Do Good People Turn Evil?

In The Perils of Obedience, Stanley Milgram introduces us to his experimental studies on the conflict between one’s own conscience and obedience to authority. From these experiments, Milgram discovered that a lot of people will obey a figure in authority; irrespective of the task given - even if it goes against their own moral belief and values. Milgram’s decision to conduct these experiments was to investigate the role of Adolf Eichmann (who played a major part in the Holocaust) and ascertain if his actions were based on the fact that he was just following orders; as most Germans accused of being guilty for war crimes commonly explained that they were only being obedient to persons in higher authority.

A while after receiving his doctorate, Milgram began studying the justifications of genocide, in particular the case of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was responsible for countless war crimes associated with the Nazis, however he claimed that him and all of his accomplices were simply following orders. A year after Eichmann’s trial, Milgram had set out to find the answer to his new found question, “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (Milgram, 1974). It is this underlying question that supported the entire experiment, essentially a study focusing on the conflicts between obedience to authority and personal conscience. As in, would you harm a person if you were told to do so by someone with high authority? The experiments began in July of 1961, at Yale University, when Milgram began a search for participants, by publishing a short advertisement in a newspaper.

In Derren Brown’s reenactment of psychologist Stanley Milgram’s experiment done in 1963, he solidified Milgram’s results by having the same framework as Milgram’s experiment. Milgram tested to see how much harm a person were to inflict if told to by an authoritative figure. In this particular experiment, a learning environment was set up, subjects were told that the focus was to see how negative punishment affects learning and they were told that they would be either a teacher or learner in the set up. All of the subjects in both Milgram’s and Brown’s situation were teachers and an actor, who all the subjects assumed to be another subject, as a learner. Learners were attached to a shocking mechanism ranging from 15 to a lethal 450 volts,

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

Stanley Milgram’s obedience study is known as the most famous study ever conducted. Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment that focused on the conflict between personal conscience and compliance to command. This experiment was conducted in 1961, a year following the court case of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram formulated the study to answer the question “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974). The investigation was to see whether Germans were specially obedient, under the circumstances, to dominant figures. This was a frequently said explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.

Miles Hewstone, who earned his PhD in social psychology from the University of Oxford, would concur, stating, “This evidence tends to rule out… the possibility that participants were sadists” (Hewstone 267). Milgram links these ordinary people to the soldiers and Nazi officials who carried out the Holocaust. Although this argument has partial merit, Milgram’s ineffectiveness, is tied to his failure to address the differences between the two groups. Baumrind effectively addresses this gap in Milgram’s logic; she states that the German soldier or SS officer had, unlike the subjects in Milgram’s experiment, no reason to believe that their superiors or authority figures were “benignly disposed towards himself or their victims” (Baumrind 93). Not only was the relation between the authority and the subject different, but the relation between the subject and the “victim” was as well. In Milgram’s experiment, the learner was an equal to the subject, while in Nazi Germany, the victims were viewed by the soldiers as sub-human. Baumrind accurately suggests that these altered relationships removed any of the guilt felt by Milgram’s subjects from the conscience of the German soldiers. Thomas Blass, who was an American social psychologist, Holocaust survivor, and author of the first published biography of Milgram, would add to Baumrind’s stance, stating, “Milgram’s approach does not provide a

Compared to the Milgram Experiment, one could easily argue that the prisoners suffered from far more anxiety and trauma that the “teachers” who instituted electrical shocks. However, as one might hate as much to admit, but the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment outweigh the risks. Not only did it bring to light many natural tendencies and moral issues of human beings, but also that it was this experiment, along with the Milgram Experiment, the revolutionized the ethical guidelines of human experimentation. While these two experiments may be considered among the darkest experiments in the history of psychology, it is important to acknowledge what they have also brought to

In the article, “The Perils of Obedience,” Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, published the findings of his infamous human authority experiment. During this trial, human subjects were tested to discern how far one will go in order to obey the commands of an authority figure. The test subjects were fooled into believing someone was actually being shocked; however, the reality was the other person was simply an actor and never received any shocks. The results were astounding: sixty-five percent of the subjects continued the entire 450 volts, while the rest lasted until at least 300 volts. In response to the experiment, Diana Baumrind, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkley, examined the actions and moral issues executed by

Throughout thousands of years, anti-semitic propaganda has increased hatred for Jews through influential figures like Martin Luther, Wilhelm Marr, and Adolf Hitler. It has been proven that the average person will most likely do something wrong if an authority figure tells them to do it or tells them that it is the right thing to do. The Milgram Shock Experiment was an experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1961. The experiment tested the average person’s ability to do harm to a stranger if an authority figure told them to do so. It proved that “The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation-...

This report will compare two experiments; Asch 's conformity experiment and Milgram 's obedience experiment. The two experiments will be compared for validity and their ethics. In addition, this report will take into consideration Zimbardo 's Stanford Prison experiment and the Lucifer Effect. To analyse how obedience and conformity theories can be used as an example of why good people can turn bad. This report will also look at how obedience and conformity can be applied to the criminal justice system.

In July 1961, Stanley Milgram began to conduct an experiment to test human obedience at Yale University. He wanted to see how German Nazis could inflict the extermination of the Jewish population, and to see how much pain they would inflict on another person just by giving instructions. Milgram put an ad in the newspaper and he got forty males volunteers between the ages of twenty and fifty. He would choose one of the volunteers and an actor who went by the name Mr. Wallace. They would draw a slip of paper which both said “Teacher”. The actor would say he got “Learner,” and the experiment would begin.

Stanley Milgram conducted one of the most controversial psychological experiments of all time: the Milgram Experiment. Milgram was born in a New York hospital to parents that immigrated from Germany. The Holocaust sparked his interest for most of his young life because as he stated, he should have been born into a “German-speaking Jewish community” and “died in a gas chamber.” Milgram soon realized that the only way the “inhumane policies” of the Holocaust could occur, was if a large amount of people “obeyed orders” (Romm, 2015). This influenced the hypothesis of the experiment. How much pain would someone be willing to inflict on another just because an authority figure urged them to do so? The experiment involved a teacher who would ask questions to a concealed learner and a shock system. If the learner answered incorrectly, he would receive a shock. Milgram conducted the experiment many times over the course of 2 years, but the most well-known trial included 65% of participants who were willing to continue until they reached the fatal shock of 450 volts (Romm, 2015). The results of his experiment were so shocking that many people called Milgram’s experiment “unethical.”

Milgram was working as a professor at Yale University, when he began conducting a series of experiments that focused on the conflict between personal conscience and obeying authority (Cherry, 2004). At the time, many people were accused of affiliating with Nazis during World War II. A popular justification given by those on trial was that they were only following orders. The study began just one year after Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. Milgram’s experiment was devised to answer the question, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (McLeod, 2007).

A psychologist at Yale University, Stanley Milgram, carried out a study in 1961 focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. The experiment was conducted shortly after the World War II, Nuremburg War Criminal trials, in which the accused had used the defense that they were merely following orders from their superiors. Milgram’s experiment was designed to answer the question: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”

How can a class of people be so commonplace yet they were able to do such extraordinary deeds? It was not due to them having an insatiable bloodlust or that they enjoyed killing. Rather it was due to the psychological implication of their situation and the ever-present pressure to go along with an established authority figure and peers. In Stanley Milgram’s experiment which displays this phenomenon of human nature, there were three individuals who had the roles of experimenter, teacher, and learner. The teacher, who was an unknowing volunteer, was instructed by the experimenter to “teach” the learner pairs of words to memorize. When the learner would incorrectly repeat the word pairs, the experimenter directed the teacher to administer an electric shock which was supposedly received by the learner. The shocks would become increasingly severe as more mistakes were made. Unbeknownst to the teacher, the learner was an accomplice of the experimenter, and was acting while not actually receiving the painful shocks. It was found that most of the subjects would continue with the more severe electric shocks if they were reassured that they must continue by the experimenter which was the authority figure. (McLeod) This result was inspired by the events of the Holocaust and relate, in-part, to Browning’s explanation of the ‘ordinary’ men’s behaviors. Since the situation that the men of the