Milgram’s obedience studies are amongst the most famous in all of psychology and taught to all psychology students. But if you think you know all about them, chances are that a new film from shortcuts tv, Beyond Milgram, will get you thinking again. When Professors Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher asked samples of psychology students […]
Read moreSome of you may be familiar with the MacDonald’s incident of 2005 where a hoax caller masqueraded as a policeman and delivered orders over the phone. Astonishingly he was obeyed despite the extreme nature of his instructions (read about the event here ). I recently gave a talk in London including this event in my talk […]
Read moreMany of you will be familiar with the excellent BBC radio series called Mind Changers which has included programmes on Milgram, Piaget, Ainsworth, Bartlett, Kohlberg, Zimbardo, Harlow, Asch. Some of these are currently available as podcasts here or you can go to PsychBLOG where Jamie has downloaded some and there are also some available on Spokenword (free subscription […]
Read moreJust found this excellent set of ‘Mind Bites’ – funky little poster style summaries of psychological research. Excellent I think for lessons on hypothesis formulation and testing. There’s also a brilliant photo archive here , containing hundreds of images of old psychological research equipment. (Including Milgram’s fake shock machine ). I love all this stuff…. maybe it’s a bloke thing, […]
Read moreAn Australian radio programme has recently broadcast a programme (11 October 2008) which went in search of some of the original subjects and interviewed them. There is an option which allows you to download it too! Here’s the link . There are also audio clips from the original experiment. Quite fascinating. You can also read interviews […]
Read moreIt’s not that I am obsessed with Milgram (see my previous posts); his work just seems to attract a lot of attention – and now a US research team has conducted a replication of the original experiment!. Jerry Burger and his colleagues felt that since this classic study is so often used to explain human […]
Read moreSince Stanley Milgram first published his classic study on obedience an enormous number of people have offered comments and reinterpretations of his work. Perhaps the most recent come from Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher (famous for their adaptation of Zimbardo’s prison study). Haslam and Reicher suggest that there are several problems with the concept of the agentic shift. For example, […]
Read moreIn April 2004 the manageress of a McDonalds restaurant in the US received a phone call from a man claiming to be a police officer, ‘Officer Scott’, telling her that one of her employees had been accused of stealing a purse. He said the girl could be searched at the store or taken to jail […]
Read moreA clip from the classic obedience studies conducted by Stanley Milgram. If you haven’t studied this experiment already on your psychology course, you can pretty much guarantee that you will at some point. The studies are controversial because of ethical concerns: Did Milgram do enough to look after his participants? The conventional argument is no, he did […]
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