“In 1961, Stanley Milgram, A Psychologist At Yale University,

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.

It has been found by Milgram that people obey for four main reasons these are; legitimate authority, the momentum of compliance, the agentic shift and passivity.

2. A. The research was conducted by first paying his participants $4.50 ($30 today) to come in and take part in the experiment. The group of participants he selected was composed of 40 males between 20 and 50 who were told that the experiment was to test the effect of “punishment on learning“. There was 15 skilled-unskilled workers, 16 white-collar employees, and 9 professionals. Apart from them, there were 2 key participants, a confederate, who was actually a 47 year-old accountant and an actor who dressed as the experimenter. He decided to test the power of obedience in a laboratory which was clever on Milgram’s part. He designed a realistic looking fake scenario, complete with a shock chair and men dressed in lab coats. The most realistic component was the fake shock generator that actually quite scary-looking. It had levels of shock that went up from 30 to 450 volts and the levels were labeled to describe the intensity of the shock. The participants

In Stanley Milgram’s ‘The Perils of Obedience’, Milgram reports from his studies of how far an individual can go in obedience to instructions and he pointed out that individuals can go as far as causing serious harm to the other people. Basically, the experiments are meant to test the choice that an individual would make when faced with the conflict of choosing between obedience to authority and obedience to one’s conscience. From the tests, it was found out that a number of people would go against their own conscience of choosing between what is wrong and what is right so as to please the individual in authority (Milgram 317). However, the experiments conducted by Milgram caused a wide range of controversy for instance; according to Diana Baumrind, the experiments were immoral. Baumrind notes in ‘Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience’ that Milgram did not only entrap his subjects, but he also potentially caused harm to his subjects (Baumrind 329). Based on the arguments that have been presented by the two authors, it is apparent that the two authors are concerned with real life situations, authority and ethics but the difference is that they both view these perspectives from different points of view as indicated by their writings. By and large, they also tend to show the importance or the insignificance of the experiments.

In "The Perils of Obedience," Stanley Milgram conducted a study that tests the conflict between obedience to authority and one's own conscience. Through the experiments, Milgram discovered that the majority of people would go against their own decisions of right and wrong to appease the requests of an authority figure.

He conducted 18 different variations of the original experiment. When changing different variables the obedience percentage dropped significantly. These variations showed that when the “authority” figure was wearing some sort of uniform the obedience levels would rise but when the participants question their authority they percentage decreased. In other variations the learner and the teacher were placed in the same room so the teacher can experience the pain the learner was going through. In this variation the obedience fell too. Throughout all of the variations the percentage of participants administering the maximum 450 volts decreased significantly when different variables were added to the

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.

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

Results of the study are looked at by the number of participants and students when they stopped or continued to the end of the experiment. Participants in the study gauged on how far they would go in delivering shock the students. The question posed to a group of student from Yale where the study was conducted and participated in the experiment. The result was 3 out of 100 provided answers to giving the maximum voltage allowed by the administrator. 65% of the participants in the study which is shocking to the question proposed before the experiment proceeded with pressing the lever for maximum voltage (Cherry, 2008). The subjects in the study became highly agitated, angry, distraught, and extremely upset with the examiners (teachers); the participant students continued all the way until the end of the study. Unexpectedly the findings produce quite a shock itself because of the high level of participants who would follow orders by continuing the shock someone as they know and understand that the severity of voltage would go from 30 volts and in 15-volt increments, and it continues all the way to 450 volts. The levels were labeled, slight, moderate, and danger “severe shock.” Moreover, the last two labels were simply documented as XXX.

In Stanley Milgram’s article “The Perils of Obedience,” several people volunteer to participate in Milgram’s experiment. It consists of a learner and a teacher. When the learner fails to memorize a word pair, the teacher applies a shock to the learner. The shocks increase in severity with each wrong answer, attaining a maximum voltage of 450 volts. Milgram states many psychiatrists he interviewed before the experiment predicted most subjects would not go past 150 volts, or the point at which the learner starts to ask to leave (Milgram 80). In his first experiment, twenty-five out of forty subjects continued the experiment until the end (Milgram 80). After several more experiments at different locations, Milgram obtained the same results. Milgram

Although no such experiment can be 100% conclusive, the Milgram experiments do shed considerable (and disturbing) light on the behavior of ordinary people in obedience of authority. They also explain, to a large extent, the seemingly perplexing behavior of many ordinary Germans during World War II and some American soldiers in Vietnam. (“Milgram,” Obedience to Authority..).

In 1974 Stanley Milgram conducted the classic study of obedience to authority. The study looked into how far individuals would be willing to go, and were asked could they deliver increasingly devastating electric shocks to a fellow human being, as they were requested to do so by the professor in charge of the experiment.

In the Nuremberg trials, Nazi leaders attempted to implicate this excuse as an appropriate defense for what they did in the many concentration camps spread all over Germany. In 1961, Yale University psychologist Stanly Milgram conducted a series of experiments to attempt to explain if the Nazi’s who took the orders shared the belief of anti-Semitism with their superior officers or were they truly just “following orders.”

The purpose of Milgram’s experiment was to see how far people would go to obey authority. His scientific methods followed the scientific procedure and produced external validity. There were 20 variations of Stanley Milgram’s experiment some factors remained consistent throughout all variations, while some remained the same, while some changed. The four experimental conditions grew in intensity. In the first condition, also known as remote feedback, the learner was isolated from the subject and could not be seen or heard except at three hundred volts when he pounded on the wall. At three hundred and fifteen volts he was no longer heard from until the end of the experiment. The naive subject was required to keep administering shocks with an unresponsive human at the other end. Put yourself in the teacher’s shoes. In the second condition (voice feedback) the learner was placed in an adjacent room, when he started to shout and protest at lower shock levels he could be heard through the crack in the door. In the third

In the case of Adolf Eichmann, the person in charge of planning the collection, transportation and extermination of hundreds of thousands of people, he stated that, “ The orders were, for me, the highest thing in my life and I had to obey them without question.” He had a role in the murders of thousands and thousands of people, yet he justifies it by saying that he was simply obeying orders. Eichmann was not a psychopath by any means in fact, he was described as very average and declared sane by six different psychiatrists. Authority had and