Essay on Stanley Milgram

Individuals often yield to conformity when they are forced to discard their individual freedom in order to benefit the larger group. Despite the fact that it is important to obey the authority, obeying the authority can sometimes be hazardous especially when morals and autonomous thought are suppressed to an extent that the other person is harmed. Obedience usually involves doing what a rule or a person tells you to but negative consequences can result from displaying obedience to authority for example; the people who obeyed the orders of Adolph Hitler ended up killing innocent people during the Holocaust. In the same way, Stanley Milgram noted in his article ‘Perils of Obedience’ of how individuals obeyed authority and

In theory, he wanted to determine to what extreme measures will an individual resort to in order to obey authority? The original design of the experiment was using two random people and having one act as a teacher and the other as the student. The teacher’s assignment was to read the student a list of simple word pairs and the student had to recall the second word of a pair. The punishment for not remembering the second word of a pair was for the teacher to administer a shock to him/her utilizing a shock generator, but each time the student answers incorrectly or refuses to respond the shock intensity would increase. The catch is that the teacher is the target of the experiment and the student is actually pretending to receive the shocks. Milgram argues people blindly obey authority because the sense of

In pursuit of information, he traveled to Paris, France and Oslo, Norway to study differing conformity rates between countries(Rogers 2016, p 3). Milgram found Norway and the US had similar conformity rates and the French conformed the least(Rogers 2016, p 3). After his graduation from Harvard in 1960, Milgram became an assistant professor at Yale, where he was able to further develop his interest in obedience (Rogers 2016, p 4). Living through WWII and the Holocaust with his Jewish heritage made Milgram more curious about obedience to authority and how it applied in this particular scenario (Blass 1998 page 3). This led Milgram to a question specific to the Holocaust;” Just how far would a person go under the experimenter's orders?” (Milgram 1977). This question became the basis for Milgram’s famous “shock experiments” . He was curious about what made these people commit lethal acts and what factors had influenced them in the process (Blass 1998 page 1). Although his question was specific to the Holocaust, his findings reveal general information and cannot be attributed to particular instances . He wanted to test how far people under the influence of an authority figure would go if they believed they were harming someone to the point of death (Slater 2004 page

In his experiment, Milgram tested several variations to achieve the aim of his experiment. Several situational factors, one at a time, to see their effect on the obedience of the subjects. In one of the variations, the teacher was instructed to hold the learner 's hand on a metal plate and deliver the electric shock when he refuses to cooperate. This showed a decrease in the obedience of subjects. This suggests that the physical presence of the learner and the physical contact between the teacher and the learner trigger empathizes from the teacher 's side since they are more aware of the suffering and pain inflicted upon the learners. This empathy and sympathy with a human being may have been a motive for the participants to disobey.

When trying to propose all alternative social psychological research project, I found it very difficult. With everything I came up with, the same issues within the Milgram experiment started to come up in the ideas that I had. The main thing to get away from is deceiving the participants. I know this is very unethical, but I’m not sure how to steer away from it. I’m not positive that you could conduct an experiment such as this one without somewhat using some form of deception. One thing I can think of is taking a qualitative approach when trying to decide an alternative study. I can do this by conducting an interview. I can come up with a series of questions that would really dig deep into the subjects of authority and obedience. This way I could get a personal account of how individuals would respond in these types of situation. This will allow me to also get to know their personalities and them as an individual.

Obedience is defined as “compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another’s authority” (“Obedience”). In 1963, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at the University of Yale, conducted an experiment to examine the effects of authority. The Obedience to Authority experiment has become one of the most renowned psychological experiments to date. Milgram decided to perform these experiments after he heard the Nazi trials at Nuremburg. He was searching for an explanation to the Nazi atrocities (Milgram Obedience 4). The main focus of the obedience experiments were to explain how seemingly normal individuals, could be driven to commit inhumane acts, such as the Holocaust. Milgram analyses the mechanisms employed by authority figures

Milgram was shocked by the levels of obedience and set about devising variations of the experiment to find out what components of the situation led to such levels of total obedience. He increased the learner’s proximity first with vocal feedback from the shocks, progressing from grunts to refusals to continued and agonizing screams, then the learner was placed in the same room acting as if being shocked, and then finally the teacher sat next to the learner and had to forcefully hold the learners hand down onto a shock plate while administering shocks. The learner refuses to continue after 150 volts. These variations each completed 40 times show the level of detail Milgram went to with his study. He dissected every aspect of the situation and studied its effect on the outcome. The variations showed that proximity to the learner increased disobedience to the orders to continue hurting the learner. Staggeringly 30% of participants completed the experiment even when they had to hold down the unwilling learners hand.

Stanley Milgram was a psychologist at Yale University who was interested in the levels of obedience people shown to an authority figure. Obedience is a type of social influence whereby somebody acts in response to a direct order from another person, it is defined as ‘’compliance with commands given by an authority figure’’. (LLC, 2016). Milgram studied obedience in 1963 by carrying out a laboratory experiment, Milgram wanted to test the idea that ‘’German’s are different’’ as the Germans obeyed Hitler’s orders during the holocaust. (Slapes, 2006).

Milgram also argues that “Obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct”(Milgram 648). Consequently, failure to uphold the virtue of obedience may lead to punishment of the subject. A

Milgram’s study was one meant to measure one’s level of obedience when being made to believe that the action they are being told to perform is causing harm to another person. The experimenters had the subjects come in to believe they were conducting a study on the effects of punishment on memory. The subjects were made to believe that they were randomly chosen between being a the “learner,” who received electric shocks, and the “teacher,” who delivered the electric shocks, however the experimenters rigged the draw so that all the learners were confederates in the study.

Social influence occurs in various forms, from a person’s anger to others actions but one influence that stands out amongst these is an individual’s power over another. Research on social influence tries to understand why humans behave the way they do and they particularly look at focusing on the process of obedience. Obedience research captures some of the underlying social psychological processes that produce extreme violence towards others (Chapter 7, page 165). Stanley Milgram’s study of Obedience was trying to find reason behind the holocaust. It focused on explaining social processes and the pressures that contribute to an ordinary person surrendering to authority and behaving in a way that goes beyond and against their beliefs and values.

I would like to think that if I would have participated in Milgram’s shock study, especially knowing what I know now, that I would not have delivered the full voltage shocks to the learner. However, I also know that most people, myself included, tend to do what we are told by authority figures and maybe, more importantly, we tend to believe what we are told, especially in an unfamiliar circumstance or environment. Furthermore, I think the need to belong comes into play as well as our natural tendency to want to feel important or like we are one of the elite. This is to say that if we are sitting on the teaching side of the room then we will feel superior to the individual on the learning side, and will relate ourselves to the person in the

In 1961, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology published an article by Stanley Milgram, a researcher at Yale University, and his study testing obedience towards political influence vs towards morals and values taught from an early age (Milgram, 1963). Milgram defined obedience as “as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point,” “as a detriment of behavior is of particular relevance to our time,” and “The psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose,” (Milgram, 1963). Motivated by the events of the Holocaust and the atrocious acts German soldiers were commanded to carry out, and obeyed, Milgram questioned how deeply ingrained the tendency to obey is in regular people, and although the concept of obedience can be used toward more positive wanted to gain more insight on destructive obedience within the laboratory. (Milgram, 1963)

Individuals think differently when it comes to obedience. One might think of how we train dogs to be obedient, another might relate obedience to punishing a child for breaking a rule, or even others think about Hitler's Regime in Germany. When it comes to obedience, there are several sides. Stanley Milgram's article, "Obedience to Authority," expresses his view of obedience as an intensely embedded behavioral tendency to obey where a potent impulse can override training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct. On the other hand, in the article "Review of Milgram's Experiments on Obedience," Diana Baumrind represents her view that contradicts Milgram's. Baumrind believes that obedient attitudes vary according to what is appropriate for

The draw was fixed so that he participant would always be the teacher and the person was on of Milgram’s confederates. The learner, which was Milgram’s confederates was taken to a separate room from the participant. The room the learner was placed in had electrodes attached to his arms while the teacher and the researcher were taken into a separate room from the participant which contained the electric shock generator and a row of switches from 15 volts to 375 to 450 volts. For this experiment, there were two rooms provided which I have stated, one for the learner which contained the electric chair and another for the teacher and the experimenter with an electric shock generator. The learner was strapped to a chair with electrodes while the teacher was given a list of words he had to learn, the teacher would test the learner by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its pair from a list of four choices. The teacher was intrusted to electrocute the learner each time the leaner got the answer wrong but the teacher didn’t know the learner was purposely getting the answers wrong. Basically, this experiment was conducted to prove that ordinary people are more likely to follow order given to them by authority figures even if it meant killing innocent