Cantor's Level Of Obedience

With each wrong answer came an electric shock that the teacher, a random male participant, had to physically cause. The teacher could hear the learner after a while begging to stop. At this point the teachers causing the pain are obviously uncomfortable. Some start by laughing nervously and other just immediately beg to stop the experiment. At this point the experimenter gives a series of orders to push the teacher to continue. As a result, two-thirds of participants carried on shocking the learner to the highest level of four hundred and fifty volts. All the participants involved continued up to three hundred

In Milgram’s article, he observed a variety of subjects. One of the subjects fully took on his role of administering shocks to the learner (Milgram 84). The subject even stated in his feedback that the “EXTREMELY PAINFUL” was not enough of a shock for the learner (Milgram 84).

Imagine being strapped down with the fear of getting shocked repeatedly from getting only one question wrong. For the experiment one of the “learners” quotes when being shocked, “Through the microphone.. Let me out, let me out! I’ve had enough, let me outta here!” (Skinner 36). This quote shows how much pain the people were in and how much trauma it caused both the “learner” and “teacher”.

At times the other participant would plead for the experiment to stop. The effect the administrator had on each subject was tremendous. Among many others, some factors that affected the participant’s obedience included the appearance of the instructor, directions provided, and the setting of the experiment at a prestigious university. The instructor made the participants believe that they were obligated to continue administering shocks through his words, appearance and tone of voice.

Stanley Milgram’s 1963 studies into obedience have provided important and shocking insights into the power of authority. The study set out to discover how obedient people really are. Debate and controversy have surrounded the study since the results were first published. Predictions made by psychologists before the experiment proved dramatically inaccurate. The experiment led volunteers to believe they were administering increasingly painful and dangerous electric shocks to another volunteer for the purposes of a study on memory. The memory study was a ploy, the real focus was on the behaviour of participants inflicting pain on another person. Participants often acted against their own moral judgements and obeyed authority, even when

Milgram began his experiment by soliciting subjects aged from twenty to fifty, from all backgrounds under the guise of a simple memory experiment (Milgram, Obedience 15). By Milgram keeping the true study under wraps he was able to study subjects reactions with minimum bias towards the actual experiment. Milgram told those participating in the faux study that they were to act as teachers and assist in teaching a student a list of paired words. What the subject was unaware of however was that the student was actually in on the true experiment and was trained in order to test their reactions (Milgram, Obedience 16). So it went that whenever the student guessed the word pair wrong the teacher, in this case the subject, was instructed to flip a switch on a panel that they were led to believe would shock the student. They believed the experiment was to reinforce memory through punishment. After every “shock,” the subject was told to increase the intensity from 15 to 450 volts in a sequence of 30 switches they were labeled as the following for the subjects to avoid confusion: Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Very Strong Shock, Intense Shock, Extreme Intensity Shock, Danger Severe Shock, and XXX (Milgram, Behavioral).

A classic experiment on the natural obedience of individuals was designed and tested by a Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram. The test forced participants to either go against their morals or violate authority. For the experiment, two people would come into the lab after being told they were testing memory loss, though only one of them was actually being tested. The unaware individual, called the “teacher” would sit in a separate room, administering memory related questions. If the individual in the other room, the “learner,” gave a wrong answer, the teacher would administer a shock in a series of increasingly painful shocks correlating with the more answers given incorrectly. Milgram set up a recorder

Milgram experiment focused on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In this experiment, three sets of people, the “teacher”, the “learner”, and

At this point, the Teacher and Learner were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. The Teacher was then given an electric shock from the electro-shock generator as a sample what the Learner would supposedly to receive during the experiment. After the Teacher was given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the Learner. The Teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. To respond the Learner would press a button to indicate their answer, if the answer was wrong the teacher would shock the Learner with the voltage increasing by 15-volts for each wrong answer, if correct the Teacher would read the next word pair. The subjects believed that for each wrong answer the Learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After a series of wrong answers the Learner would start complaining about their heart, afterwards there would be no response from the Learner at all. Many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner at this point in the experiment. Some paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment, while most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects even began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress when they heard the screams of the

The participant believed he was delivering real shocks, but the learner was a confederate who pretended to be shocked. Once the 300 volt level was reached the learner would bang the wall and demand to be released, or become silent and refuse to answer questions. The experimenter instructed the teacher to treat this as an incorrect response and to deliver a further shock. Out of the 40 participants, 26 delivered the maximum shocks while 14 stopped before reaching the higher levels. Many of the participants became extremely agitated, distraught and angry at the experimenter (Cherry,

In the early 1960’s Stanley Milgram (1963) performed an experiment titled Behavioral Study of Obedience to measure compliance levels of test subjects prompted to administer punishment to learners. The experiment had surprising results.

The next experiment focuses on obedience and why the tests subjects reacted the way they did. Stanley Milgram reflects on the study conducted and the outcomes of the electric shock study in an article titled “The Perils of Obedience”. The experiment calls for a teacher participant to do word association with a learner. When an incorrect answer is given by the learner, the teacher is under the instruction to administer electric shock on an upwards scale as the experiment continues. There comes a point in the experiment when the teachers feel uncomfortable continuing to shock the learner. Many times though the teacher continues at the urging of an individual overseeing the experiment. The first experiment that Milgram conducted was using Yale undergraduates, the results reflected “about 60 percent of them being fully obedient (696).” Another experiment was then conducted using “ordinary people” as the people of New Haven were labeled (Milgram 696). Milgram made the following statement about the results: “The experiment’s total outcome was the same as we had observed among the students (696).” The study did reflect that even though a person did not agree with the commands especially when putting another individual through he or she did as told more than half of the time. More studies were conducted around the world by other professors; many of the experiments had the same or similar results. There is one study that was conducted that has

The purpose of Milgram’s experiment was to see how far people would go to obey authority. His scientific methods followed the scientific procedure and produced external validity. There were 20 variations of Stanley Milgram’s experiment some factors remained consistent throughout all variations, while some remained the same, while some changed. The four experimental conditions grew in intensity. In the first condition, also known as remote feedback, the learner was isolated from the subject and could not be seen or heard except at three hundred volts when he pounded on the wall. At three hundred and fifteen volts he was no longer heard from until the end of the experiment. The naive subject was required to keep administering shocks with an unresponsive human at the other end. Put yourself in the teacher’s shoes. In the second condition (voice feedback) the learner was placed in an adjacent room, when he started to shout and protest at lower shock levels he could be heard through the crack in the door. In the third

The Milgram experiment was conducted in 1963 by Stanley Milgram in order to focus on the conflict between obedience to authority and to personal conscience. The experiment consisted of 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, and who’s jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. The roles of this experiment included a learner, teacher, and researcher. The participant was deemed the teacher and was in the same room as the researcher. The learner, who was also a paid actor, was put into the next room and strapped into an electric chair. The teacher administered a test to the learner, and for each question that was incorrect, the learner was to receive an electric shock by the teacher, increasing the level of shock each time. The shock generator ranged from

In an experiment done by Stanley Milgram, individuals were told, by “a taciturn guy in a lab coat”, to punish others for getting difficult questions wrong by shocking them (Nelson, 302). Although no one was actually getting shocked, the individuals in the experiment truly believed that they were giving deadly amounts of electric shocks to others. In spite of the fact that the individuals were delivering the electric shocks, it is not truly their fault. The guy in the lab coat continuously told the participants to unjustly punish the other individuals for getting questions wrong, “[urging] the behavior on” (Nelson, 302). Therefore, the guy in the