Stanley Milgram (1963) was interested in how likely people would obey an authority figure who instructed them to harm another person. His study involved 40 male participants, aged 20 to 50, who were recruited through advertisements and mail solicitation. Participants had diverse occupations and educational levels. They came to a lab where they served as teachers in a supposed learning and memory experiment. A simulated shock generator with 30 switches was used. It was clearly marked with voltage levels and verbal designations ranging from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 volts (danger: severe shock). The participants’ task was to administer an electric shock to the learner, a confederate of the experimenter, whenever he made an error in the memory test, increasing the intensity of shock each time. When the participant refused to administer a shock, the experimenter would give a series of prods to the participants to ensure that they continue with the experiment, even if they reached the marked danger of a severe shock, or heard the learner’s screams and pounding from an adjacent room. The experiment ended when the maximum voltage of shock had been delivered, or if the participant refused to continue any further. The maximum intensity shock a participant was willing to administer before he refused to participate any further was measured. The results showed that 26 out of 40 (65%) participants obeyed the commands of the experimenter to the end, reaching the most potent shock
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
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,
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
Stanley Milgram’s obedience study is known as the most famous study ever conducted. Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment that focused on the conflict between personal conscience and compliance to command. This experiment was conducted in 1961, a year following the court case of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram formulated the study to answer the question “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974). The investigation was to see whether Germans were specially obedient, under the circumstances, to dominant figures. This was a frequently said explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.
If a person of authority ordered you inflict a 15 to 400 volt electrical shock on another innocent human being, would you follow your direct orders? That is the question that Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University tested in the 1960’s. Most people would answer “no,” to imposing pain on innocent human beings but Milgram wanted to go further with his study. Writing and Reading across the Curriculum holds a shortened edition of Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” where he displays an eye-opening experiment that tests the true obedience of people under authority figures. He observes that most people go against their natural instinct to never harm innocent humans and obey the extreme and dangerous instructions of authority
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.
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
For a long time, people have been trying to figure out why American troops acted the way they did during the My Lai Massacre and a lot of these soldiers answered what anyone would have to defend themselves: “I was just following orders,” also known as the Nuremburg Defense. A psychological study done by Stanley Milgram in 1963 tests the obedience in different types of people, but these people were told that the test was for a different scientific use. Results show that two-thirds of the participants went all the way by shocking the “learner” with the full 450-voltage after being told that “it [was] absolutely essential that [they] go on”
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
In 1974 Stanley Milgram conducted the classic study of obedience to authority. The study looked into how far individuals would be willing to go, and were asked could they deliver increasingly devastating electric shocks to a fellow human being, as they were requested to do so by the professor in charge of the experiment.
In “The Stanford Prison Experiment” Philip G. Zimbardo discusses an experiment he conducted, which consisted of college students portraying guards and prisoners in a simulated prison. Shortly after the experiment began, it was stopped, due to the mistreatment of the prisoners and the overall psychological abuse inflicted on them by the prison guards (Zimbardo 116). In “The Perils of Obedience” Stanley Milgram writes about a controversial experiment in which he requests volunteers to assist him in shocking participants who answer incorrectly to certain questions on the opposite side of a wall. The shock that the volunteers believe they are administering could cause great harm or even be deadly to the participants. After Milgram conducts
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
In 1961, psychology professor Stanley Milgram conducted quite the controversial experiment called the Milgram Shock Experiment. Milgram paid people four dollars an hour to attend a learning and memory in his lab that quickly transformed into something else entirely. Under the watch of Milgram, the person assigned to be the teacher, would read out words to the other person who was assigned as the student, and was hooked up to an electric shock machine in another room. Every time the student incorrectly repeated the words that was read out to him/her, the teacher then delivers a shock to the student. Starting at fifteen volts (labeled as “slight shock”), the teacher can increase the volts to all the way to four hundred and fifty volts (labeled as XXX). As the teachers reached the higher voltages, some of them refused to go on any further in fear that they might harm the students, defying Milgram’s authority. Some on the other hand, continued to increase the shock, even as the student yelled and pleaded for the shocks to stop till they fell silent. Once the experiment was finished, the person assigned as the teacher was soon to find out that the students were in fact not being shocked, and the cries of pains were prerecorded. The experiment was deemed unethical because of deception that the participants actually believed that they were harming an actual person, unaware that the student is an actor. Also that the participants were exposed to very stressful situations that could have harmed them psychologically and were not given the chance to withdraw from the
In 1961 Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment in the effect authority figures had on peoples’ moral judgements. Two subjects, one fully informed about the experiment and one not, and an experimenter were involved. The informed subject was assigned the role of “learner”, while the uninformed one was the “teacher”. The “teacher” was given a list of word pairs to teach to the “learner”—if the “learner” got one wrong, the “teacher” would press a button that would supposedly give the “learner” an electric shock, which would increase by 15 volts for every wrong answer. (In reality, the electric shocks were fabricated.) If the “teacher” expressed unease at any point, the experimenter would try and convince them to continue. The process was halted when the “teacher” would refuse even after this convincing. 16 variations of this experiment were conducted throughout the world. The results were shocking. Two-thirds of the participants went up to 450 volts, the highest level. All of them used 300 volts.
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