Dr. Stanley Milgram: The Man Who Shocked The World

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.

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, and other members of the community also questioned the nature of obedience. Milgram reflected back to the 1933 events of the Holocaust. Milgram began to question the intentions of the soldiers serving under Eichmann. Why would all those German soldiers go along with kill millions of innocent Jews, slaves, homosexuals, children, and gypsies? Were the soldiers just following the orders of Adolf Eichmann, leader of the German Army? Milgram was interested in doing the obedience to authority figures study because he questioned if Adolf’s men were just following his orders, and this lead to killing of eleven million innocent victims during the time period of the Holocaust. Milgram became enthusiastic in researching the limit that the average person would go to obey orders from their authority figures, even if that meant

Stanley Milgram, established a new course of study in the psychology of obedience. The purpose of his experiment was to have an idea of to see how people react the autocritical standard; during his experiment, he recorded how people will behave when given a source of power. Milgram gained this idea after the World War II. He believed that some people had the ability to essentially block out human thoughts of morals, ethics, and sympathetics when assigned to a job. The core issue that Milgram faced was finding a way to create a situation to test his theory; because behavior is such a complicated aspect of psychology to test, Milgram had to properly execute the experiment without physical harm from one person to another.

Obedience is a basic behavior that practically everyone has. Unfortunately, some authority is essential for community living. In a way, obedience is a form of submission as old as time itself. Society appears threatened by disobedience and hesitation. In the experiments described in “The Perils of Obedience”, ethics and hesitation get in the way of obedience.

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

In 1962, Stanley Milgram, a Social Relations professor at Yale University conducted an experiment on the internal struggle between a person’s innate obedience to authority and their standards of morality. Milgram was intrigued by former Nazi officers justifying their horrific actions with the excuse that they were merely following orders. Milgram’s experiment, heavily reliant on unknowing participants, recruited 40 male individuals aged 20-50 years old--with a preference for individuals who were not educated--with a newspaper ad that promised four dollars as payment for their contribution to memory research. Subjects were led into the test area in pairs, accompanied by an experimenter, and paid immediately. The

Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, conducted a classic study obedience in which the participants were forced to either violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands (Behrens 343). Milgram's study suggested that under a special set of circumstances the obedience we naturally show authority figures could transform us into agents of terror (343). His experiment showed that normal people could be influenced to the point of administering great amounts of pain on another human being, just because a person in a position of authority told them to do so (343). A theory that was reached as a result of Milgram's experiment was that "it is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of action" (355). Milgram's results offer a possible explanation as to why the Nazis did what they did. Even though

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

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.”

1. Stanley Milgram conducted a study on obedience after he had been long intrigued by the way that people conform in social settings like being in large groups or being under direct authority figures. An example of conformity that intrigued him the most was how the Nazi’s in Germany, who years previous were normal people, could engage in one of histories most disturbing genocides. Milgram’s study consisted of forty males who were split up into two groups, teacher and learner (accomplice of the study). The teacher would be in a room with an actor pretending to be a doctor or psychologist, the actor would wear a lab coat to show authority over the teacher.

A lot of people argued that Milgram’s experiment was unethical, but made sense logically. His ”experiment was carried out in the shadow of the Holocaust. The trial of Adolf Eichmann had the world wondering how the Nazis were able to persuade so many ordinary Germans to participate in the murder of innocent people” (Cohen A24). During world war two (WW II), Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazis’ came to power through his dictatorship which ultimately led to the demise of millions of Jews in order to create a master race. With the obedience of the militia, he rose to power annihilating any freedoms Jewish people had. His tactics were brutal and irreconcilably fatal for all who disobeyed him.

The experimenter and teacher then returned to the experimental room, occupied by an ominous-looking shock delivery machine. Here, experimenter instructed the teacher to read the first word of each word pair followed by four options. The learner’s task was to choose which of the four had been previously paired with the first word. Each time the learner was incorrect, the teacher was to administer an electric shock. Additionally, with each successive incorrect response, the severity of the shock was to be increased. The lowest level was relatively harmless, just 15 volts, and labeled on the machine as a “slight shock.” As the severity of the shock increased, so did the machine’s labels, through “Moderate,” “Strong,” “Very Strong,” “Intense,” “Extreme intensity,” and “Danger: Severe shock” until finally reaching a level the English language apparently had no words to describe, starkly labeled “XXX,” marking the final two levers designed to deliver 435- and 450-volt shocks,

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

The Milgram experiment is probably one of the most well-known experiments of the psy-sciences. (De Vos, J. (2009). Stanley Milgram was a psychologist from Yale University. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Milgram wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II. Milgram selected people for his experiment by newspaper advertising. He looked for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University.

In 1963, Stanley Milgram conducted research, where the findings were published in the article, ‘Behavioral Study of Obedience.’ Milgram wanted to study the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience, by conducting an experiment where participants were ordered by authority to deliver strong electric shocks to another person.