Burgers 2009 Replication of the Milgram Experiment Essay

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Stanley Milgram’s groundbreaking psychological experiments on obedience remain famous not just because of what they revealed about human behavior, but also because of how they drew attention to the need for more robust ethical codes in psychological research. Burger (2009) replicates Milgram’s most famous obedience studies in “Replicating Milgram,” tweaking the methodology to ensure ethical treatment of research participants. Therefore, the Burger (2009) experiment uses slightly different experimental approaches. Experimental approaches “have long been a mainstay of the natural science disciplines,” and the “value and applicability of these approaches is relatively new to research examining the psychological, political, and economic dimensions of human life online,” (Oxford Internet Institute, 2017, p. 1). No non-experimental approaches were used in the original Milgram or the Burger (2009) studies.

The Milgram experiments were so groundbreaking as to lead to new theory development in behavioral and social psychology. Milgram worked with the hypothesis that obedience is a factor of authority; people are more likely to obey orders “when that person’s authority is seen as legitimate,” (Burger, 2009, p. 3). In other words, the researchers predicted that the legitimacy of authority determines obedience. Obedience, the dependent variable, was operationalized quantitatively—via measuring the response to the order to deliver an electronic pulse. However, Burger (2009) claims that the primary dependent variable is not obedience itself but “the point in the procedure at which the participant refused to continue,” (p. 1).

Burger (2009) notes that experimenter characteristics may have played a major role in the original Milgram study precisely because an experimenter is viewed as someone with legitimate authority. In fact, the participants might have believed that their obedience would reflect on their performance and behaved accordingly in the study—what is known as demand characteristics. Because many participants would have been familiar with the Milgram study in 2009, the demand characteristics would have been doubly as problematic for Berger. For this reason, Berger (2009) implemented a screening test that eliminated participants with too much familiarity with the original experiment—something that Miller (2009) claims to be inefficient and unnecessary (p. 23). Miller (2009) also criticizes the Burger (2009) study on account of its overly reducing the perceived harm, which impacts the validity and reliability of the results.

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Nevertheless, the Burger (2009) study as accurately and ethically as possible recreates the experimental conditions of the original Milgram obedience experiments, using similar independent and dependent variables, changing mainly how they are measured and defined. The primary difference with Burger’s (2009) study is that it attempts to conduct a more ethical experiment while still yielding usable, meaningful results. Independent variables in both the original and the Berger (2009) replications included variations in the experimenter’s behavior and verbalizations. Berger (2009) also notes that situational constraints and situational variables may impact subject responses and performance. Dispositional empathy and desire to control or motivation to control events were the subject variables that Berger (2009) mentions, but not Milgram. Instructional variables were also at play, particularly in the different ways Milgram and Berger would have provided instructions and in Berger’s case too, informed consent. Unlike the original Milgram study, Burger (2009) also informed the participants that they were free to leave at any time and could still retain their incentive pay.

Neither the original Milgram experiments nor the Berger (2009) replications used true random selection of participants. In Berger’s (2009) case, participants self-selected by responding to an advertisement. However, both the original and the Berger (2009) experiment did rely on random assignment to bolster reliability and validity. Both the original and the Berger (2009) replications involved between-subjects designs. One of the noted problems with the Milgram original experiments was obtrusive approaches, which Berger (2009) does not significantly attempt to correct for in his modernized, updated version of the obedience experiments. In fact, the role of the experimenter is integral to the research design, as the experimenter is positioned as an authority figure. As Miller (2009) points out, previous attempts to replicate the Milgram experiments substantially changed the research design by artificially attempting to improve internal validity. For example, some researchers introduced “mediated violence” instead of the more direct violence being assessed in the original experiment (p. 22). Burger (2009) avoids using….....

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