Edexcel Psychology for A Level Year 2: Student Book

Chapter 1 Issues and debates Practice questions, answers and feedback 28 On this spread we look at some typical student answers to questions. The comments provided indicate what is good and bad in each answer. Learning how to produce effective question answers is a SKILL. Read pages 6–15 for guidance. Question 1: Assess how psychological understanding of either obedience or prejudice has changed over time. (20) Ella’s answer First Milgram (1963) did his study and then developed his theory in 1974. It was a development because it is the way science works, from observations to explanations. This shows that the understanding of obedience has increased. The initial observation was his study showing people are obedient to authority figures. He had an authentic-looking shock apparatus and fooled participants into believing a confederate was another participant they were giving electric shocks to. He did this by asking them to draw straws so it seemed like they were the teacher by chance. Then they saw the learner being strapped to a chair and received a convincing 45 V shock. Milgram measured obedience by how far up the shock generator the ‘teacher’ went. 100% of participants shocked to 300 V and 65% went to 450 V. They obeyed the experimenter because he was in a technician’s coat, because all the apparatus looked real and because it was at Yale. This showed that situational factors had caused obedience so Milgram needed a theory to explain how this worked. Milgram’s theory says we can be in one of two states, the agentic state or the autonomous state. The agentic state is where we obey authority, the autonomous state is where we are disobedient. He says we are socialised to go through the agentic shift to make us obey and that this is necessary for society to work, so that members of our group with legitimate authority like someone of superior status, e.g. Milgram’s experimenter in the tech coat, can make us follow orders. If these are destructive orders we follow them anyway because we are in the agentic state but this causes moral strain. Science relies on observations and Milgram made other observations in his variations. Observation number 7 used an experimenter giving the verbal prods over the telephone. Only 22.5% of participants were obedient, less than in the first study, so over time he had shown that obedience rates fell. In Experiment 10 (office block) the rates went up again, to 47.5%, which perhaps shows it wasn’t a change in time but that people in rundown office blocks are more obedient, which wouldn’t be to do with changing times it would relate to the socioeconomic class of the participants being lower than those living near Yale. Then by the time he reached Experiment 13 (ordinary man), obedience was even lower, at 20%. This shows that there is some development over time as people are getting less obedient. Milgram’s work is important as in science you have to be able to falsify ideas and Milgram falsified Adorno’s idea of the authoritarian personality introduced in the 1950s. This is where people are submissive to authority from above but harsh to those they have power over. Milgram showed that the Holocaust didn’t happen as Adorno et al . said because the Germans were all authoritarian but because the situation put people in the agentic state. This falsification and replacement with a better theory is the way psychology develops. However, a competing argument is that personality does matter. Rotter came up with an alternative idea from Milgram at about the same time, so it isn’t really a development over time, but it added to the total psychological understanding. He suggested two personality types existed according to people’s locus of control (LOC). This is how you think your actions, and what happens to you, are controlled. For internal LOC people, this is their own decision. For people with an external LOC it’s other people, like authority figures. When Miller used high-status experimenters to tell internals to hold an electrified wire they didn’t but externals did. This shows that personality matters because the LOC affected whether the participants were affected by the experimenter’s status. In conclusion, from Adorno to Milgram to Rotter shows how psychological understanding of obedience has developed over time. A falsified idea about authoritarian personality was replaced by a situational explanation and then personality was shown to matter after all. In the end this means that obedience is really quite complicated and is probably controlled by both factors from the situation and the authority figure and by factors from the individual like their personality. 697 words Ella is making a really good point here, linking an idea about the development of understanding over time to the nature of the scientific method. The point Ella makes at first and her ending to this paragraph are worthwhile but in the middle there is much more procedural detail about Milgram’s study than she needed. Too much description here will have left her short of time to present her other paragraphs clearly. It is important to include Milgram’s theory but much of this paragraph is not contributing to the point that Ella made at first, that the theory is a progression from the study. This is really just a description that happens to make reference to the study without showing how the theory represents a development. At some point in each paragraph there needs to be a link to the issue/debate. Ella starts off well, accurately describing Milgram’s variations (Y1 page 34). She makes one mistake suggesting that the participants themselves were from the office block or Yale, which leads to a very confused conclusion to this paragraph. A bigger error is thinking that the results show obedience is decreasing – the studies were done over a relatively short period of time so do not illustrate historical changes – and moreover the essay is about developments in understanding over time, not changes in the way people behave. In the next paragraph Ella has come back to her original idea about development in psychology over time depending on the scientific process and made a useful point, with the right level of detail. Ella has made her competing argument very explicit. Although it isn’t necessary to be quite so blatant, it should always be clear when that is your intention. Development over time doesn’t always have to be strictly chronological, so Ella’s point is basically a good one – Rotter’s LOC has increased understanding of obedience. However, her description of Miller’s study (1975, Y1 page 36) could have been a little more clear and accurate. This is a useful conclusion, where Ella has pulled together the ideas she has explored. This answer has more emphasis on description (AO1) than evaluation (AO3), whereas in 20-mark questions the emphasis should be on evaluation. Ella has attempted to integrate competing arguments and her paragraph about Rotter is good – it’s a shame she didn’t do this throughout her essay. There are some errors and a lack of focus on the question at hand. This is a level 3 answer, 11 marks.