David Likely writes on 31 Mar 99,:
> Fellow TIPSpersons -
>
> This is a little off-the-cuff, but somebody (maybe everybody!)
> in social psych knows the answer, and I don't.
>
> I was just drafting a web version of George's Miller's "one-
> is-a-bun" mnemonic image demo. It has worked extremely
> well for me (in the 'live' version) for many years. I began to
> wonder if maybe it hadn't worked _too_ well -- perhaps
> my students are responding to the "demand characteristics"
> of the demo (Orne's idea, I think) or they are showing a
> sort of (undramatic version of) Milgram's "obedience to
> authority." I then began to wonder if the Milgram effect
> might not, indeed, be an Orne effect -- that is, if some
> participants were "playing the game" of helping Milgram
> demonstrate what they thought he wanted to find. I
> don't have the Milgram paper(s) here at home, but I did
> peek at some secondary accounts -- Hock's "Forty
> studies..." and a few Intro books. I see descriptions of
> "obedient subjects" and of "defiant subjects," but I see
> not a word about "skeptical subjects." Did no participant
> at all suspect a hoax? Did they really think psychologists
> could do what it seemed Milgram wanted them to do?
> I do wonder, really, if some of the sheep, and maybe
> some of the goats, too, wern't "playing the game" --
> not saying so being part of the game itself. (This being
> what Orne suggested, although it was "hypnotic effects"
> that he was concerned to debunk.
>
> What say you?
I believe that what Orne showed was that hypnotized and unhypnotized
participants act more similarly than we would think. Without an
unhypnotized control group, no one would have thought that an
unhypnotized person would have agreed to throw acid on someone.
What Orne showed was that persons who were told to act as if
hypnotized did the same things as the hypnotized individuals. I don't
believe he was saying, however, that the participants didn't believe it
was actually acid.
To say that Milgram's participants were just responding to demand
characteristics is true but it does not mean that their responses were
not genuine. I believe that obedience to authority is a very strong
demand characteristic but that doesn't invalidate Milgram's work nor
does it mean that Milgram's participants saw through the ruse. Milgram
points to the extreme emotional disturbance of many of his "teachers"
to show that they thought it was real. No one nonchalantly proceeded
to increase shock levels without repeatedly getting Milgram's approval.
The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology (1985) by Arthur S. Reber, lists
two definitions for demand characteristic. "1) Those features of an
experimental setting that bias the subject to behave in particular ways,
that invite from the subject a particular interpretation of the study and
recruit particular kinds of behaviors. When used in this fashion the term
refers to confounding features in a study that contaminate the results. .
. . 2) More generally, the qualities of a particular experimental setting
that simply, by their nature, invite certain kinds of behaviors." Many IVs
would fit the #2 definition but I do not believe that the demand
characteristics of Milgram's study were a contaminating factor, I believe
they were the focus of the study. One person's variable of interest is
another person's confound and there may be cases in which an
experimenter would subtly influence a participant to respond in a
certain way but I think it was exactly this concept of demand or
obedience that was being studied by Milgram.
Rick
Dr. Rick Froman
Psychology Department
Box 3055
John Brown University
Siloam Springs, AR 72761
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.jbu.edu/sbs/psych
Office: (501)524-7295
Fax: (501)524-9548
"The plural of anecdote is not data."
- Roger Brinner, Economist, Data Resources International
