Lack Of Extreme Personal Tension

After viewing both Milgram’s experiment and the Stanford Prison experiment, I can say that I was disappointed - but not surprised - by the results of each study. Throughout history the rise of one individual’s power has altered the course of entire cultures - Hitler, Stalin, and the Kim Jongs being obvious examples of this. Another story detailing the dangers of such stratified social hierarchy and thirst for power is Lord of the Flies. Though gruesome, this book proves how one person’s quest for ultimate authority can lead to the downfall of the entire group. While subjects in Milgram’s experiment seemed more apprehensive towards carrying out their “duties,” it was disheartening to see most of them buckle under the false sense of authority. I believe the average citizen would tell themselves they weren't capable of going along with such atrocities, but this experiment just goes to prove how toxic unquestioned authority can be. When we perceive an individual to hold supreme power over ourselves, we allow their teachings to grip our moral compass in a stranglehold, preventing us from acting in a civilized, rational manner. This is especially apparent in the Prison Stanford experiment. Even though all members of the study knew it was just that - no more than a sociological experiment - they quickly fell down the slippery slope that is group conformity. This demonstrates the Thomas Theorem extraordinarily well - the prisoners thought they were less than the guards, so they

This essay will look at an important key psychological experiment carried out by the renowned social psychologist Stanley Milgram which was carried out in the early 1960’s (Banyard 2012) to determine how far ordinary people would go to inflict pain to a fellow human based on instruction from an authority figure, and that of the replication of the experiment which was carried out by Burger in 2009 (Byford 2014) to determine if the same level of obedience was still applicable in the 21st Century, as was observed in the original study some 40 years earlier. The

Society is based upon those who lead and those who follow. Typically people will go as far as harming innocent people in order to please authority. Events such as mass genocides and massacres, happen due to people’s strong willingness follow authority they will perpetrate these horrendous acts. From the outside perspective, it seems as though these events should be obviously avoidable. However, it is difficult to imagine being in the position of either going against personal morals or following authority. Milgram decided to test the theory of how far a person will go to satisfy authority. Although society is skeptical to accept the validity of Milgram’s results, the event that occurred in My Lai proves his results.

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.

The purpose of Stanley Milgram writing his “The Perils of Obedience,” is to show to what extent an individual would contradict his/her moral convictions because of the orders of an authority figure (Milgram 78). He constructed an experiment wherein an experimenter instructs a naïve subject to inflict a series of shocks of increasing voltage on a protesting actor. Contrary to Milgram’s expectations, about sixty percent of the subjects administered the highest voltage shock. (Milgram 80). According to Milgram, experiment variations disproved the theory that the subjects were sadists. (Milgram 85). Milgram states that although the subjects are against their actions, they desire to please the experimenter, and they often

Fromm claims that it doesn’t matter which power someone gives their obedience to, so long as that power provides security. This sense of security makes men feel empowered, as they are supported and watched over by a higher power, one that shares their ideals and beliefs (Fromm 262). Sartwell also claims that those who are most malleable to the influences of an outside force is the man who has an intense desire for his own security and, by extension, the security of his family and friends (Sartwell 253). When his security is threatened, man will resort to crimes such as those seen in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The soldiers who were forced to become security guards felt constantly under threat of attack by insurgent forces. They feel rage and fear, which consumes them. By forcing the prisoners to do both humiliating and painful things, such as pose naked with other men in highly sexual positions, the guards/soldiers feel safer, as they have removed the prisoners ability to fight (Szegedy 211). This draws back to Sartwell’s paper, which uses the crisis in Rwanda as an example to llustrate how men can turn to murder and violence in the name of public safety. The Hutus in Rwanda were formed into “ ’civilian self-defense forces’ ” (Sartwell 254) to protect against the group of individuals that they perceived as a threat to their established government. Both papers highlight how men will turn to savagery and violence in order to remain in what

If a person of authority ordered you inflict a 15 to 400 volt electrical shock on another innocent human being, would you follow your direct orders? That is the question that Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University tested in the 1960’s. Most people would answer “no,” to imposing pain on innocent human beings but Milgram wanted to go further with his study. Writing and Reading across the Curriculum holds a shortened edition of Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” where he displays an eye-opening experiment that tests the true obedience of people under authority figures. He observes that most people go against their natural instinct to never harm innocent humans and obey the extreme and dangerous instructions of authority

​For a long time, people have been trying to figure out why American troops acted the way they did during the My Lai Massacre and a lot of these soldiers answered what anyone would have to defend themselves: “I was just following orders,” also known as the Nuremburg Defense. A psychological study done by Stanley Milgram in 1963 tests the obedience in different types of people, but these people were told that the test was for a different scientific use. Results show that two-thirds of the participants went all the way by shocking the “learner” with the full 450-voltage after being told that “it [was] absolutely essential that [they] go on”

The Excerpt “The Peril of Obedience by Stanley Milgram discusses an experiment testing on individuals through cruel and unmoral experiments. After reading Milgram’s text about the experiments conducted to see if individuals would compile with authority even if the command was unmoral. Stanley Milgram, an excerpt From “The Perils of obedience”, states that Milgram is making the following statement concerning the condition of the experiment: “This condition of the experiment undermines another commonly offered explanation of the subjects’ behavior- that those who shocked the victim at the most severe levels came only from sadistic fringe of society” (Milgram 699). By stating this Milgram explains that even if it means harming other human beings

stressed and he hesitates about fulfilling the experimenter's orders. Desperation and the manifest suffering of the accomplice force the subject to stop the experiment; however, the legitimate authority orders him to continue. In this experiment, Milgram aims to investigate when people refuse to obey and defy authority in an explicitly contradictive situation.

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 1961, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted a controversial experiment on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. He examined the justifications for acts of genocide given by those accused at the World War II Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on "obedience,” and that they were “just following orders from their superiors” (McLeod, Saul. Milgram Experiment, Simply Psychology).

Obedience and Disobedience has been a part of key moments in history. Many have studied forms of obedience to learn how it affects people and situations. For example, Stanley Milgram conducted a well-known experiment in which the subject, named the “teacher” must shock the “learner” every time he doesn’t remember a word pair from a memory test. The focus of this study is on the teacher, and whether they will administer killing shocks when told to by an authority figure. Another well-known experiment is the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo. A group of college boys were separated into two groups, prison guards and prisoners, and were put

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.”