PSYC 215 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Fundamental Attribution Error, Milgram Experiment, Demand Characteristics

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 215
• Professor: Adam Etinson

Document Summary

Learner vs. teacher; participant is always the teacher. At every mistake, the learner is punished by an electric shock at a certain voltage. After a while the learner yells out in pain but the experimenter tells the teacher to go on. People would say: "i would not shock the guy in the first place, and i"d stop it as soon as he yells" 2/3 of the people continue to the maximum voltage at a point where the learner stops responding. Shows the power of the situation (we often make the fundamental attribution error, as in, we assume the things that we do can be attributed to our dispositions) Psychiatrists and lay people did not predict anywhere near this amount of obedience. Event social psychologists, who were interested in the power of social situations, did not fully predict this: Some researchers thought you could learn all you needed to know by asking people what they would do.