Milgram And The Holocaust Experiments

Many various members of the populace who believed that only a few would rais it to the highest level of 450 volts, were wrong in their predictions. The majority of subjects obeyed the experimenters' orders to the very end of the experiment by administering the highest voltage three times. As the first experiments were conducted on Yale undergraduates, some believed that the results were inconclusive due to the competitive nature of the students. However, the results of the experiment were the same when Milgram tested "ordinary" people. When the experiments were repeated in other areas of the world, the level of obedience was even higher than those

The Milgram experiment was conducted in 1963 by Stanley Milgram in order to focus on the conflict between obedience to authority and to personal conscience. The experiment consisted of 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, and who’s jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. The roles of this experiment included a learner, teacher, and researcher. The participant was deemed the teacher and was in the same room as the researcher. The learner, who was also a paid actor, was put into the next room and strapped into an electric chair. The teacher administered a test to the learner, and for each question that was incorrect, the learner was to receive an electric shock by the teacher, increasing the level of shock each time. The shock generator ranged from

“‘Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions’” (Quotes About Holocaust, 1). The Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz was the brutal murder site of millions of innocent Jews and other perceived enemies of Germany. Here, death and suffering was the norm and there was no escape from the wicked acts of the Nazis until the prisoners’ long awaited liberation. However, Auschwitz changed the victims’ lives forever.

Stanley Milgram writes about his shocking experiment in “Perils of Obedience.” Milgram writes on the behaviors that the people had during the experiment. Milgram had an experiment that involves two people. One person was a student and the other a teacher. The student was strapped into an electric chair and was required to answer certain questions. The teacher asked a certain word, and the student must know the pair that goes with it. If the student answered the question incorrectly, the teacher must shock the student. Each time the student answered a question incorrectly, the volts increase. Milgram was expecting the teachers to back out of the experiment once they saw the student in pain for the first time, but surprisingly enough, more than sixty percent of the teachers obeyed the experimenter and continued on with the experiment, reaching up to four-hundred-fifty volts. After three times of the four-hundred-fifty volt shock, the experiment was called to halt.

During World War II, the Jews were the primary victims of Germany’s most atrocious act, the Holocaust, where thousands of Jews were senselessly slaughtered in the name of Nazism. Countless innocent Jews perished in concentration camps, while the majority of the Nazis watched and did nothing. To them, the Jews were not human beings, but rather mere animals, who deserved concentration camps. This reasoning baffled the Allied countries, as they understood that regardless of race and religion, no one should be subjected to concentration camps. Yet, the Nazis completely disregarded and violated the basic rights of humankind. The Nazis successfully propagated this anti-Semitic mentality because ordinary Germans were consumed by their ignorance

Milgram conducts an experiment to examine the act of obeying, and shows concrete instances. He pressures the subjects to behave in a way conflicting with morality. In the experiment, the experimenter orders the subject to give increasing electro shocks to an accomplice, when he makes an error in a learning session. The situation makes the subject

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

where there would be a teacher and a subject on two opposing sides of a wall. Whenever the subject made an incorrect answer, they would receive a shock, this experiment was rigged so that the subject would actually be shocked be rather made extremely convincing screams of pain and the subject was told to give the wrong answer to the teacher. When the voltage reached passed 200 v, the teacher would become more reluctant to go further with the experiment due to the pain that the subject was going through, but the teacher didn’t know that the test was rigged. After it got past 475 V, about 65% of the teachers would hold the switch to shock the subject under the pressure from the men in the white coats recording the experiment and in most cases were reluctant to press on the button by themselves. This experiment no only proves that many people will do dangerous and immoral things under the pressure of authority, but also supports the idea that many people would not commit these acts underneath their own free will due to human

News of the millions of people that had been slaughtered were the headlines on newspapers all over the world. Photos of the starved dead bodies of Holocaust victims were released for all to see. Trials were held by the Allied countries against Nazi Party officials for “crimes against humanity.” Many of the officers were executed, including some of Hitler’s right-hand men. Many Nazi soldiers were never caught and put on trial, and the search for those tied to doing such barbaric things still continues on today. However, the lead man in this terrible plan escaped. Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, had allegedly committed suicide on April 30, 1945. Germany had been left without a leader, having freshly lost World War II, with the atrocities of what their fascistic government had done exposed. The Germans themselves were speechless and ashamed when they found out the truth of what their Führer (Hitler’s title) and his government had done. Museums, books, and films have been made to help spread the word of the Holocaust. Monuments have been constructed so that we never forget the atrocities that these innocent human beings suffered. But sadly as the years go by, more and more people don’t know about the Holocaust. Even worse, many are pretending like it didn’t happen. But it did happen and eleven million people died because of it. Some victims of the Holocaust, like Anne Frank,

Towards the end of World War II ally powers began to come across concentration camps which housed what the Nazi’s deemed the “undesirables” mainly people of the Jewish faith, gypsies, Russians, polish, the mentally disabled, and the physically impaired. What happened in these camps is one of the most appalling events in world history which would become to be known as the Holocaust. Approximately eleven million people died in the Holocaust due to malnourishment, slave labor, extermination, and medical experimentation (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). These were so heinous that allied powers took the Nazi members to international court for crimes against humanity, which became to be known as the Nuremburg Trials (Duhaime's Law Dictionary).

In “The Perils of Obedience”, social psychologist Stanley Milgram reveals the results of an experiment he performed trying to see if one would hurt another in order to obey authority. The experiments involved three subjects: the experimenter (authority), the teacher, and the learner. The experimenter only made sure that the experiment was performed, while the teacher had to read a series of words and the learner, strapped in an electric chair, had to remember the words read to him. If the learner incorrectly responded to the teacher, the learner would be given an electric shock. As the learner starts to give wrong answers the shock level rises.

Of all the injustices against humanity, the Holocaust is one of the most recent and well known. From 1933 to 1945, the Nazis waged a vicious war against Jews and other races viewed as beneath pure blooded Germans. This war came to a head with Adolf Hitler’s "Final Solution" in 1938. One of the end results of the Final Solution was the creation of concentration camps in Germany, Poland, and other parts of Nazi Europe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, people world-wide were appalled by final tallies of losses from the camps, and those responsible were sent to trail for their heinous acts. The Holocaust was a dark time in the history of the 20th century. The SS division of the Nazi party of Germany violated the basic human rights of millions

The Stanley Milgram Obedience experiment is an experiment to replicate Nazis following Hitler’s orders to kill Jews in World War II. Whereas, in this experiment, forty males were recruited to complete this study; they were told it was a memory and learning experiment. In this experiment, every time the subject (learner) answered incorrectly, the recruited male (teacher) would have to shock them. The results were: all forty subjects (teachers) obeyed up to 300 volts, and twenty-five of the so-called teachers, continued to give shocks up to the maximum level of 450 volts.

After eighteen variations on the study, Milgram found that 65% of all participants continued to the supposed 450 volts and all participants went to at least 300 volts. Milgram concluded that ordinary people tend to follow an authority figure in a group, even to the torture and killing of a human being, if the authority’s actions seem to be rooted in correct morality and/or legality. In Psychology, this is what as known as “prestige suggestion”. After World War II, Milgram’s overseer during

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