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Edexcel's approach to each topic requires students to study a classic study and a contemporary study in depth, and to be able to describe, evaluate and compare them. This is not busywork: the paired study is where the specification's emphasis on research methods and on the development of psychological knowledge over time comes together, because a well-chosen classic and contemporary pairing lets you see how a phenomenon was first established, how method and ethics have changed in the decades since, and whether the original finding still holds. For the Social topic the natural pairing is the two great obedience studies: Milgram's (1963) baseline experiment as the classic, and Burger's (2009) partial replication as the contemporary — because Burger set out deliberately to re-run Milgram under twenty-first-century ethical constraints, so the two are directly comparable and the comparison illuminates exactly how the discipline's methods and ethics have moved. This lesson presents each study under the headings aim, method, procedure, results, conclusion, then evaluates both methodologically and ethically, and finally compares them. Because Milgram's procedure was covered in depth in the obedience lesson, and Sherif's Robbers Cave in the prejudice lesson, this lesson keeps the descriptive detail proportionate and directs its depth at the evaluation and comparison the specification examines here.
Key Definition: A classic study is a foundational piece of research that established or transformed understanding of a phenomenon and remains a touchstone for the field. A contemporary study is a recent piece of research (typically post-2000 for Edexcel) that revisits, updates, challenges or extends earlier work, often with modern methods or ethics.
By the end of this lesson you should be able to:
Edexcel 9PS0 — Paper 1, Topic 1: Social Psychology. This lesson maps to the specification's requirement to study, evaluate and compare a classic study and a contemporary study for the Social topic, exercising research-methods understanding (experimental method, validity, reliability, sampling, ethics) and the theme of how psychological knowledge develops over time. The chosen pairing is Milgram (1963) (classic) and Burger (2009) (contemporary).
Assessment Objectives exercised:
Connects to…
Milgram's baseline experiment is described procedurally in the obedience lesson; here it is set out in the aim/method/procedure/results/conclusion frame the paired-study question requires, with the descriptive detail kept proportionate so that the evaluation can carry the weight.
To investigate whether ordinary people would obey an authority figure's instruction to inflict harm on an innocent person, and to test whether destructive obedience is a product of the situation rather than a defective national character (the "Germans are different" hypothesis).
A controlled observation conducted within a laboratory experiment at Yale University. Strictly, the baseline itself involved no independent variable — it was a pre-planned observation of how far participants would go under a fixed set of conditions — but it is embedded in Milgram's wider experimental programme, in which situational variables (proximity, location, uniform) were manipulated across conditions. The key dependent variable was the maximum voltage each participant administered.
Ordinary people are far more willing to obey a legitimate authority — even to the point of apparently seriously harming an innocent person — than intuition predicts. Obedience is driven principally by the situation, not by a defective or unusually obedient disposition, undermining the "Germans are different" hypothesis and supporting a situational account developed theoretically through the agentic state.
Jerry Burger (2009) conducted a carefully constrained partial replication of Milgram to answer a question the original could not: would people obey to the same extent today, nearly half a century later, and could this be tested ethically? His key methodological innovation was the "150-volt solution".
To investigate whether obedience rates in the twenty-first century are comparable to those Milgram obtained in the early 1960s, and to do so within modern ethical guidelines — testing both the reliability of Milgram's finding over time and whether the study could be run without the original's harms.
A laboratory experiment replicating Milgram's baseline as closely as ethics allowed, run at a US university. Burger reasoned that in Milgram's data, the 150V point — where the learner first cries out to be let out and mentions his heart — was the crucial decision point: around 79% of Milgram's participants who continued past 150V went all the way to 450V. So if he stopped the procedure immediately after the participant's decision at 150V, he could infer their likely full-obedience behaviour without exposing them to the extreme distress of the higher voltages. This is the "150-volt solution": obedience was operationalised as willingness to continue past 150V.
Obedience to authority remains high in the twenty-first century: people today are only marginally less willing to obey than in the 1960s, and the effect is not confined to men. Milgram's finding is therefore reliable over time — the phenomenon is robust rather than a product of the McCarthy-era climate — and, importantly, the study demonstrated that obedience can be investigated within modern ethical constraints.
graph LR
A["Milgram (1963)<br/>Classic<br/>65% to 450V"] -->|"~49 years;<br/>150-volt solution;<br/>modern ethics"| B["Burger (2009)<br/>Contemporary<br/>70% past 150V"]
B --> C["Obedience robust over time<br/>+ no sex difference<br/>+ ethically testable"]
Both studies share a broadly laboratory setting, with the mixed validity that entails. Internal validity is a genuine strength: both used high standardisation (identical prods, scripted learner, controlled apparatus), so extraneous variables were tightly controlled and the obedience observed can be attributed to the manipulated authority situation. The classic demand-characteristics objection (Orne and Holland, 1968) — that participants saw through the deception — applies to both, but is countered in Milgram by the visible extreme distress, and is less of a threat in Burger only to the extent that participants ignorant of Milgram's work had no template to "play along" to. Ecological validity is the shared weakness: shocking a stranger for wrong answers on a word task bears little resemblance to real-world obedience dilemmas, so generalisation to genuine destructive obedience (My Lai, Abu Ghraib) requires caution in both cases. Burger's 150-volt solution, while ethically ingenious, introduces its own validity limitation: obedience past 150V is only an inferred proxy for full obedience, resting on the assumption that today's participants would follow the same 150V→450V trajectory Milgram's did — an assumption that cannot be directly confirmed precisely because the study stops.
Both procedures are highly standardised and therefore replicable, which is exactly what makes the pairing so instructive: Burger is the replication, and its close reproduction of Milgram's rates is strong evidence for the reliability of the obedience effect across nearly half a century, three US regions and both sexes. Meeus and Raaijmakers' (1986) Dutch replication and Milgram's own numerous variations further attest to the finding's robustness. The caveat is that reliable methods can reliably reproduce a biased result — high replicability does not by itself guarantee ecological validity.
It is worth making explicit why Milgram and Burger form an unusually strong classic–contemporary pairing, because "compare" questions reward an appreciation of the pairing as a whole. First, they study the same construct (destructive obedience to legitimate authority) with a deliberately matched procedure — Burger reconstructed Milgram's set-up detail by detail — so differences in outcome can be attributed to time and ethics rather than to the studies simply being about different things. Second, they are separated by nearly half a century, which is exactly the interval needed to test the "child of its time" objection: had obedience collapsed, that would have vindicated the temporal-validity critique; that it held refutes it. Third, Burger was explicitly built to be ethically different, so the pairing doubles as a case study in the discipline's ethical development. A weaker pairing (say, two studies of loosely related phenomena, or two from the same decade) could not do any of this work. Recognising that the comparability of the two studies is itself what makes the comparison valuable is a mature methodological observation.
The two studies also illustrate a trade-off that runs through experimental psychology: the tension between internal and external validity. Both maximise internal validity through tight standardisation and control, which is what licenses the causal claim that the authority situation produced the obedience. But that very control — an artificial task, a contrived laboratory, a scripted confederate — is what limits external validity, because real destructive obedience unfolds in messy, high-stakes, richly meaningful contexts that no laboratory reproduces. This is not a flaw unique to these studies but a structural feature of the experimental method: the control that buys internal validity tends to cost ecological validity. Burger's design tightens the tension further, because his ethical safeguard (the 150-volt stop) improves participant protection but reduces the directness of the measure, trading a slice of validity for a large gain in ethics. The lesson for evaluation is that no single study is perfect on every criterion; strong research programmes triangulate, combining tightly controlled experiments (Milgram, Burger) with field studies (Hofling et al., 1966; Bickman, 1974) so that the strengths of one design compensate for the weaknesses of another.
The two studies differ instructively on sampling, and this is a key comparison point. Milgram's sample was androcentric (40 men only) and drawn from one US city via volunteer (self-selecting) sampling, which may over-represent unusually cooperative or approval-seeking people. Burger deliberately corrected the sex bias — recruiting men and women and finding no significant difference — which strengthens the generalisability of the obedience finding across sex. However, both remain culturally narrow (US samples), so Smith and Bond's (1998) caution that obedience replications cluster in Western industrialised societies applies to the pairing as a whole: the finding is robust within Western culture but its cross-cultural generality is not established by these two studies.
| Criterion | Milgram (1963) | Burger (2009) |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | Lab (Yale) | Lab (US university) |
| Sample | 40 men, volunteer, one city | 70 men and women, screened |
| Key measure | Max voltage (to 450V) | Continued past 150V? |
| Internal validity | High (standardised) | High (standardised) |
| Ecological validity | Low (artificial task) | Low (artificial task) + proxy measure |
| Reliability | Established by replications | Is a replication — confirms reliability |
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