Obedience, By Stanley Milgram

Obedience to people in authority is a deep-rooted trait that we all possess by virtue of our upbringing, and as Milgram put it, “it is only the person dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, with defiance or submission, to the commands of others” (Milgram 1974). This trait is exhibited every day in family circles, workplace and school. People are most likely to obey instructions from people they perceive their authority to be legal or moral. We see people obeying their pastors, leaders in various societies and other people they see as higher to them; and they obey anything they are being told even if it involves killing another human being. They justify their actions, however wrong, on obedience to authority.

Obedience is the requirement of all mutual living and is the basic element of the structure of social life. Conservative philosophers argue that society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the priority of the individuals' conscience. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, designed an experiment that forced participants to either violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands. Milgram's study, reported in "The Perils of Obedience" suggested that under a special set of circumstances the obedience we naturally show authority figures can transform us into agents of terror or monsters towards humanity.

“The Perils of Obedience” was written by Stanley Milgram in 1974. In the essay he describes his experiments on obedience to authority. I feel as though this is a great psychology essay and will be used in psychology 101 classes for generations to come. The essay describes how people are willing to do almost anything that they are told no matter how immoral the action is or how much pain it may cause.

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.

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

Obedience as an act can be traced back to the very beginnings of human history. The common belief has always been to obey authority at all cost. This act has never been questioned because authority corresponds to the common belief that respecting authority and obeying them will lead you to success in all aspects of life. Obedience is not defined to specific situations and its context can be portrayed in various ways. For example, Erich Fromm writes in his essay, “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem; “Human history began with an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of disobedience.” This statement suggests that everything which we perceived to be

Each of the two experiments carried out by Milgram and Zimbardo had questionable ethics in their procedure. Ethics is defined as “Moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2016). In psychology, ethics are moral guidelines when conducting social experiments such as these, so that the dignity of each participant is respected and preserved. This piece of work will evaluate the perceived ethics in Milgram’s experiment of human obedience to authority figures, and Zimbardo’s experiment of conformity to roles, and also provide an overall conclusion on whether or not these studies were ethical.

A classic experiment on the natural obedience of individuals was designed and tested by a Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram. The test forced participants to either go against their morals or violate authority. For the experiment, two people would come into the lab after being told they were testing memory loss, though only one of them was actually being tested. The unaware individual, called the “teacher” would sit in a separate room, administering memory related questions. If the individual in the other room, the “learner,” gave a wrong answer, the teacher would administer a shock in a series of increasingly painful shocks correlating with the more answers given incorrectly. Milgram set up a recorder

Today our society raises us to believe that obedience is good and disobedience is bad. We are taught that we should all do what we’re told and that the people that are disobedient are almost always bad people. Society tells us this, but it is not true. Most people will even be obedient to the point of causing harm to others, because to be disobedient requires the courage to be alone against authority. In Stanley Milgram’s "Perils of Obedience" experiment, his studies showed that sixty percent of ordinary people would agree to obey an authority figure even to the point of severely hurting another human being. (Milgram 347).

In his article "The Perils of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to determine if the innate desire to obey an authority figure overrides the morality and consciousness that had been already established in a person. After Milgram conducted his experiments he concluded that 60% of the subjects complied to an authority figure rather than their own sympathy. There was additional testing outside the US which showed an even higher compliance rate. Milgram reasoned that the subjects enjoyed the gratification from the experimenter, who was the authority figure in the experiment. He noted that most of the subjects are "proud" to carry out the demands of the experimenter. Milgram believed for that reason, why the

In 1963 a psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted one of the greatest controversial experiments of all time. Milgram tested students from Yale to discover the obedience of people to an authoritative figure. The subjects, whom did not know the shocks would not hurt, had to shock a “learner” when the “learner” answered questions incorrectly. Milgram came under fire for this experiment, which many proclaimed was unethical. This experiment of Milgram’s stimulated the creation of several responsive articles. Two articles that respond to this experiment are authored by Diane Baumrind and Ian Parker. These two authors attempt to review the methods, results, and ethical issues of Milgram’s experiment.

One conclusion is that most people are willing to do whatever an authority figure tells them to do. Most people believe that an authority figure probably knows more than they do so they are willing to do what authority figures say. Another important conclusion from his experiment is that people are easily deceived. They are willing to look past their own moral judgements and do what they are told to do. They believe in what an authority figure says even if it is not true. A third conclusion about human behavior is that there is no exact personality trait that is linked with defiance or obedience. This means that our view of authority is most likely learned through observational learning. It is engrained in children to listen to authority figures. Through school, work, and our parents people’s behavior toward authority figures are molded. Those are the three most important conclusions about human behavior that were gained through Milgram’s

My objective is to introduce the topic of obedience to authority and provide an awareness of the vulnerability that most people have in this area. Today, there are theories that focus primarily on characteristics that explain wrong-doing and how

It’s important to explore the sociology and psychology behind people choosing to obey authority even against their own conscience because it can help us recognize and resist influence directed towards us and others. In this research paper, we will explore the obedience class of social influence.

As a child growing up, everyone was told “respect your elders” or “listen and obey”. As children grow into teenagers, they start pushing the boundaries to see who they really need to obey. Throughout adulthood, though people have fewer and fewer authority figures as the years go by, everyone must obey someone. Though we all have someone to obey, when does the respectful obedience cross the line into dangerous territory? Obedience becomes dangerous when it becomes physically or mentally harmful to one’s self or society.