

The experimenter explained that the teacher’s job would be to sit in the control room and to read a list of word pairs to the learner. While the research participant (now the teacher) looked on, the learner was taken into the adjoining shock room and strapped to an electrode that was to deliver the punishment. In fact both papers read teacher, which allowed the confederate to pretend that he had been assigned to be the learner and thus to assure that the actual participant was always the teacher.

They were each given a slip of paper and asked to open it and to indicate what it said. After the participant and the confederate both consented to participate in the study, the researcher explained that one of them would be randomly assigned to be the teacher and the other the learner. The experimenter explained that the goal of the research was to study the effects of punishment on learning. When the research participant arrived at the lab, he or she was introduced to a man who the participant believed was another research participant but who was actually an experimental confederate. Milgram used newspaper ads to recruit men (and in one study, women) from a wide variety of backgrounds to participate in his research. Under Hitler’s direction, the German SS troops oversaw the execution of 6 million Jews as well as other “undesirables,” including political and religious dissidents, homosexuals, mentally and physically disabled people, and prisoners of war. Like his professor Solomon Asch, Milgram’s interest in social influence stemmed in part from his desire to understand how the presence of a powerful person-particularly the German dictator Adolf Hitler who ordered the killing of millions of people during World War II-could produce obedience. He designed a study in which he could observe the extent to which a person who presented himself as an authority would be able to produce obedience, even to the extent of leading people to cause harm to others. The powerful ability of those in authority to control others was demonstrated in a remarkable set of studies performed by Stanley Milgram (1963). Milgram was interested in understanding the factors that lead people to obey the orders given by people in authority. Milgram’s Studies on Obedience to Authority

In short, power refers to the process of social influence itself-those who have power are those who are most able to influence others. Social power can be defined as the ability of a person to create conformity even when the people being influenced may attempt to resist those changes (Fiske, 1993 Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). Bosses have power over their workers, parents have power over their children, and, more generally, we can say that those in authority have power over their subordinates. One of the fundamental aspects of social interaction is that some individuals have more influence than others. Define leadership and explain how effective leaders are determined by the person, the situation, and the person-situation interaction.Compare the different types of power proposed by John French and Bertram Raven and explain how they produce conformity.Describe and interpret the results of Stanley Milgram’s research on obedience to authority.
