Summary Of ' The Perils Of Obedience ' Essay

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.

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 "The Perils of Obedience" and Philip G. Zimbardo's "The Stanford Prison Experiment" both effectively use experiments to discuss factors that effect one's obedience to authority. Milgram's experiment involves a test subject, also called the teacher, who is asked by an authority figure, or the "experimenter" to give out question to a learner. If the learner answers incorrectly, the teacher is asked to deliver shocks to the student that increase in voltage each time. Conflict arises when the learner begins to cry out in pain, and the teacher must decide to stop and listen to the learner's pleas, or obey the experimenter. Both the experimenter and the learner are actors, while the teacher remains oblivious to the experiment. The results show twenty-five out of forty learners obeying the authority to the end, administrating 450 volts (Milgram 80). Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment consists of twenty-one college aged males, ten of which are assigned as prisoners, and eleven of which are assigned as guards. The subjects are placed in a mock prison, where they acted in ways they did not know was possible, even though they are aware of being in an experiment: the guards frequently harass and torment the prisoners in various manners due to being deindividualized. Though Milgram explains the power of the situation causing obedience more fairly, Zimbardo more effectively explains the impact of wanting to please others. Though Milgram and Zimbardo both logical

The purpose of Stanley Milgram writing his “The Perils of Obedience,” is to show to what extent an individual would contradict his/her moral convictions because of the orders of an authority figure (Milgram 78). He constructed an experiment wherein an experimenter instructs a naïve subject to inflict a series of shocks of increasing voltage on a protesting actor. Contrary to Milgram’s expectations, about sixty percent of the subjects administered the highest voltage shock. (Milgram 80). According to Milgram, experiment variations disproved the theory that the subjects were sadists. (Milgram 85). Milgram states that although the subjects are against their actions, they desire to please the experimenter, and they often

Humanity will always question the idea of obedience. Two prestigious psychologists, Stanley Milgram and Philip G. Zimbardo, conducted practical obedience experiments with astonishing results. Shocked by the amount of immoral obedience, both doctors wrote articles exploring the reasoning for the test subjects ' unorthodox manners. In "The Perils of Obedience" by Milgram and "The Stanford Prison Experiment" by Zimbardo, the professionals reflect their thoughts in a logical manner. Milgram 's experiment consisted of a teacher, learner, and experimenter: the teacher was the test subject and was commanded to administer a shock by the experimenter. Upon switching the generator on, the learner-who was actually an actor-would jerk, cry, and occasionally seem unconscious. Expecting most subjects to stall the experiment, Milgram witnessed the exact opposite. Zimbardo, on the other hand, staged a mock prison, whereas half the subjects were guards and the other half were prisoners. Every test subject knew they were in an experiment and complied with the two week trial. However, the majority of the test subjects-particularly the guards-found themselves fitting into the mock prison all too well: abusing, insulting, and yelling obscenities at prisoners was commonplace, compelling many prisoners to appear insane. The driving force for immoral obedience is contributed to several factors: As seen in the film A Few Good Men by director Rob Reiner, when obedience causing harm undergoes

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.

As we grow up our parents teach us how to be respectful and very well-mannered. They enforce the importance of saying, “Please, thank you, and excuse me,” when needed. Parents also insist we listen and respect our elders, because they have authority over the world since they have been here the longest. We were raised to comply with the demand of someone who had authority over us. According to Patricia Werhane (1), “In the early1960’s Stanley Milgram undertook his noteworthy study of human obedience to authority. Puzzled by the question of how otherwise decent people could knowingly contribute to the massive genocide of the Holocaust during World War II, Milgram designed an experiment that sought to cause a conflict between one’s willingness to obey authority and one’s personal conscience.”

Machiavelli declares that whatever you do, be it just or evil, if you know your actions will bring favorable results then you are not responsible for the manner, corrupt or blameless, in which they were obtained. This reasoning defines a timeless question: do the ends really justify the means? R. J. Herrnstein, author of “Measuring Evil”, believes they do, “A small, temporary loss of a few peoples comfort and privacy seems a bearable price for a large reduction in ignorance” (88). But is it not harsh to allow few to be terrorized for the benefit of many? When evaluating the Milgram experiment, summarized in Milgram’s article “The Perils of Obedience”, Diana Baumrind, writer of “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience”,

The film, A Few Good Men, showcases military lawyer, Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, defending two United States Marines, Lance Corporal Harold Dawson and Private Louden Downey, who were accused of murdering a fellow Marine Corps member, Private William Santiago. The obedience of the Marines was assessed when Colonel Jessup ordered Lance Corporal Dawson and Private Downey to perform a “code red,” a brutal punishment made illegal by the government, on Private Santiago in order to coerce him into becoming an improved Marine. Similarly, in the article “The Perils of Obedience,” Stanley Milgram conducted a psychological experiment that observed the extent at which an individual will obey orders. The experiment created a scenario where an unknowing member

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist from Yale University, conducted a series of experiments on obedience to explain some of the concentration camp horrors perpetrated during World War II. He tested the subjects' willingness to cause pain to another person if instructed to by an authority figure.

Upon review it appears that clearly the reactions of the guards and prisoners in the Stanford prison experiment supported Milgram’s obedience theory. However, there are several key components of the prison experiment that differed from Milgram’s own experiment. For example, the ad itself may have helped create some of the behaviors observed. Milgram’s experiment utilized the same media to accrue participants, but specifically called for participants take part in a memory study; this presentation is relatively innocuous and truly not entirely representative of what Milgram’s intentions were. Because the ad Milgram ran did not reveal its purpose or describe the setting in which it would take place, participants walked into the experiment with an open mind, unsure what to expect. Zimbardo’s experiment, on the other hand, stated specifically it was a prison experiment. By declaring this in their ad, were the experimenters already implanting their subject’s behavior? Psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked this question in a 2007 study. To test the ad itself, they recreated the original ad as well as an alternate version that omitted the words “prison life.” They discovered through testing that applicants who applied for the prison study showed significantly higher tendencies toward aggressiveness, narcissism, authoritarianism and social dominance while scoring lower on empathy and altruism. (Konnikova, 1) The study is also wildly popular in its portrayal of the

Milgram’s (1963) study of obedience was a laboratory study to investigate how far people will go in obeying authority. The experiment took place at Yale University; this was a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Milgram invented the experiment to find out,"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 experiment involved 40 males aged between 20 and 50 from a range of background’s i.e. Construction workers to Doctors. All participants were from the New Haven area in the United States of America. The subjects had all applied to be involved in the study through a local newspaper advertisement and were paid $4.50(Grahame, 2009).

Stanley Milgram was a psychology professor at Yale University, a prestigious school in Connecticut. He was interested in why so many German people in the 1930s and 1940s had followed instructions which involved causing pain or killing innocent human beings. His experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments that measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.

Stanley Milgram’s (1963), Behavioral Study of Obedience measured how far an ordinary subject will go beyond their fundamental moral character to comply with direction from

Stanley Milgram, a famous social psychologist, and student of Solomon Asch, conducted a controversial experiment in 1961, investigating obedience to authority (1974). The experiment was held to see if a subject would do something an authority figure tells them, even if it conflicts with their personal beliefs and morals. He even once said, "The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act (Cherry).” This essay will go over what Milgram’s intent was in this experiment and what it really did for society.