Experimenter

Introduction

In film industry, movie that usually involve psychology are usually the typical cases like counselling or criminal psychology.  There is seldom any much movie that talks about conducting research as a researcher in psychology field.  Experimenter  is the movie that talks about the obedience research that conducted by Stanley Milgram.  

Summary

The film is based on the true story of the famous social psychologist Stanley Milgram who had conducted a series of radical behaviour experiments in the University.  The purpose of the experiment is to investigate the willingness of human to obey an authority figure to administer electric shocks to the strangers. The movie are separated into two parts.  In the first half of film, it showed the audience on how Milgram had conducted his experiments and how he meets Sasha, who will become his wife in the later part of the movie. The second parts of the movie portrayed the struggles with the public perceptions about the ethics of the experiments by Milgram.  Fortunately, he pushed through it and move forwards in his life to become a professor in New York City and continue his research in social interactions and social pressure in a more real-life experiment settings.  

Obedience

Not to forget the most known experiment that had done by Milgram will be the obedience experiment.  It is a well-established concept in social psychology that almost appeared in every introductory textbook of psychology.  In this movie, Milgram had concluded that up to all the participants continued to obey the instructions given by the authority up to 300 volts and surprisingly there are 65% of the participants obey the instructions given by the authority in proceed to give the electric shocks up to 450 volts.  It showed that people who are ordinarily like you and I are more likely to obey the orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being.  Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the wall we are brought up since young.  This is because people tends to obey the orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right.  This response to legitimate authority is learned in various situations, such as, family, school and workplace.  

Milgram’s Agency Theory

Milgram explained the behaviour of his participants by suggesting that people actually have two states of behaviour when they are in a social situation:

l The autonomous state - People direct their own of actions and take up the responsibility for causing the results of those actions.

l The agentic state - People allow others to direct their actions and pass off the responsibility for the final outcome to the person who gave the orders.  This situation also known as the participants act as the agent for another person’s will.  

       In short, Milgram suggested two things that must be place in order for a person to enter the agentic state would be the person who are giving order is perceived as someone as being qualified to direct other people’s behaviour where they are seen as legitimate and also the person being ordered believed that the authority will take the responsibility for what had happened.  

Agency theory state that people will obey an authority when they tend to believe the authority will take the responsibility for the consequences for their actions.  As when participants were reminded that they had the responsibility for their action, there are almost none of them continued the experiment, and when the experimenter told the participants that ;he would take responsibility, participants who are refused to go on resume back to experiment and go on with it.

Contrast

Although Milgram’s study found such a significant result in showing the obedience in society.  However, there are a lot of controversial issues that had shown in this study as portrayed in the movie.  Deception, rights to protect participants and right to withdraw are the three main elements that causes the issues in this study.  

Milgram’s study make the participants actually believed that they were shocking a real person.  However, Milgram believes that this deception is necessary in order to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at-truths.  I also tends to believe that this deception is necessary as by disclosing the actual nature of the study may result in inaccuracy of the result.  I believed that as long as the experimenter or researcher did debrief the actual nature of the experiment at the end of the experiment and provide help that are reachable to the participants if they felt depressed and deceit.  In this movie, Milgram also interviewed participants in the post-experiment to find out the effect of the deception.  He concluded that there are majority of participants said that they are glad to be in the experiment and only a few minority said that they wished they had not been involved in it.  

In this study, participants were exposed to extremely stressful situations that may have the potential in causing psychological harm and many of the participants seems to be very distressed in the experiment.  There are many signs of tension included trembling, sweating, stuttering, laughing nervously, biting lips and digging fingernails into palms of hands are being shown in the participants.  However, Milgram argued that these effects were only short term as their stress level decreased when they are debrief.  As mentioned in the paragraph above, I tend to agree on Milgram’s point of view as these it was unavoidable to have these effects during the experiment but by providing sufficient information like counselling service and debriefing statement may help the participants to deal with the psychological distress that they had experienced.  Milgram also conducted a followed up study on the sample of participants a year later and he found that there were no longer any signs of long term psychological harm.  

Another main elements that are controversial in this study is the right to withdraw from the study.  The ethic review board states that experimenter or researcher should make plain explanation of their rights to free to withdraw from the study at any time that they wished.  Although it is seems difficult to practice it in this study as this study was about obedience, however, Milgram state that withdraw are still possible as there are 35% of the participants withdraw from it. I tends to believe that withdrawal from the study are not restricted only during the experiment but also after the experiment.  It is the right of participants in choosing whether are they comfort for the researcher to use the data in analysing the result.  

Dark Side of Human Nature

In this study, there are also participants who are unwilling to accept the truth that they obey the instructions and provide the electric shocks to the another person.  They are unable to accept this fact that they have the evils side in their body after they know the true nature of the study.  I believe that this is commonly found in the people as everyone tends to have the stereotyped about themselves that they are neither an angel or a devil.  However, in this experiment, it proved that they are wrong and mostly of the people continued the experiment although that the high voltage of electric shocks may result in harm to another person.  As a result, participants who are unwilling to accept the truth may start to blame the experimenter and the researcher to avoid any distress.  This situation can be further explained by using Fundamental Attributional Error (FAE).   In this theory, it stated that people tends to make the good judgment on themselves and bad judgment on the opposition.  People may tends to blame on the environment or other people that lead to this consequences.  This is portrayed in the movie when they are some participants blame on Milgram for conducting this study.  Although I believed that they might understand the reason and the situation well, however, it seems to be quite difficult for them to admit it.  

Conclusion

         In a conclusion, the purpose of the study is to investigate on how obedience could work in different factors that can influence in it and how far that obedience can drive people.  It is not the experiment to demonstrate the dark side nature of human beings.  Aside from that, I had came across a short video in promoting stop smoking campaign that talks about the children came to the passerby who are smoking to borrow the lighter to smoke but all the people including teenagers, working adults and parents refused to lend it to the child.  Some of them even explained the consequences of smoking to the child and persuade the child not to smoke.  Surprisingly, it seems like the smoker understand the cons of smoking and did not encourage people in smoking but why are they still continue in smoking despite they know the consequence.  I am always curious on what is the reason behind that keep the smoker in smoking and would also like to know how effective of persuasion is so powerful in helping to sending this message to the public.