Stanley Milgram's The Perils Of Obedience

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

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

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).

- Quite a common sign of tension was nervous laughing fits (14 out of 40 participants), which seemed entirely out of place, even bizarre. - On one occasion, a participant had such a violently convulsive seizure that the experiment had to be

Even though the experimenter takes full responsibility of what happens to the learner, the teacher feels horrible about their actions. The experiment causes discomfort for both the teacher and the learner. As the shocks grow stronger, tension begins to arise inside of the teacher. Hesitating slowly consumes the teacher, but the experimenter commands him to pursue. After hesitation, the teacher’s ethics get in the way of what they are told to do.

Milgram first tested his experiments on Yale students. Milgram's hypothesis stated that most of the teachers would not go beyond 150 volts (only 4%), as their consciousness would intervene. The results of Milgram's first experiment was far from his prediction. When Milgram performs his first test on Yale students, many argued that the students were too competitive and aggressive the results wouldn't be accurate for the majority. Milgram further expanded his subject pool to middle-class adults, white collar, and industrial workers. He found that all of the groups held identical results with the Yale students, with 60% of the subjects complying all the way to 450 volts.

The Milgram experiment is one of the most controversial psychology experiments of the past century. I was familiar with it prior to accessing the simulation on the elearning site from an ABC television Four Corners episode on the nature of torture. So when I participated in the simulation, I stopped administering the shock at the first sign of distress from the subject at thirty watts. If I was in the actual Milgram experiment I would like to believe that I would have behaved in the same way. Human nature dictates that we believe that only abnormal people are capable of sinister behavior. This belief that internal attributions cause certain behaviours assures us of some stability and security in our day-to-day lives and yet the

“Saul McLeod.” The Milgram Experiment, Saul Mcleod, 1 Jan. 1970, www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html. American Psychological Association, American Psychological Association, www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx?item=3. There were a lot of things wrong with The Milgram Experiment that needed to be changed to meet the APA's Code of Conduct. First “Principle E: Respect for People's Rights and Dignity” that something Milgram Experiment didn’t have, again when the participant wanted to quit the scientist wanted to continue with the experiment not caring to see if the subject was alright or alive. Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, there were 30 switches on the shock generator, as a result, each time when the subject makes a mistake, increasing the level of electric shock that can easily harm them. If the participants refused to administer a shock or can’t continue they were giving prods to ensure they continued. My conclusion The Milgram Experiment is that I understand people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even though of harming an innocent human being. People tend to obey orders whatever they are told too and believe whoever is telling them what to

The participant believed he was delivering real shocks, but the learner was a confederate who pretended to be shocked. Once the 300 volt level was reached the learner would bang the wall and demand to be released, or become silent and refuse to answer questions. The experimenter instructed the teacher to treat this as an incorrect response and to deliver a further shock. Out of the 40 participants, 26 delivered the maximum shocks while 14 stopped before reaching the higher levels. Many of the participants became extremely agitated, distraught and angry at the experimenter (Cherry,

In the experiment there would be a teacher and a learner even though the real focus would be on the teacher, and this would help Milgram test his theory. Milgram designed the experiment and remained deceitful on the actual events that would be taking place. Milgram states “The teacher is a genuinely naïve subject who has come to the laboratory for the experiment” (693).The teacher believed they would administer shocks to the

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

Milgram's most famous experiment, rooted his knowledge of Nazi war crimes and groupthink, involved orchestrating an environment in which seemingly ordinary people were encouraged to administer what they believed to be fatal electric shocks to other experimental subjects (who were really Milgram's confederates). "The overwhelming majority complied, and roughly 65 per cent of subjects continued to administer shocks up to the maximum of 450 volts despite the apparent screams of pain from their victim," results that have been replicated cross-culturally (Russell 2009). In a similar experiment which replicated Milgram's findings, seminarians were unwilling to help someone in physical distress when instructed to hurry from one building to another to deliver a moral sermon (Russell 2009).

The subjects were informed that the punishment would not cause permanent tissue damage, however, could be extremely painful. The subjects observed the learner/accomplice being prepared with electrodes strapped in a chair. The teacher/subjects read a series of word-pairs to the learner then read the first word of the pair along with four terms. The learner’s role was to pair the first word with the correct term (Milgram, 1963). The learner would then press one of four switches attached to an electrical shock generator indicating his response. Unknown to the teacher, “in all conditions the learner gives a predetermined set of responses to the word pair test, based on the schedule of approximately three wrong answers to one correct answer” (Milgram, 1963).

After the experiment was concluded, Milgram found the roughly sixty-five percent of the participants continued on to the maximum 459 volts and that no participants stopped administering shocks before 300 volts. From a qualitative standpoint, the participants showed indicated their stress levels through sweat and trembles. The subjects’ inability to depart from the influence of the experimenters demonstrated a factor of compliance in the presence of and authority figure.

(Brennan 2016). All the students surveyed believed that only a very small percentage of teachers would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally surveyed his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few participants would progress beyond a very strong shock. In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65% of the experiment participants gave the maximum 450-volt shock. Milgram however also noticed their behaviour. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment). Many were very uncomfortable administrating the shocks. At some point throughout the experiment, every participant stopped and questioned the experiment; some said they would refund the money they were paid for taking part in the experiment. Throughout the experiment, participants displayed varying degrees of anxious behaviour. Subjects were sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, groaning, digging their fingernails into their skin, and some were even having nervous laughing fits or seizures. (McLeod,