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The Milgram Experiment Essay

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There are several factors that can contribute to a person blindly following any type of authority, one of which is routinization. The Asch study was originally intended to be a test on how willing the subjects were to comply with peer pressure, but it also shows how easily routinization will affect a subject’s mind. Milgram’s experiment was to find out how willing a subject was to obey an authority, but it, too, shows that routinization of the authority’s commands affects the way a subject will act. According to both the Milgram experiment and Ash’s study, routinization is the major factor that caused subjects to obey authorities to an extent that they, most likely, never would have before.
In the Asch study, the subjects were in a scenario …show more content…

Milgram thought at first it would have been easiest for the subjects to administer the shocks because the person the actor was receiving seemingly no pain from the shocks. As the actor started to show signs of distress and pain the subjects only had slight hesitation, but as the authority continuously told the subject the same instructions, the subject would willingly obey. Most of the subjects surprised Milgram and continued the experiment to the end. Milgram believed this was because the subject was routinely following the orders of their seeming authority. The change in reaction of the actor most of the way up the scale was minute enough in each step that each step seemed easier as the subject had just used the level below. According to Milgram, the subject would have thought that if the authority was okay with the next shock and the next shock was not a large jump in voltage, then it would be okay to just go up one more switch. By the time the subjects would have administered deadly shocks, the subject would have been firmly in the process of continuing to follow the original orders that had been repeated multiple times by the authority figure. All the routinization in play would have taken the subjects’ moral compasses and thrown them by the wayside. Only some people with strong morals would have been capable of breaking away from the routinization process and actually following their

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