Asch 's Conformity Experiment And Milgram 's Obedience Experiment Essay

Milgram conducted an experiment on obedience to authority. His influence came from the second world war, where Nazi’s committed evil crimes and were part of the mass murder of thousands of Jews. Milgram wanted to know what influences people to do evil things like this, and whether it is due to ‘just following orders’ from an authority figure. Slater et al attempted to replicate Milgram’s (1963) study of obedience using a virtual environment. In this essay, I will discuss the similarities and differences between these studies, using evidence to support my points.

In the Stanford prison experiment, Zimbardo analyzes how human behavior can change based one’s surroundings and what they are told to do. Normal college students are given roles to play in a mock prison. In this experiment, people are assigned jobs as prison guards and prisoners. The prison guards quickly adapted to their roles. They saw no problem treating the prisoners with no respect. These students use violence against the other students to show their leadership and dominance. The prisoners quickly got accustomed to their parts as well.The prisoners believed that they deserved the punishment. “The experiment shows that good people under the wrong circumstances can behave just like those that we vilify” (Zimbardo). With this experiment, Zimbardo studies the Lucifer Effect. The Lucifer Effect is understanding how good people become evil. He uses his data from this experiment to further develop the Lucifer Effect theory and find out why the Nazis treated the Jews with such cruelty. His results show that when given the opportunity and in the right environment, humans will dehumanize other

Over 4 decades ago, a Stanford psychology professor named Phillip G. Zimbardo administered an experiment that re-created a prison environment. The goal of the experiment was to simply study the process by which prisoners and guards “learn” to become compliant and authoritarian, respectively (Zimbardo 732). What would emerge from the “Stanford Prison Experiment” article were more than just compliance and authority. The experiment gave rise to the nature of evil and obedience in human beings. Thus like Zimbardo’s experiment, Stanley Milgram’s “The Peril of Obedience” found that under certain circumstances and conditions, human beings were also capable of being immensely subdued to

In her article, “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience”, psychologist Diana Baumrind criticizes Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority, stating that not only were Milgram’s experiments unethical but so was the scientist himself, claiming that he did not take appropriate measures to properly ensure his subject’s wellbeing post-experiment and therefore, experiments such as these should not be repeated. Baumrind does address an important point in her review and that is the responsibility of psychologists to ensure that their subjects are treated fairly and ethically but this is overshadowed by the fact that Baumrind’s argument is one rooted in pathos with little evidence to support her claims while being

In 1963 a psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted one of the greatest controversial experiments of all time. Milgram tested students from Yale to discover the obedience of people to an authoritative figure. The subjects, whom did not know the shocks would not hurt, had to shock a “learner” when the “learner” answered questions incorrectly. Milgram came under fire for this experiment, which many proclaimed was unethical. This experiment of Milgram’s stimulated the creation of several responsive articles. Two articles that respond to this experiment are authored by Diane Baumrind and Ian Parker. These two authors attempt to review the methods, results, and ethical issues of Milgram’s experiment.

Asch since his experiments are what pioneered the study of conformity. His study is considered a classic, and most of conformity studies based their study off of Asch’s experiments. Asch made a group of white, male college students study two separated cards that contained lines. One card was the base line, and the subjects had to choose from three similar line on the second card that matched the first card. Asch made his subjects report their findings out loud to the rest of the other subjects in the room. In all of his experiments, all but one subject were confederates, and that was the majority the lone subject had to face. The majority answered incorrectly throughout the experiments as Asch instructed them to do, and he study the experimental subject to see if he will conform to the incorrect majority. In his first experiments, a group of 7 to 9 students was used. The second experiment tested for the number of opposing subjects needed to reach a set rate of conformity. The final experiment tested the rate of conformity of the experimental partner if he had a supporting partner. The results of the first experiment showed that “the misleading majority’s wrong judgment [made the experimental subjects answer incorrectly] in 36.8 percent of the selections” (Asch 20). This was very interesting, and the rest of the other experiments showed different numbers as well. It only took three opposing subjects to make the experimental subject conform at 31.8% and beyond three subjects did not change the rate (Asch 21). A supporting partner made the experimental subject rate of incorrect answers reduced by one-fourth (Asch 22). This led me to look at other studies that explored conformity with different age groups and using females instead of males. For example, Walker and Andrade found in their experiments “that conformity decreases with age from childhood to maturity in the Asch (1956) situation” (371). Children tend to

The Stanford Prison Experiment was to determine how conformity and obedience could result in people behaving in ways that are counter to how they would at on their own. The main goal of the experiment was to see how social norms and social convections might influence the behavior of participants who are playing the roles of prisoners and prison guards. The study really elaborates on the relationship between the abuser and the abused. It is interesting to see how easily the human psyche gives repetitive abuse and is conditioned to receive it and accept it. This paper will discuss the motives, procedures, findings, ethical issues, and informed consent the Stanford Prison Experiment concluded on.

In the video , Psychologist Milgram experimented on human behavior and their obedience to authority. Showing examples of regular, everyday civilians,volunteering to take an experiment on whether they would get questions right or wrong. With this type of experiment comes consequences where they would be shocked by a "shock generator" which elevates in voltage the more answers that are answered wrong,the higher the voltage goes. In the experiment Milgram wanted to prove that humans will suffer pain behind their belief of the level of authority that an individual upholds. Knowing each question that they may answer could possibly become wrong,the consciously continue in the state of conflict of whether they should proceed on with the experiment or stop. Also, not only does the volunteers continue to take on the abuse of this experiment but their was some Psychologist that continued with the experiment,even when it became dangerous. One man in the video expressed that he has a heart condition,yet and stillcontinued to go on with the experiment and the Psycholist agreed,without any hesitations for health of this older male gentleman.

Obedience and Disobedience has been a part of key moments in history. Many have studied forms of obedience to learn how it affects people and situations. For example, Stanley Milgram conducted a well-known experiment in which the subject, named the “teacher” must shock the “learner” every time he doesn’t remember a word pair from a memory test. The focus of this study is on the teacher, and whether they will administer killing shocks when told to by an authority figure. Another well-known experiment is the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo. A group of college boys were separated into two groups, prison guards and prisoners, and were put

This paper serves to summarize The Zimbardo Prison Experiment, better known as The Stanford Prison Experiment which was conducted by Phillip Zimbardo in 1971 at Stanford University. The purpose of the study was to conduct research in order to better understand the psychological components of human aggression and submission to include conformity and obedience in a prison environment with a select group of subjects playing roles as either prison guards or inmates, however, I should note, according to McLeod, S. (2016), The Navy’s intent or purpose for the experiment was to better understand how to train members of the armed forces on how to cope with stress associated with captivity as opposed to making American Prison systems more humane. Another interesting point of note is that Zimbardo conducted this experiment shortly after World War II, and the Vietnam War where concern was raised as to some of the atrocities carried out in those wars where “ordinary” people conducted heinous acts per instruction from so-called authoritative figures. Experiments with similar objectives were carried out by Stanley Milgram and others. (Jones, A. D., & Milgram, S. 1974)

Stanley MIlgram is a Yale University social psychologist who wrote “Behavioral Study of Obedience”, an article which granted him many awards and is now considered a landmark. In this piece, he evaluates the extent to which a participant is willing to conform to an authority figure who commands him to execute acts that conflict with his moral beliefs. Milgram discovers that the majority of participants do obey to authority. In this research, the subjects are misled because they are part of a learning experience that is not about what they are told. This experiment was appropriate despite this. Throughout the process, subjects are exposed to various signs that show them

We will also see how that behavior still apply in this modern day era. The two experiments that I will focus on is the Milgram Experiment and the Asch Experiment. Both of these experiments will show different ways of how compliance and conformity is shown in action. We will see what each did to reveal what people will do in certain situations and then reflect on why they did their actions. .

Remember when you were in class doing some class work, a group of classmates is discussing about it and they all agree on the answer of a certain question, a minute ago you were certain that your answer to that question was the correct one, but now you feel insecure and decide to change it to have the same answer as everybody else, what happened? According to Solomon Asch’s conformity experiment, what explains this common behavior is the normative social influence which leads to conformity.

Evaluation of Milgram's Obedience Study Stanley Milgram was from a Jewish background and conducted the experiment to see how people can obey to an apparent authority figure e.g. Germans in World War II. He advertised for participants in a newspaper offering payment of $4.50. Volunteers were told that the experiment was looking at the effects of punishment on learning. The participant played the role of the ‘teacher’ and the ‘learner’ was a stooge, Mr Wallace.

Asch set up this study as he believed Sherif 1935 study on conformity was ambiguous and Asch wanted to set up an unambiguous study. Therefore Asch set up a lab experiment with ‘the aim to investigate the extent in which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform’. Asch study involved one real participant and seven confederates. He set up 4 lines on a card. One line being compared to the other three lines. Therefore the group had to choose which out of the three lines matched the single line. The whole group had to say what line they thought was the same. The real participant would have heard five of the confederate’s opinions before it came to him for his answer. The answer was always clear but the confederates would have answered wrong in order to see how the participant reacts and how he answers. Out of the 18 trails, 12 of them were answered incorrect by the confederates. It was found that the real participants conformed about one third of the time. Participants said they conformed as they started to believe that they weren’t seeing clearly and the rest of the group were correct. Others said they knew the answers were wrong but didn’t want to go against the rest of the group and stand out and even ones that didn’t conform expressed great pressure to also conform and go along with group. This study shows how some individuals can feel the pressure to conform to group norms even