Review Of Stanley Milgram 's ' Obedience ' Essay

Milgrams obedience experiment is a series of famous social psychology experiments. The experiments sought to elucidate and measure the subjects' willingness to obey an authority who instructs the subject to perform acts that a person would not normally like to perform for reasons of conscience (Zimbardo, 2007). One of the Milgram experiment aims was to investigate obedience and authority, in the impact on a subject's ability to harm another person (Zimbardo, 2007). The experiment involved three participants. A facilitator and an actor who played a volunteer, then a subject, who voluntarily agreed to participate. The actor and the subject were then assigned different roles in the experiment trough a draw, one as a teacher and one as a learner. The draw was arranged so that the subject always came to be the teacher, and so the subject always had the impression that he and the actor had the same voluntary status. Milgram then separated the teacher and the learner using a wall. Then the teacher was told to give the student questions, and with each wrong answer the teacher would administer a shock which strength would increase for every wrong answer. As the voltage of the shocks was increased, the learner complained more vociferously and eventually became silent. The longer the test went on more of the subjects requested to abort and see how the learner was doing, but was then persuaded by the facilitator to continue. The majority of the subjects came to the stage of distributing

Milgram’s studies focused on the conflict between one’s obedience to authority, and one’s personal conscience. He devised a series of experiments in which involved participants (ordinary males from the New Haven area), to electrocute another individual. Participants where given the role as a “Teacher” and were paired with a “Learner” (an actor and confederate of Milgram unbeknownst to the “Teacher”). The procedure was rather simple; the “Learner” is given a list of word pairs to remember. The “Teacher” would then proceed to test the “Learner” by naming a word and asking the “Learner” to recall its partner pair. For every wrong answer, the “Teacher” would be instructed to administer an electric shock amongst the “Learner”, increasing the level of shock each time. His experiments were an attempt to answer the question “How far would one go in obeying instructions that were given by an authority if it involved harming another person?” Moreover, Milgram wanted to explain how ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities— seemingly normal Germans whom tormented individuals during the Holocaust— through his studies. Ultimately, it was observed that sixty five percent of the participants did in fact administer electric

Milgrams research sought had two determinants as reported by Blass (1998). First, Milgram attempted to account for the holocaust and secondly, he intended to use the Asch’s technique for studying conformity to behavior of greater human consequences. In this research study, it was found out that an average of group of men would readily inflict painful and electric shocks on harmless victims whose actions did not call for such harsh treatments. The

In July 1961, Stanley Milgram began to conduct an experiment to test human obedience at Yale University. He wanted to see how German Nazis could inflict the extermination of the Jewish population, and to see how much pain they would inflict on another person just by giving instructions. Milgram put an ad in the newspaper and he got forty males volunteers between the ages of twenty and fifty. He would choose one of the volunteers and an actor who went by the name Mr. Wallace. They would draw a slip of paper which both said “Teacher”. The actor would say he got “Learner,” and the experiment would begin.

Similarly, in Milgram 's study, it contends that obedience of an arbitrary test subject, entitled the “teacher”, was made subservient to assessing whether or not it was feasible for a human being to obey regulations that they identified as morally reprehensible. In the experiment the teacher was commanded by a superior figure, the “experimenter”, to apply voltage shocks increasing in intensity all the way up to a fatal shock for incorrect responses (79). Later in the article Milgram points out that more than half the time the teachers would submit to the orders addressed to them even though the teachers recognized the actions they were taking were morally wrong. Because of this, it obscures the subject as to why the teachers were obedient because unlike Lance Corporal Harold Dawson and Private Louden Downey surrounded by the military culture there are no reverberations for disobedience for the teachers. As a result of this, Milgram hypothesizes the teacher’s obedience correlated to the fact that the experimenter told the teachers that they would take all the fault if anything happened to the student (81). For this reason, it leads the teaches to use scapegoating to justify their actions which Rob Reiner, director of “A Few Good Men”, would more than coincide with. Parallel, Fromm author of “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem” would likewise concur with Milgram 's hypothesis and in return state more

Almost five decades later, Stanley Milgrams famous study of obedience to authority is by far one of the most known and talked about psychological experiments of the twentieth century. Milgram’s ground-breaking research showed participants a side of them that not only shocked them but also brought the world of psychology to a standstill. Milgram’s renowned study where he asked several participants to administer voltage shocks to ‘learners’ behind a screen was one of the most famous research studies done on obedience. The findings of Milgram’s study showed that authority can be a dangerous trait. This was also shown in real life situations such as the devastating time periods of the Holocaust and Abu Ghraib where humans administered shocking

Known as the man who shocked the world, Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments that changed the way power of authority was viewed. A few psychologists have declared that Milgram 's experiment was eye-opening, but others have also stated that his experiment verified nothing about obedience. As the author of the article "Obedience," Ian Parker critiques Milgram 's experiment claiming that it had its faults; for example, his conclusions failed to prove his theory on the occurrence of the Holocaust (Parker 102). With his multiple sources, Parker validates his statements about the Holocaust, and as well as the unethical treatment Milgram 's subjects received after the experiment, abandoning them with inner issues. Diana Baumrind, a fellow psychologist, assess the Milgram Experiment in her article "Review of Stanley Milgram 's Experiments on Obedience" and insists the format in which the experiment was conducted was inaccurate in numerous ways. Baumrind additionally identifies the unprofessional management of the emotional state the test subjects were left in after conducting the experiment (Baumrind 92). She also discusses the comparison between the Holocaust and the experiment that Milgram had concluded, siding with Parker and agrees that it does not lead to any conclusions. Both Parker and Baumrind logically generate claims about the Milgram Experiment and his theories that change the way it is viewed.

In Bridgeport, Massachusetts a social psychologist performed an experiment that would alter our perspective of humanity. Stanley Milgram was studying obedience following WWII. With a Jewish background and an education in social psychology, he wanted to explore the obedience of German people. He thought the atrocities committed during WWII could be attributed to a highly obedient country and culture. Milgram would soon come to realize obedience is an integral part of human nature.

Many war crimes and horrific historical events involve the forces of obedience especially within groups. These tragic events as time has passed have sparked curiosity in many behavioral scientists. Research through experimentation has occurred and helped explain some of the behaviors witnessed such as in the famous Milgram experiment. Stanley Milgram performed an experiment that revealed some truly baffling facts when it comes to

Stanley Milgram 's groundbreaking studies on obedience certainly shocked the world with their electrifying results. The experiment that Milgram conducted included ordinary people delivering “shocks” to an unknown subject, which caused much controversy to occur and raised many questions in the psychological world. Diana Baumrind, a psychologist at the University of California and one of Milgram’s colleagues, attacks Milgram’s ethics in her review. She decides that Milgram 's tests are unethical towards the subjects and claims that his experiment is irrelevant to obedience. In contrast, Ian Parker, a writer for The New Yorker and Human Sciences, asserts Milgram’s experiments hold validity in the psychological world. While Baumrind focuses on Milgram’s ethics, Parker concentrates more on the reactions, both immediate and long-term, to his experiments. Both Parker and Baumrind effectively argue the points that the laboratory was not exactly the best location for the tests and that the experiment allowed for too many ethical problems.

However, Baumrind also argues that this experiment does an inadequate job of representing the feeling of the German soldiers. The German soldiers, Baumrind asserts, had believed that their actions they were just. And that their victims were subhuman (1964, p.423). Thereby these German soldiers had no reason to feel guilt in the acts they were carrying out. In Milgram’s study the subjects had concern for the victims that they were shocking and this was cause for distress in the

Ethical guidelines are crucial in research to minimise unnecessary physical or psychological harm to participants in an experiment. Before ethical guidelines existed in research, several experiments were not conducted ethically. In 1963, American psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted Milgram’s Study of Obedience investigating participants' obedience towards authority. The study demonstrated multiple ethical issues which proved the importance of ethics in research. This report will address the ethical principles that Milgram's study covered poorly and how they could be modified to improve the study. Two ethical principles, not covered adequately in the study were right to withdrawal, and deception. Additionally, the ethical principle covered adequately; debriefing will be explained.

The information you present regarding Stanley Milgram’s experiment brings to light several topics. Nevertheless, I feel lack of obedience would not be the most significant reason why this experiment does not work in the present era. However, after reviewing this week’s lesson it is more feasible to relate the failure of this experiment in current times because of the invention of modern technology. Furthermore, the ethical concerns of this experiment would be the effect on the shocker due to possible mental issues that could result from the belief that someone is dead because of their hand. Now, considering all of this information do you feel that with deeper analyzation of the current society that conformity to power is more prevalent than

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted a 1963 experiment that originated from the idea of Germans being highly obedient to authority figures, and whether that played a role in the Nazi killings during World War II. The purpose of the experiment was to see if ordinary people, under an immense amount of pressure by an authority figure, would still be obedient regardless of whether something detrimental would happen because of a person’s submissiveness.

The Milgram study was considered to be one of the most famous studies, on obedience in the history of psychology. The Milgram study was done by Stanley Milgram a Yale University psychologist, whose study was to focus on two things one being obedience to authority, and a persons personal conscience. The results of the study were remarkable, as according to (McLeod, 2007) 65 percent of two-thirds of the participants or teachers continued administering shocks to the highest voltage level of 450 volts. The rest of the teachers continued to at least 300 volts. Milgram did this experiment in 18 different ways and altered the independent variables in each trail to see how it affects the outcome or dependent variable. Milgram’s experiment was directly influenced by World war 2 and the holocaust, and while Milgram wanted to test how far people would go in obeying instructions even at the risk of hurting someone. Following Milgram’s experiment he came up with two types of theories, one being the autonomous state, which says that people tend to direct their own actions, and take responsibility for the results of those actions.