Stanley Milgram The Perils Of Obedience Summary

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.

In Stanley Milgram’s ‘The Perils of Obedience’, Milgram reports from his studies of how far an individual can go in obedience to instructions and he pointed out that individuals can go as far as causing serious harm to the other people. Basically, the experiments are meant to test the choice that an individual would make when faced with the conflict of choosing between obedience to authority and obedience to one’s conscience. From the tests, it was found out that a number of people would go against their own conscience of choosing between what is wrong and what is right so as to please the individual in authority (Milgram 317). However, the experiments conducted by Milgram caused a wide range of controversy for instance; according to Diana Baumrind, the experiments were immoral. Baumrind notes in ‘Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience’ that Milgram did not only entrap his subjects, but he also potentially caused harm to his subjects (Baumrind 329). Based on the arguments that have been presented by the two authors, it is apparent that the two authors are concerned with real life situations, authority and ethics but the difference is that they both view these perspectives from different points of view as indicated by their writings. By and large, they also tend to show the importance or the insignificance of the experiments.

Many various members of the populace who believed that only a few would rais it to the highest level of 450 volts, were wrong in their predictions. The majority of subjects obeyed the experimenters' orders to the very end of the experiment by administering the highest voltage three times. As the first experiments were conducted on Yale undergraduates, some believed that the results were inconclusive due to the competitive nature of the students. However, the results of the experiment were the same when Milgram tested "ordinary" people. When the experiments were repeated in other areas of the world, the level of obedience was even higher than those

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.

The two studies being analyzed today are the Stanly Milgram experiment and the Slater experiment. The two similar experiments yielded information about obedience to authority that explains the correlation in society between authority, obedience, and morality. Despite the major ethical problems in the Milgram experiment, it is known in social psychology today that human beings will follow orders from authority figures even to the extent of inflicting harm on another. However, even with this fact, it is also known that there is limits to such obedience.

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.

In the chapter "The Dilemma of Obedience" of the book Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View, Stanley Milgram explores the concept of obedience to authority, and why people cannot defy authority even the situation is totally conflicting with morality. He introduces his ideas by giving the definition of obedience, and mentions Nazi extermination as an instance of obedience, which contradicts with moral values. According to Milgram, obedience idiosyncratically binds humankind to systems of authority, and links the individual action to political purpose. In terms of observations, obedience accepted as an inveterate behavior inclination, and obeying a system of authority has been comprehended as

In the article, “The Perils of Obedience,” Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, published the findings of his infamous human authority experiment. During this trial, human subjects were tested to discern how far one will go in order to obey the commands of an authority figure. The test subjects were fooled into believing someone was actually being shocked; however, the reality was the other person was simply an actor and never received any shocks. The results were astounding: sixty-five percent of the subjects continued the entire 450 volts, while the rest lasted until at least 300 volts. In response to the experiment, Diana Baumrind, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkley, examined the actions and moral issues executed by

Each time the question asked was answered incorrectly the voltage of shock would be increased. The “student” had been an actor hired to react to each shock, as the shock was to increase so did their reactions to appeal to the “teacher’s” empathy. When the “teachers” had reached a dangerous high voltage and continued to do so it demonstrated a form of blind authority. Blind authority is obeying the law only because it is a law, convinced your actions are okay because one is obeying orders of an authority greater than man. It is apparent that this is blind authority due to the “teachers” questioning if they should continue the experiment and demonstrating feeling guilt or discomfort in their task given. Although the “teachers” may have felt their task given was wrong they continued to do so because a figure of authority assured them it was okay, they were following the rules

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 his article, Milgram discusses how “for many people, obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct”(Milgram 579). Milgram set up an experiment to test the obedience of ordinary people. He tested authority vs the morals of the subjects. He had no theory when he

The results showed that two-thirds of the participants continued on as ordered to the 450volts and the other ones shocked the learner to 300 volts. Milgram tested 636 people in 18 different variations of the experiment. He changed location conditions, the number of teachers, whether or not the teacher (participant) was touched, and changed the clothing of the experimenter (put on a lab coat). Ordinary people can carry out orders or even cause extreme harm to another individual if given by a person of authority. Being obedient is ingrained into us from an early age.

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

2. In the film The Power of the Situation, various social experiments that examined human conformity were shown. Of these experiments, the Milgram Experiment, was conducted with a focus on obedience to an authority figure, and one’s own conscience. This experiment was brought about in order to attempt to confirm Nazi soldier’s testimonials that “obedience,” or “following orders” was the reason they committed their crimes. Within the experiment itself, Milgram had three people involved, the learner (working with Milgram) who was supposedly hooked up to a machine that was to deliver shocks when the switch was hit by the teacher, who was a random person selected for the experiment.