Obeying Authority Outline

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.

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

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

The Milgram Experiment conducted at Yale University in 1963, focused on whether a person would follow instructions from someone showing authority. Students (actors) were asked questions by the teachers (participants), if the students got the answer wrong they would receive a shock each higher than the previous. The shocks ranged from Slight shock (15v) to Danger! (300v) to XXX (450v). Stanley Milgram wanted to know if people would do things just because someone with authority told them to, even if it was hurting someone. I believe that the experiment was a good way to test the obedience of people

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

Milgram proved his belief be a series of 20 experiments with 1000 participants. He studied how people would respond to outright commands given by someone of authority to give punishment on a learning. So, if the learner gives the wrong answer the teacher(participant) would admit a bolt of electric shock delivered by a switch. Would the participants be obedient to the social constraints of authority or disobey the authority(experimenter), hence, delivering a bolt of shock or not delivering a bolt of shock? Also, at what level will the participant disobey and refuse to give punishment to the learner? Personally, I feel my best choice if I was a participant in the study is the choice from the beginning of the experiment to not continue to participate. Still, I think it is very possible to get wrapped up in wanting to please the authorities persuasion and submit to their direction, then, the outcome is giving punishment to the learner long after my moral sense tells me to stop. Ultimately, if the study was conducted today many people believe our culture in America has not changed enough to get a different outcome in a study like Milgram’s

This experiment to me really shows just how many people will obey to authority even when it means going against your morals. The Milgram case helped me to criticize my surroundings more so than rather overlook what is going on. We are taught to obey authority at a young age and all throughout our adolescence. It is hard to say that some of these pre notions aren’t conditioned into our every day

The experiment was a controlled in the sense that each ‘teacher’ heard the same cries of distress from the next room, they all met the same ‘learner’ and so on. This point of the experiment is important because although they were encouraged to continue, surprisingly few exercised their right to stop, most just did as they were told, which was the basis of the defence for many of those at the Nuremburg trials, which preceded the study; “I was just following orders” Banyard (2012). The results seemed to support the hypothesis that people obey those in a position of authority, and Milgram (1963) carried out many variations of this original study.

In society, obedience to authority is ingrained in humanity from an early age, causing some individuals to blindly obey orders without contemplating the credibility of the source. In psychoanalyst Erich Fromm’s article “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem,” he explains that throughout human history obedience has been associated with virtue and disobedience with sin (Fromm 127). Fromm suggests that our conscience is an internalized voice of authority (126). Fromm claims individuals need to distinguish the difference between rational and irrational authority because obedience is effective when individuals want to obey, instead of fearing to disobey (127). Two other authors who examine obedience are Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee

Before Milgram’s findings, the fact that people were inclined to obey to authority figures was already realized. He just confirmed this belief. Milgram followed effective steps by using precise procedures. He made sure that the experiment reflected features of an actual situation in which a person would obey to an authority figure: offering compensation (monetary reward in this experiment), being under pressure (Prods 1 to 4 in this case), and mentioning that the person who obeys can withdraw. These features can also be seen in a situation where a soldier is commanded to fire, for instance. A soldier will get a monetary compensation, is under pressure to obey because he chose to be part of the military, and he knows that he can resign at any time. Milgram created an experiment so precise and detailed that more than enough evidence was demonstrated.

In Stanley Milgram 's essay Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority, the self-proclaimed "social psychologist" conducted a study while working as a psychologist at Yale University. The primary goal of Milgram 's experiment was to measure the desire of the participants to shock a learner in a controlled situation. The experiment was based on three primary roles: the authoritative figure, the learner, and the teachers. The authoritative figure instructed the teachers to shock the learner when they answered the question wrong. This form of punishment is typically believed to conflict with personal morals and the main reason for the experiment was to evaluate the teacher 's response to

To Milgram, obedience occurs when the subject complies with the entire series of commands, if he rejects one command then the subject is disobedient. Milgram discovered that the proximity of the authority figure to the subject, greatly effected their willingness to obey. He concluded that obedience sharply increases, as the experimenter is physically in the room with the subject. The results from his study also demonstrate that “physical presence of an authority is an important force contributing to the subject’s obedience or defiance…manipulation of the experimenter’s position yielded more powerful results” (Milgram, 1965). This is in contrast to the proximity to the subject to the victim. Finally, in order to test the importance of background authority, he conducted the same experiment in a commercial building in Bridgeport, instead of at Yale University. By doing this, he discovered that the location of the experiment did not matter much because, “subjects may consider one laboratory to be as competent as another, so long as it is a scientific lab” (Milgram, 1965). As previously mentioned, a reoccurring