Describe and Evaluate Psychological Research Into Obedience

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

“The Perils of Obedience” was written by Stanley Milgram in 1974. In the essay he describes his experiments on obedience to authority. I feel as though this is a great psychology essay and will be used in psychology 101 classes for generations to come. The essay describes how people are willing to do almost anything that they are told no matter how immoral the action is or how much pain it may cause.

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 purpose of Stanley Milgram writing his “The Perils of Obedience,” is to show to what extent an individual would contradict his/her moral convictions because of the orders of an authority figure (Milgram 78). He constructed an experiment wherein an experimenter instructs a naïve subject to inflict a series of shocks of increasing voltage on a protesting actor. Contrary to Milgram’s expectations, about sixty percent of the subjects administered the highest voltage shock. (Milgram 80). According to Milgram, experiment variations disproved the theory that the subjects were sadists. (Milgram 85). Milgram states that although the subjects are against their actions, they desire to please the experimenter, and they often

In 1963 Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, created an experiment examining obedience. This experiment has been questioned by many psychology professionals. One psychologist Diana Baumrind transcribes her beliefs in the “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience.” Baumrind, when writing the review, was employed at the Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley. In her review Baumrind denounces Milgram for his treatment of his subjects, potentially harming their self image. However, Ian Parker, a British journalist who has written for the New Yorker and Human Sciences, believes Milgram’s findings still hold a significant place in society today. In his article “Obedience” Parker focuses on the purpose of

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

Baumrind fairly claims the “laboratory is not the place” to conduct studies of obedience as the laboratory tends to increase the number of variables above what is desired (Baumrind 90). Science Magazine defends Baumrind’s claim by conducting an experiment directed toward answering the question of the reproducibility of previously conducted psychological experiments. The data collected shows a significant decrease in the strength of the data collected and the number of experiments deemed reproducible was much smaller than those which were reproducible (“Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science”). If the experiment’s results are correct, then Baumrind has fairly contested the integrity of the results of the experiment conducted by Milgram since his results have a stronger chance of not being reproduced in a laboratory than of being reproduced in a laboratory. Milgram adds credibility to his article by mentioning the population from which the subjects were drawn. Initially, Milgram enlists Yale undergraduates to volunteer for his study which led to results consistent with his study, but severely taints the credibility of his experiment. He then modifies his experiment and enlarges to volunteer population to include that of anyone living in the city (Milgram 80-81). His

(An expert). Blass (1999) enabled the understanding we had on Milgram’s notion of agentic shift to broaden, providing us with a different perspective on Milgram findings. Milgram (2004 [1974] cited Dickerson, 2012:373) himself suggested that both expertise and authority are important, ‘because the experimenter issues orders in a context he is presumed to know something about, his power increases’. Furthermore, can Blass (1999) change our perspective on ‘agentic shift’, presuming ‘agentic shift’ is still considered the most efficient way of explain Milgram’s findings then could expertise be the reason for the ‘agentic shift’ rather than authority. In addition to this critical review of the Milgram study, Blass (1999) addressed the conformity levels during the time of the experiment, Blass (1999) suggested that Milgram’s high levels of obedience were a symptom of the time and culture in which the studies were carried out, and in more recent years conformity has decreased, however there was no relationship found between the date of the study and level of conformity found.

Today our society raises us to believe that obedience is good and disobedience is bad. We are taught that we should all do what we’re told and that the people that are disobedient are almost always bad people. Society tells us this, but it is not true. Most people will even be obedient to the point of causing harm to others, because to be disobedient requires the courage to be alone against authority. In Stanley Milgram’s "Perils of Obedience" experiment, his studies showed that sixty percent of ordinary people would agree to obey an authority figure even to the point of severely hurting another human being. (Milgram 347).

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 a person. After Milgram conducted his experiments he concluded that 60% of the subjects complied to an authority figure rather than their own sympathy. 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 that reason, why the

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

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

Task: outline and evaluate findings from conformity and obedience research and consider explanations for conformity (and non-conformity), as well as evaluating Milgram’s studies of obedience (including ethical issues).

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

“At the time Milgram's study was big news. Milgram explained his results by the power of the situation. This was a social psychology experiment which appeared to show, beautifully in fact, how much social situations can influence people's behavior. The experiment set off a small industry of follow-up studies carried out in labs all around the world. Were the findings still true in different cultures? By and large the answers were that even when manipulating many different experimental variables, people were still remarkably obedient. (2007)”