Comparison Of Milgram And Bandura Studies

While Milgram’s and Banduras et al.’s studies were of a similar nature, both looking at why people may harm others, they looked at it in a very different way. Milgram’s ‘Obedience study’, focused on obedience and how far someone will go in a moral dilemma when an authority figure is telling them to do something they feel isn’t morally, something they would normally choose to do (Bantard, 2014). Badura et al.’s study, ‘Bobo dolls study’ focused on, if and how a child would copy aggression they have seen, performed by another person, in this case, an adult, and if more likely to recreate the aggression if seen in a video or person. Following the debate on media and violence (Oates, 2014) This essay will look at the similarities and differences between the methods used by these Psychologists.

Firstly, the most obvious difference between these two studies is the participants. Milgram used 40 participants, all-male, who were recruited from the general public, all aged between 20 and 50 years. These participants were recruited using an advert in a paper requesting volunteers and offering payment for their time. (Banyard, 2014, fig 2.4, p68) The advert was misleading and told the participants that Milgram was looking for people to undertake a study on memory and learning. Bandura et al. chose to use ninety-six children from the Stanford University nursery school as participants in their study. The children were all aged between 3 and 6 years of age with the average being 4 years and 4 months. They were an equal mix of males and females (Oates, 2014).

Both studies used controlled experiments, within a laboratory to provide consistency in results. Although controlled, these differed from each other, Milgram’s original study used strict conditions with no variations, ensuring that each participant had the same experience, right down to the same people who were encountered by the participants during the experiment. Also, the same reaction of the ‘learner’ was recorded previously and played to each subject. Milgram wanted to ensure the study had consistency so the data recorded was comparable (Banyard, 2014). Bandura et al. experiment, whilst controlled had slight variations within it which were purposely manipulated, resulting in an independent variable, they divided their participants into four groups, each group with slightly different conditions, for example, one group witnessed a live model showing aggression, another group viewed a video of the same behavior. This was to explore if seeing the behavior on video made a difference to how the children reacted and imitated the behavior or if seeing it from a live model had more of an impression on them. One of the four groups were not exposed to the aggressive behavior but were given the same toys as the other groups, for example, a mallet, this was to provide a baseline condition, known as a control condition, as a benchmark of how the children would react, whether they would hit something aggressively with the mallet, even though they had not been exposed to the same behavior. The three other groups, who were shown the aggressive behavior are known as the experimental groups (Oates, 2014).