The Authority Of Culture : Milgram 's Obedience Experiment

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

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.

The participant was not given full disclose about the details of the experiment, making the research untruthful. Freedom was another principle that was violated since the participants’ ability to withdraw from the experiment was highly discouraged. Even though it was possible to withdraw, not much power was given to the participant. Lastly, Milgram was neither altruistic nor giving of dignity to the participant. Participants showed signs of stress and possible psychological damage due to the process of harming another individual, but that did not stop the experiment. Milgram instructed the participants to continue the study until the very end. In order to make this experiment more ethical, Milgram should have set up the experiment in a way that did not give the illusion of causing harm to another human being. Also, participants should have been able to withdraw from the experiment without questioning. Lastly, Milgram should have known to stop the study once he saw the participant showing signs of distress and pain. This is to cause less harm to the participant and promote

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

Milgram proved his belief be a series of 20 experiments with 1000 participants. He studied how people would respond to outright commands given by someone of authority to give punishment on a learning. So, if the learner gives the wrong answer the teacher(participant) would admit a bolt of electric shock delivered by a switch. Would the participants be obedient to the social constraints of authority or disobey the authority(experimenter), hence, delivering a bolt of shock or not delivering a bolt of shock? Also, at what level will the participant disobey and refuse to give punishment to the learner? Personally, I feel my best choice if I was a participant in the study is the choice from the beginning of the experiment to not continue to participate. Still, I think it is very possible to get wrapped up in wanting to please the authorities persuasion and submit to their direction, then, the outcome is giving punishment to the learner long after my moral sense tells me to stop. Ultimately, if the study was conducted today many people believe our culture in America has not changed enough to get a different outcome in a study like Milgram’s

Stanley Milgram, established a new course of study in the psychology of obedience. The purpose of his experiment was to have an idea of to see how people react the autocritical standard; during his experiment, he recorded how people will behave when given a source of power. Milgram gained this idea after the World War II. He believed that some people had the ability to essentially block out human thoughts of morals, ethics, and sympathetics when assigned to a job. The core issue that Milgram faced was finding a way to create a situation to test his theory; because behavior is such a complicated aspect of psychology to test, Milgram had to properly execute the experiment without physical harm from one person to another.

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 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 1961, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment on a group’s obedience to authority. This experiment has encountered intense scrutiny ever since its findings were first published in 1963; many people question the ethics and validity of the experiment. Multitudes of researchers have taken it upon themselves to determine the answers to the questions (McLeod). Based on new guidelines for ethics, Stanley Milgram’s experiment on the obedience to authority was neither ethical nor valid.

Stanley Milgram, an American social psychologist, writes in his article “The Perils of Obedience” about an experiment he designed which forced participants to either obey the demands of an authority figure, in this case the experimenter, or to turn against obedience and refuse to proceed in the experiment (Milgram 78). He found from this experiment that a minority of the participants refused to obey orders by the experimenter; therefore, most of the participants followed the orders given by the experimenter knowing it would result in the learner’s pain (Milgram 80). Milgram believes his results did not prove that these participants were sadists or mass murderers; however, his results did prove that ordinary people simply obeying orders can

Stanley MIlgram is a Yale University social psychologist who wrote “Behavioral Study of Obedience”, an article which granted him many awards and is now considered a landmark. In this piece, he evaluates the extent to which a participant is willing to conform to an authority figure who commands him to execute acts that conflict with his moral beliefs. Milgram discovers that the majority of participants do obey to authority. In this research, the subjects are misled because they are part of a learning experience that is not about what they are told. This experiment was appropriate despite this. Throughout the process, subjects are exposed to various signs that show them

During the post-Holocaust era, Stanley Milgram investigated how people respond to authority when the order contradicts their ethical values. Would they harm innocents under orders? Milgram researched obedience by having men come in to a lab and pose as teachers. Their task was to punish the learner, a secretly-hired actor, by instigating electrical shocks whenever he failed. An experimenter, the authority, firmly commanded the subject to continue testing the learner. Although Milgram hypothesized a higher disobedience, 65% of subjects shocked the learner to the maximum voltage (p.34). He concluded obedience clouded people’s morals. Why? People are conditioned to follow authority.

Stanley Milgram was disturbed by how easily people obeyed Hitler during World War II. He wanted to understand what made all of those people treat Jews so poorly in such a short amount of time. Milgram used this confusion to put together a well thought out experiment about obedience between a subject and a person of authority. This turned out to be one of the most influential experiments ever performed. He wanted to find out if people’s morality to others could outweigh their natural obedience to an authority figure. Milgram became a profound social psychologist through his background, experiment and his findings.

In addition to this experiment another group of psychologist sought to compare the cross-cultural differences in obedience. It poses a key question in asking whether the United States’ obedience level differ from that of other countries (Blass, 2012). Blass (2012, p.203) noted that the findings reported across different culture that the findings obtained by Milgram on obedience can be generalised and that there is no direct correlation between an individual’s

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.