Opinion On Miligram

Personally, researching this experiment made me extremely uncomfortable just because I do not believe in causing unnecessary harm to someone who does not deserve it. In this case, harm is the unnecessary stress since the accomplice of the experiment was not actually shocked, he just acted like it. I think that the moderators of the experiment, especially Milgram, should have been upfront in the ad placed in the newspaper over what was going to actually be happening to the people who volunteered. The way the readings and the video made it sound was that it was just a surprise over what actually happened to the subjects. It is shocking to me that he thought that this was something that was morally and ethically right.

In Derren Brown’s reenactment of psychologist Stanley Milgram’s experiment done in 1963, he solidified Milgram’s results by having the same framework as Milgram’s experiment. Milgram tested to see how much harm a person were to inflict if told to by an authoritative figure. In this particular experiment, a learning environment was set up, subjects were told that the focus was to see how negative punishment affects learning and they were told that they would be either a teacher or learner in the set up. All of the subjects in both Milgram’s and Brown’s situation were teachers and an actor, who all the subjects assumed to be another subject, as a learner. Learners were attached to a shocking mechanism ranging from 15 to a lethal 450 volts,

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment, which later wrote about it in “The Perils of Obedience” in 1963 to research how people obey authoritative figures and what extent a person would go inflicting pain onto an innocent person. The study involved a teacher (subject), learner (actor), and an experimenter (authoritative figure). The teacher was placed in front of a control panel labeled with electrical shocks ranging from 15 to 450 volts and instructed to shock the learner incrementally if they gave a wrong answer when asked questions with word associations. Switches corresponded with the voltage ranging from “Slight Shock” to “Danger: Severe Shock” followed by

It was surprising how easily someone could just inflict pain on another human being without so much as a second thought. Milgram even states “Subjects in the experiment frequently even said, “If it were up to me, I would not have administered shocks to the learner” (Milgram 702). By stating this I know the participants did have some remorse they wouldn’t want to shock the learner but they do because of the fact they were told to by an authority figure. In life we are always told to listen and respect our elders and teachers and we see them as our authority figure so if they were to give us a command we would compile. What if the command we were given was something we knew was wrong but since it was from someone who has authority it must make it ok. That’s we think and I know working in the nursing field I see it more than I should because of nurses telling me to do things I’m not allowed to do under my certifications. I find it hard to tell them no, just like the participants of this experiment they knew that if they listened the individual would get hurt but that didn’t matter they were doing what they were told to do. The experiments were wrong morally and were extremely cruel and because they were so unnecessary innocent individuals were put in pain for no

Those subjects either played the role of a student or a teacher. The Teachers were told to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to the learner when questions were answered incorrectly. The shock levels were from 15 to 450 volts. In the Milgram Obedience Study Video, it states that” Many if not most subjects were troubled by it and found it a highly conflicted experience... Some were laughing hysterically after inflicting damage upon them,” meaning that this quote not only presents how the experiment gave too much power to the experimenters but also shows the misuse in power (Milgram, 6:40-7:00).

Prompted by this phenomenon, Stanley Milgram investigates this “potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct.” (Milgram 314) Milgram set up an experiment in which he intended “to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.” (Milgram 314) Thereby, observations could be made of how long a person would continue to inflict pain. “To extricate himself from this plight, the subject must make a clear break with authority.” (Milgram 315) The basic premise of the study being to learn how an ordinary person reacts when put under pressure to cause great physical harm to a stranger through a series of simulated electrical shocks. However, the subjects are under the impression that they were participating in a study of memory and learning. This is where Diana Baumrind takes issue with Milgram’s study. She feels that “by volunteering, the subject agrees implicitly to assume a posture of trust and obedience.” (Baumrind 326) Basically, Baumrind feels that the setting of a fairly innocuous sounding experiment in a safe, controlled environment of a lab causes the subject to have a false sense of safety in the experimenter’s experience. Therefore, the experiments are prone to produce skewed results, as well as potential psychological injury to the subject. Later analysis of

The subjects of the experiment believed that they were taking part in a study on the relationship of learning and punishment. The subject would sit in a room and ask questions to an actor in another room, who was supposed to be another subject. In front of the questioner was a box that had a series of buttons labeled from 15 volts to 450 volts. The subject was told to shock the person every time they answered incorrectly, increasing the voltage each time. As the shocks got worse, the actor would make noise, bang on the wall, yell for help, etc. but the researcher would tell the subject to keep going. Milgrim found, contrary to many psychologists predictions, that sixty-five percent of the subjects delivered the shocks all the way up to 450 volts (Slater).

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.

Milgram began his experiment by soliciting subjects aged from twenty to fifty, from all backgrounds under the guise of a simple memory experiment (Milgram, Obedience 15). By Milgram keeping the true study under wraps he was able to study subjects reactions with minimum bias towards the actual experiment. Milgram told those participating in the faux study that they were to act as teachers and assist in teaching a student a list of paired words. What the subject was unaware of however was that the student was actually in on the true experiment and was trained in order to test their reactions (Milgram, Obedience 16). So it went that whenever the student guessed the word pair wrong the teacher, in this case the subject, was instructed to flip a switch on a panel that they were led to believe would shock the student. They believed the experiment was to reinforce memory through punishment. After every “shock,” the subject was told to increase the intensity from 15 to 450 volts in a sequence of 30 switches they were labeled as the following for the subjects to avoid confusion: Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Very Strong Shock, Intense Shock, Extreme Intensity Shock, Danger Severe Shock, and XXX (Milgram, Behavioral).

The Milgram Obedience Study was an experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1963 to observe how far people would obey instructions that resulted in harming another individual. The experiment consisted of a “learner” engaging in a memory task and a “teacher” testing the “learner” on the task, administering electrical shocks to the “learner” each time an incorrect answer was given; the electric shocks started out small from 15 volts, labeled as “SLIGHT SHOCK”, all the way to 450 volts, labeled as “X X X”—of course, that was what the participant was told. The true purpose of the experiment was not disclosed until after the experiment and the “random selection” of who would be the “teacher” or “learner” was rigged so that the participant was always the “teacher” and the “learner” was always an actor. The shocks, naturally, were never given to the “learner”, and the “learner” gave responses that were scripted, both in answers to the questions and in responses to the shocks.

The study was conducted by Stanley Milgram and aimed to examine how people “reacted to instructions from authorized individuals when the actions conflicted with their personal safety and conscience” (De Vos, 2009, p.226). The participants were instructed to work in pairs and play different roles. In each pair, one of the participants played a role of a “learner,” and was presented with different questions from the “teacher,” the second person in the pair. Experimenters observed the questioning process and asked “teachers” to apply an electric shock to “learners” when they gave wrong answers to questions. The main problem in the research was ethical, as the more than a half of “teachers” were instructed to apply electric shocks up to the level of 450 volts, which could be very harmful. However, the “learners” were asked to provide mainly wrong questions, and the “teachers” were not aware of this intention (Milgram, 2010). At the end of the study, the experimenters revealed the deception. The research concluded that “teachers” were likely to obey instructions from authorized individuals, even when the health of “learners” supposedly was in serious

However, this experiment was all fake, the learner was also a person who knew what was going on just like how it was for the Asch Conformity, there were no real shocks they just gave fake screams to make it seem like it was real! The whole point was to test if the teacher would follow the directions and go all the way to 450 volts. Some people actually gave up because they couldn’t live with hurting an innocent person and some people went all the way to 450 volts. I remember watching this experiment in one of my high school classes I am still just as shocked as I was while watching the video.

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

Stanley Milgram, in his essay, “The Perils of Obedience,” argues that ordinary humans can be destructive instruments when they obey authority. For example, the Nazis guards were following orders when they were committing genocidal acts. “Obedience,” written by Ian Parker, leads one to believe that people have different degrees of obedience under different situational factors. Parker partially agrees with Milgram on human obedience and how it can cause problems.

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