent are both ethical issues that Milgram didn't consider in his experiment.
In Milgram's experiment, the participant played the role of the 'teacher' while a confederate played the role of the 'learner'. The teacher gave the learner an electric shock every time they gave a wrong word-association to a cue word. The shocks progressively increased in 15v increments up to 450v. This was because it is easier to get somebody to commit to an action if it starts small and progressively builds up than asking someone to give another person a 450v shock straight away. The experimenter would give the teacher verbal prods such as 'it is essential that you continue' whenever they displayed any hesitation to giving a shock. Arguably, this blurred the ethical issue of having the right to withdraw from a study because the experimenter was pushing the teacher to finish the experiment. In addition to this, the teacher experienced signs of physical distress such as trembling and sweating hands, showing that Milgram also disregarded the ethical issue of protecting his participants from harm. The experiment was a laboratory experiment with a standardised procedure. This ensured that the results had high reliability but however had low ecological validity due to the contrived setting.