Conformity and Obedience Assignment
In this assignment I intend to evaluate Stanley Milgrams studies of obedience and in particular the ethical issues broken. I hope to determine whether the knowledge gained justifies his experiments. After the destruction and atrocities committed in World War II many historians argued that there must be some sort of character defect that made the German people more obedient. Mailgram’s study was an attempt to test ‘the Germans are different’ hypothesis. The hypothesis states that Germans are more likely a person or people in authority regardless of what the act is. (Social psychology handbook pg.8)
Milgram conducted an experiment into the nature of obedience in 1963 at the prestigious Yale
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In the second ‘voice feedback’ condition 62.5 per cent went to the lethal 450 volts. He also found even though the participants hesitated and objected they still continued with the experiment. Although many were observed to tremble, stutter, dig their nails into their palms and even laugh, one participant had a seizure. (Gross, 2010, pg.416/417).
Milgram evaluated his own experiment and devised nine factors that could explain the reason why such high levels of conformity were visible. To test the factors he devised further versions of his experiment. I believe that this strengthens the experiment the amount of control that Milgram was able to give and the different variations helped to strengthen Milgrams conclusion as to why we obey people in authority. (Gross, 2010, pg. 417).
A weakness of the experiment is the sample used is not representable to the rest of the American population and can’t be generalised. Only males who read the advert and were prepared to take part in a laboratory experiment were used Milgrams have been accused of deliberately using an ethnocentric sample. (Class notes)
I also believe that the experiment was not ecologically valid as laboratory is not considered a normal situation and this could contributed to the experiment having demand characteristics as the participant might have thought that they were in an controlled safe environment and were also encouraged to do so by the experimenter.
Another big weakness
The first reason that Milgram found that people obey is because people feel like they have to obey someone if they have a high social status or a highly respected job, this is called legitimate authority. Bickman (1974) supported this theory by doing an experiment on the streets of New York. Bickman had three men dress up as a policeman, a guard and a regular passerby in a shirt and tie, he then had the three men ask other passerby’s to either pay a parking fine or pick something of the floor, it was found that
Obedience is the requirement of all mutual living and is the basic element of the structure of social life. Conservative philosophers argue that society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the priority of the individuals' conscience. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, designed an experiment that forced participants to either violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands. Milgram's study, reported in "The Perils of Obedience" suggested that under a special set of circumstances the obedience we naturally show authority figures can transform us into agents of terror or monsters towards humanity.
When individuals disregard their freedom for the good of the whole, they are no longer considered individuals but products of conformity. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, engineered an experiment to test the ordinary person’s level of obedience. Many of Milgram’s colleagues admired his intricate experiment, and thought that he provided valid information on the complexity of obedience. One of his colleagues, Diana Baumrind, however, strongly disagreed with Milgram and has good reasons to criticize his experiment. She thought his experiment was unethical and very harmful to the social well-being of the participants. In her article, “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience”, she castigated Milgram’s experiment and provided
The two studies being analyzed today are the Stanly Milgram experiment and the Slater experiment. The two similar experiments yielded information about obedience to authority that explains the correlation in society between authority, obedience, and morality. Despite the major ethical problems in the Milgram experiment, it is known in social psychology today that human beings will follow orders from authority figures even to the extent of inflicting harm on another. However, even with this fact, it is also known that there is limits to such obedience.
Stanley Milgram is a famous psychologist who focused his studies on authority and peoples reaction and obedience to it. His famous experiment and it's results were groundbreaking in psychology, surprising both psychologists and regular people alike. First I will discuss the reason for Milgrims study of obedience to authority. Then I will explain the experiment, its formulation, and its results. Finally I will cover the influence of the experiment on psychology and society.
In the chapter "The Dilemma of Obedience" of the book Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View, Stanley Milgram explores the concept of obedience to authority, and why people cannot defy authority even the situation is totally conflicting with morality. He introduces his ideas by giving the definition of obedience, and mentions Nazi extermination as an instance of obedience, which contradicts with moral values. According to Milgram, obedience idiosyncratically binds humankind to systems of authority, and links the individual action to political purpose. In terms of observations, obedience accepted as an inveterate behavior inclination, and obeying a system of authority has been comprehended as
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 Stanley Milgram’s article “The Perils of Obedience,” several people volunteer to participate in Milgram’s experiment. It consists of a learner and a teacher. When the learner fails to memorize a word pair, the teacher applies a shock to the learner. The shocks increase in severity with each wrong answer, attaining a maximum voltage of 450 volts. Milgram states many psychiatrists he interviewed before the experiment predicted most subjects would not go past 150 volts, or the point at which the learner starts to ask to leave (Milgram 80). In his first experiment, twenty-five out of forty subjects continued the experiment until the end (Milgram 80). After several more experiments at different locations, Milgram obtained the same results. Milgram
In his article “The Perils of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to determine if the innate desire to obey an authority figure overrides the morality and consciousness that had been already established in an individual. After Milgram conducted his experiments he concluded that 60% of the subjects complied to an authority figure rather than their own morals. There was additional testing outside the US which showed an even higher compliance rate. Milgram reasoned that the subjects enjoyed the gratification from the experimenter, who was the authority figure in the experiment. He noted that most of the subjects are "proud" to carry out the demands of the experimenter. Milgram believed for this was the reason, why the German
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
Ethical and moral concerns often exist with the use of deception in psychological research and experiments. Bortolotti and Mameli (2006) argue that, with the satisfaction of some requirements, the possibility exist for the use of deceptive techniques without causing harm to
In Week 1, students focused on research ethics and whether (or not) social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s 1963 obedience study was ethical (Mason, 2018). Milgram organized the study because he wanted to know how people might become strongly influenced against their personal moral and belief structures (Mason, 2018). Roscoe argued that Milgram’s 1983 disobedience study was completely ethical because the organizer pre-advised subjects as to the voluntary nature of the research and because deception is justified within psychological research. Roscoe also declared that no Milgram study participant experienced any negative long-term psychological effect. Additionally, Roscoe contended that all subjects were told, post study, that the administered
Stanley Milgram’s (1963), Behavioral Study of Obedience measured how far an ordinary subject will go beyond their fundamental moral character to comply with direction from
Stanley Milgram, a famous social psychologist, and student of Solomon Asch, conducted a controversial experiment in 1961, investigating obedience to authority (1974). The experiment was held to see if a subject would do something an authority figure tells them, even if it conflicts with their personal beliefs and morals. He even once said, "The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act (Cherry).” This essay will go over what Milgram’s intent was in this experiment and what it really did for society.
(Brennan 2016). All the students surveyed believed that only a very small percentage of teachers would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally surveyed his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few participants would progress beyond a very strong shock. In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65% of the experiment participants gave the maximum 450-volt shock. Milgram however also noticed their behaviour. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment). Many were very uncomfortable administrating the shocks. At some point throughout the experiment, every participant stopped and questioned the experiment; some said they would refund the money they were paid for taking part in the experiment. Throughout the experiment, participants displayed varying degrees of anxious behaviour. Subjects were sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, groaning, digging their fingernails into their skin, and some were even having nervous laughing fits or seizures. (McLeod,