RESEARCH METHOD COHEN ok

ROLE-PLAYING VERSUS DECEPTION: THE EVIDENCE 451
Finally, advocates of role-playing methods
deplore the common practice of comparing the
outcomes of role-playing replications against the
standard of their deception study equivalents as
a means of evaluating the relative validity of
the two methods. The results of role-playing
and deception, it is argued, are not directly
comparable since role-playing introduces a far
wider range of human behaviour into experiments
(see Forward et al. 1976).Ifcomparisonsareto
be made, then role-playing results should provide
the yardstick against which deception study data
are measured and not the other way round
as is generally the case. We invite readers to
follow this last piece of advice and to judge the
well-known experiments of Milgram (1974) on
destructive obedience to authority against their
role-playing replications by Mixon (1972; 1974).
Amoresustaineddiscussionofethicalproblems
involved in deception is given in Chapter 2.
Role-playing versus deception: the
evidence
Milgram’s obedience-to-authority
experiments
In a series of studies from 1963 to 1974,
Milgram carried out numerous variations on
a basic obedience experiment which involved
individuals acting, one at a time, as ‘teachers’
of another subject (who was, in reality, a
confederate of the experimenter). ‘Teachers’
were required to administer electric shocks
of increasing severity every time the learner
failed to make a correct response to a verbal
learning task. Over the years, Milgram involved
over 1,000 subjects in the experiment – subjects,
incidentally, who were drawn from all walks of
life rather than from undergraduate psychology
classes. Summarizing his findings, Milgram (1974)
reported that typically some 67 per cent of his
teachers delivered the maximum electric shock to
the learner despite the fact that such a degree of
severity was clearly labelled as highly dangerous
to the physical well-being of the person on the
receiving end. Milgram’s (1974) explanation of
destructive obedience to authority is summarized
by Brown and Herrnstein (1975).
Mixon’s (1974) starting point was a disaffection
for the deceit that played such an important
part in generating emotional stress in Milgram’s
subjects, and a desire to explore alternative
approaches to the study of destructive obedience to
authority. Since Milgram’s dependent variable was
a rule-governed action, Mixon (1974) reasoned
the rule-governed behaviour of Milgram’s subjects
could have been uniform or predictable. But
it was not. Why, then, did some of Milgram’s
subjects obey and some defy the experimenter’s
instructions The situation, Mixon (1974) notes,
seemed perfectly clear to most commentators; the
command to administer an electric shock appeared
to be obviously immoral and all subjects should
therefore have disobeyed the experimenter. If
defiance was so obviously called for when looking
at the experiment from the outside, why, asks
Mixon, was it not obvious to those taking part
on the inside Mixon found a complete script of
Milgram’s experiment and proceeded to transform
it into an active role-playing exercise.
Mixon (1974) wrote that previous interpretations
of the Milgram data had rested on the
assumption that obedient subjects helplessly performed
what was clearly an immoral act. Although
this situation seemed clear from the outside, yet
to the actors it was not. In Mixon’s role-playing
version the actors could not understand why the
experimenter behaved as if feedback from the
‘victim’ was unimportant, as such feedback was
suggesting that something serious had happened
and that the experiment had gone badly wrong,
yet the experimenter was behaving as if nothing
was wrong, thereby contradicting the clear evidence
that suggested that the ‘victim’ was in
serious trouble. When Mixon used the ‘all-ornone’
method he found that when it became
perfectly clear that the experimenter believed the
‘victim’ was being seriously harmed, all the actors
tried to defy the experimenter’s commands.
The ‘all-or-none’ analysis suggests that people will
obey apparently inhumane commands in an experiment
so long as there seem to be no good
reasons to think that the experimental safeguards
Chapter 21