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Bocchiaro

Terms in this set (24)

- to investigate dispositional factors on obedience, disobedience and whistleblowing

- to investigate the accuracy of people's estimates of how often people would obey, disobey or whistleblow
Aim
Laboratory experiment
Research method?
- to make sure the procedure was believable

- to make sure procedures were ethical
Why were 8 pilot studies used
- number of people who wrote a statement of support for the sensory deprivation study

- the number of people who became whistleblowers

- personality data was collected through psychometric tests

- estimated obedience, disobedience and whistle blowing was collected by describing the procedure to another set of Ps and asking them what they would do and what others would do
Data collection?
92 Ps
Sample for pilot study?
149
Sample for main experiment
- HEXACO-PI-R

- decomposed games

- asked about religion
What were the personality tests?
- honesty-humility

- emotionality

- extraversion

- agreeableness

- conscientiousness

- openness to experience
What was measured in the HEXACO-PI-R?
social values
What did decomposed games test?
- what their religion was

- how often did they worship

- how deep was their faith
What questions were asked about religion?
138
How many people were in the scenario study?
- what would you do?

- what would the average student at your university do?
Questions in the scenario study?
76.5%
% of Ps who obeyed in the actual study
43.9%
Estimated % for 'what would the average student at your University do?' in disobeying
64.5%
Estimated % of 'what would you do' for whistle blowing
9.4%
% of people who actually whistle blew?
- none of the dispositional traits from HEXACO-PI-R test predicted obedience, disobedience and whistleblowing

- social values didn't determine whether people obeyed, disobeyed or whistle blew

- the only thing that correlated with whistleblowing was depth of faith (those who described themselves as having strong religious faith were slightly more likely to whistleblow)
Other findings?
- People are usually obedient to authority figures

- dispositional factors are poor at predicting who will whistleblow

- people think that they are more likely to whistleblow than they actually are. They also think that they are less likely to obey than they actually are
Conclusions?
✅ lab setting = standardised procedure, can be replicated, know the details (what the experimenter would say), Bocchiaro intended for it to be replicated

✅ not low in ecological validity: task of recruiting new Ps would be a normal thing to do in a uni lab
Strengths and weaknesses of the research method
✅ quantitative : comparisons

❌lack qualitative data: only knew experimenter asked the Ps to comment on why they behaved the way did during the debrief. But data not as revealing as Milgram's
Evaluation of data types used
✅ no harm

✅ right to withdraw

✅debriefed

❌deceived
Ethical issues
✅ normal task to recruit Ps to take part in a future study

❌ whistleblowing normally involves reporting incriminating information about your boss
Ecological validity
✅ internally and externally reliable

- internal: standardised procedure = same experience: same instructions

- external: other researchers can replicate
Reliability?
✅ sample size fairly large: results won't be overly affected by extreme characteristics

❌ sample are volunteers: unrepresentative

❌Students from Dutch University: same age, above average cognitive functions
Representativeness?
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