Drawing on Milgram's Classic Laboratory Research on Obedience

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.

The Milgram Experiment violates three of the five principles outlined in the Five General Principles of Ethics. Milgram wanted to see if there was a connection between “the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience” (McLeod, 2007). Milgram’s hypothesis that he based his experiment on was “How the German people could permit the extermination of the Jews?” (Dan Chalenor, 2012). The first one that Milgram’s experiment violated was “Principle A: Beneficence and Nonmaleficence” which is where “psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm” (Ethical principles, 2013, p. 3, para. 3). The second principle that was violated was “Principle B: Fidelity and Responsibility” which is where

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.

Likewise Tuskegee studies, the Milgram test was an endeavor to decide how those denounced at the Nuremberg Trials could legitimize their cases that they were just complying with the requests of the Nazi authority. The members who were enlisted as educators have been educated that the electric stun and the agonizing sounds they got notification from the understudies were really counterfeit. Truth be told, they were misdirected all through the entire procedure, however they wound up noticeably imperative instruments that found how human inner voice responds when a kindred individual experience torment that is caused by one's self. Besides, the analysis investigated how orders from an expert that asked for their aggregate submission influenced

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

During the Holocaust, millions of Jews were murdered. One specific person did not cause these deaths, because there was a division of labor. Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi organizer of these mass murders, never saw the direct effects of the genocide he was orchestrating. After the Holo-caust, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to study the levels of obedience to authority; he used his experiment to find where evil resided in people and to discover the cause of the Holo-caust. Some people found his findings useful information, while others thought his experiment was morally unacceptable due to his use of deception. Diana Baumrind, author of “Some Thoughts on the Ethics of Research: After Reading Milgram’s ‘Behavioral Study of Obedi-ence,’” disagrees with Milgram’s use of deception and manipulation in his experiment. Con-trasting Baumrind, Richard Herrnstein, author of “Measuring Evil,” believes deception was nec-essary in order for Milgram’s experiment to be effective. Deception is ultimately needed in the experiment, especially because Milgram’s findings are beneficial information for social science.

The Milgram Experiment is one of the most famous studies in psychology. It was carried out by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist from Yale University. The purpose of the experiment was to study how far people would go in obeying an instruction from an authority figure if it involved hurting another person. Milgram wanted to study whether Germans were more obedient to authority as this was what people believed was the main reason for Nazi killings in World War II. 40 males were chosen to participate in the study, and were paid $4.50 for attending. The experiment was carried out as follows:

Beginning in 1933, it is estimated that nearly six million innocent Jews were slaughtered during the events of the Holocaust. Gas chambers, death camps, and daily corpse quotas were erected in order to execute the policies of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Although these inhumane policies originated from a single mind, they were implemented on a massive scale by countless individuals simply following orders with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. Three months after the start of Eichmann’s trial, Milgram devised a psychological experiment to determine whether the accomplices involved were truly guilty or were simply following the orders of an authority figure.

This could of caused long term emotion distress for the participants. He also did not have a follow up for the participants, he had no idea if the experiment had caused long term effects. Another problem from Milgrams experiment is that now that we look at it, how much of it is real? Milgram conducted his experiment in a laboratory type conditions and how much of it would be real in a real-life

Both authors explain that if the setting had differed from the laboratory, the subjects would have acted differently; they would not have felt obliged to obey the expert conducting the experiments. People often participate in things because of where they are, and not who they are (Parker 103). Conversely, both authors also refute that Milgram’s experiments related to Hitler’s Germany. The Nazis took part in horrific acts because they believed Hitler was right; they were not just obeying orders (Baumrind 93). Based on the facts of the experiments, it is easy to see why Baumrind and Parker do not necessarily agree with what Milgram conducted. Both articles are effective in portraying the downfalls of Milgram’s experiments and provide few

Stanley Milgram’s experiment aimed to test the phenomenon of when people obediently follow the destructive commands of authoritative figures, which was partly spurred on by how Nazi war criminals, like Adolf Eichmann, often said they were just “following orders” when brought to trial (Laurent Bègue, Jean-Léon Beauvois, Didier Courbet, Dominique Oberlé, Johan Lepage, Aaron A. Duke, 2014). In his experiment, the (mostly male) participants were led to believe that they were acting as teachers, and were supposed to deliver shocks in increments of

Both Baumrind and Parker effectively wrote about how the Milgram experiment was like the holocaust and Nazi torture. Baumrind states that "the laboratory is unfamiliar as a setting and the rules of behavior ambiguous compared to a clinician's office"(90). This shows how people would react differently if they were in a familiar setting other than a lab. She goes on to explain how obedient suggestible manner is stronger in the lab than it would be elsewhere. In the article Milgram Experiment by Saul Mcleod he states that "Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by authority figure, even to the extent of killing innocent human being" (Milgram experiment).

The experiment undertaken by Stanley Milgram in 1963 was supposed to answer some questions about obedience and raised some questions and answered some. At the time, that Milgram underwent the experiment, a Nazi war criminal was being trialed. Milgram wanted this experiment to answer whether this Nazi criminal and his followers were just accomplices to Hitler during the Holocaust or did they have some responsibility to it as well.

The Milgram experiment is the famous study. Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be into the atrocities committed by Germans WWII. People should know about the Milgram experiment because it show how to make people obedient, people less obedient and learn people from different cultures.

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.”