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Writing a Psychology report on Milgram (1963)

Hi all,
I have to write a report on Milgram's study. I am a little confused on how to write this in regards to in the writing style. Do i write this as i am the researcher at the time?
Also with regards to references, how would i fit these into a report? Under any given heading.
Thanks,

Reply 1

Anoth3rhobo

I'd have a look at reports online - try and replicate the style they are written in.

As for referencing, the BPS reference system is pretty straight forward. Simply write the findings of said study, then in brackets the researchers name and year - for example (Spearman, 1989)

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Reply 2

PTScarlet

Im struggling to start off my introduction with regards to what kind of references so use. What psychologists studies/theories can i reference and talk about in my intro ?

Reply 3

music788

Original post by PTScarlet

Im struggling to start off my introduction with regards to what kind of references so use. What psychologists studies/theories can i reference and talk about in my intro ?

You should be talking in past tense, since you're discussing a piece of work (Milgram 1963) from the past.

You've been quite vague so it's hard to help you as i'm not sure exactly what you are meant to be talking about. Anyway here goes.

Introduction
In your intro you need to start with the vague area of research before you even talk about Milgram. Intro's should start broader and get narrower. Also, your whole report should flow nicelyand sound like a story.

Milgram's research was in the area of social psychology, so you could start maybe talking about what social psychology is (but only for literally a sentence or two). Then maybe bring in the idea of obedience. Talk about what obedience research is and why it's important. Then you need to get more specific. You need to talk about why Milgram carried out his experiment- every researcher has a reason for carrying out an experiment. The idea for Milgram's experiment came from World War II, shortly after the trial of the World War II criminal Adolph Eichmann. Eichmann was this guy who ordered the deaths of Jews, and he said that he 'was simply following instructions' when he ordered the deaths of those millions of Jews. This was the inspiration for Milgram's experiments into obedience.

Experiment
Talk in some detail about Milgram's experiments themselves. That's the easy part :smile:

Just talk about the method, participants, design, etc.

Evaluate the experiment
Try and think of any strengths/weaknesses of Milgram's experiment. His study is VERY famous, so a google search into 'strengths and weaknesses of Milgram's study' should throw up some.

Contributions of the experiment
Talk about how Milgram's results have contributed to our understanding of obedience in psychology. Again, google can help you with this. Talk about the obedience research that's been carried out since and how it has advanced. You should definitely also raise the point of whether these experiments should have been carried out in the first place due to how immoral it was to put poor subjects in the position where they thought they'd killed someone. On the other hand though, I seem to remember reading before somewhere that Milgram made sure that the subjects had counselling and stuff after the experiment. I can't remember off the top of my head as to whether this counselling was successful or not, but either way the results are worth mentioning.

Regarding referencing... I really CBA to type out instructions. But if you include anything i've just mentioned (e.g. the whole thing about world war 2), reference it. You could just go on google books and google 'milgram, world war II', find a book that mentions the world war II thing, and reference it. No one will know that you didn't get the information from that book originally.