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Participant concerns for the Learner in a Virtual Reality replication of the Milgram obedience study

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Rojano_Do_ate_2018_JEB_Highfield_FinalPubVersion.pdf (754.1Kb)
Date
31/12/2018
Author
Gonzalez-Franco, Mar
Slater, Mel
Birney, Megan E.
Swapp, David
Haslam, S. Alexander
Reicher, Stephen D.
Keywords
BF Psychology
DAS
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Abstract
In Milgram’s seminal obedience studies, participants’ behaviour has traditionally been explained as a demonstration of people’s tendency to enter into an ‘agentic state’ when in the presence of an authority figure: they attend only to the demands of that authority and are insensitive to the plight of their victims. There have been many criticisms of this view, but most rely on either indirect or anecdotal evidence. In this study, participants (n = 40) are taken through a Virtual Reality simulation of the Milgram paradigm. Compared to control participants (n = 20) who are not taken through the simulation, those in the experimental conditions are found to attempt to help the Learner more by putting greater emphasis on the correct word over the incorrect words. We also manipulate the extent to which participants identify with the science of the study and show that high identifiers both give more help, are less stressed, and are more hesitant to press the shock button than low identifiers. We conclude that these findings constitute a refutation of the ‘agentic state’ approach to obedience. Instead, we discuss implications for the alternative approaches such as ‘engaged followership’ which suggests that obedience is a function of relative identification with the science and with the victim in the study. Finally, we discuss the value of Virtual Reality as a technique for investigating hard-to-study psychological phenomena.
Citation
Gonzalez-Franco , M , Slater , M , Birney , M E , Swapp , D , Haslam , S A & Reicher , S D 2018 , ' Participant concerns for the Learner in a Virtual Reality replication of the Milgram obedience study ' , PLoS ONE , vol. 13 , no. 12 , e0209704 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209704
Publication
PLoS ONE
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209704
ISSN
1932-6203
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright: © 2018 Gonzalez-Franco et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Description
The research reported in this paper was supported by Economic and Social Research Council grant ES/L003104/1 ‘Beyond the banality of evil: A new understanding of conformity and atrocity’ to SR, https://esrc.ukri.org.
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/16792

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