The Milgram Experiment: Intro To Law And Social Psychology

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 subjects of the experiment believed that they were taking part in a study on the relationship of learning and punishment. The subject would sit in a room and ask questions to an actor in another room, who was supposed to be another subject. In front of the questioner was a box that had a series of buttons labeled from 15 volts to 450 volts. The subject was told to shock the person every time they answered incorrectly, increasing the voltage each time. As the shocks got worse, the actor would make noise, bang on the wall, yell for help, etc. but the researcher would tell the subject to keep going. Milgrim found, contrary to many psychologists predictions, that sixty-five percent of the subjects delivered the shocks all the way up to 450 volts (Slater).

Often, researchers wonder why obedience has such a strong effect. Some researchers say that obedience is a conscious thing; however, some researchers also say that obedience comes from the fear of authority figures. What exactly does obedience and authority mean? Obedience is “compliance with that which is required by authority; subjection to rightful restraint or control.” (Obedience, 2003) Authority is “a legal or rightful power; a right to command or to act; power exercised buy a person in virtue of his office or trust; dominion; jurisdiction; authorization.” (Authority, 2003)

Prompted by this phenomenon, Stanley Milgram investigates this “potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct.” (Milgram 314) Milgram set up an experiment in which he intended “to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.” (Milgram 314) Thereby, observations could be made of how long a person would continue to inflict pain. “To extricate himself from this plight, the subject must make a clear break with authority.” (Milgram 315) The basic premise of the study being to learn how an ordinary person reacts when put under pressure to cause great physical harm to a stranger through a series of simulated electrical shocks. However, the subjects are under the impression that they were participating in a study of memory and learning. This is where Diana Baumrind takes issue with Milgram’s study. She feels that “by volunteering, the subject agrees implicitly to assume a posture of trust and obedience.” (Baumrind 326) Basically, Baumrind feels that the setting of a fairly innocuous sounding experiment in a safe, controlled environment of a lab causes the subject to have a false sense of safety in the experimenter’s experience. Therefore, the experiments are prone to produce skewed results, as well as potential psychological injury to the subject. Later analysis of

According to the Oxford dictionary Obedience is defined as a compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another's authority. In many situations authority demonstrates the ability to control man to go against their beliefs in what is morally right. Due to fear and the insecurities of man, authority may push the limits of society to a point where the individual may temporarily give up their identity. This is proven by The Stanford Prison experiment

Norman Chomsky once wrote “I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.” There is a true feeling of what authority can do if placed in situations that require someone to follow instructions. What happens to someone when they follow the orders of another

The Stanley Milgram Obedience experiment is an experiment to replicate Nazis following Hitler’s orders to kill Jews in World War II. Whereas, in this experiment, forty males were recruited to complete this study; they were told it was a memory and learning experiment. In this experiment, every time the subject (learner) answered incorrectly, the recruited male (teacher) would have to shock them. The results were: all forty subjects (teachers) obeyed up to 300 volts, and twenty-five of the so-called teachers, continued to give shocks up to the maximum level of 450 volts.

Proximity between the participant and the learner was changed, with it ranging from the learner not being heard or seen at all (yielding 100% obedience), to the participant holding down the learners hand and arm onto a metal plate, which they believed was shocking the learner (decreasing obedience to 30%). Milgram himself reported significant differences between these proximity conditions, but when Blass (1991) evaluated Milgram’s (1963) work, he reports the analyses and shows that regardless of whether a participant is close to the learner physically and emotionally, they still acted in a similar way. The fact that Milgram did not report these analyses also shows how there might have been some selective reporting in what he wanted the public to see. Blass’ (1991) analyses display how the situation was not necessarily that powerful, and that the participants acted in similar ways regardless of the different types of contexts they were put in. Furthermore, there was also another version of the study (state exactly which experiment this was) in which the participants could decide for themselves how much voltage to shock the learner to. It comes as a relief that they shocked significantly lower than the baseline conditions, showing that when the situation allows freedom, the individual can make a decision. However, I would argue that even though they had the freedom to administer the shock level of their choice, they still actually administered a

Yale University Psychologist, Stanley Milgram (1963) demonstrated an experiment called the Milgram's experiment. It was meant to be about the study of obedience and what people would do when others were in pain, demand to stop the experiment or continue following orders. It took place in 1961 a year after world war II, Milgram wanted to make inquires about obedience and if that was the reason for the nazi killings, due to the Germans listening to their orders no matter what the situation was. "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (Milgram, 1974). Milgram chose 2 participants at a time one was a teacher and the other would be the learner the teacher would

Stanley Milgram was a Yale psychologist that is famous for conducting the obedience experiments in 1961. Milgram had conducted a series of experiments during the 1960s that were related to obedience. The results of these experiments had demonstrated a disturbing yet powerful view into the power of authority that can exert from it some sort of obedience. Milgram’s experimentation had begun in 1961 after the trail of Adolph Eichmann has started slightly after World War II. Milgram was inspired by Eichmann’s defense’s premise that the man was simply following orders that resulted in the death of millions of Jews. Milgram conducted the experiment with the participation of forty men that were recruited through newspaper advertisement. Milgram had used paid participation method in which participants were paid a sum of $4.50. Milgram was to use a shock generator that started with 30 volts and increased with 15 volts up to the maximum of 450 volts. The main switches were labeled with terms such as: slight shock, moderate shock, danger, severe shock, and XXX. The participants were named as teachers who were to deliver a shock to students as punishment for incorrect answer to questions. The teacher participants had believed that they were delivering shock to students, but in actuality there was a bit of deception as students were just pretending to be shocked. With the progression of the experiment the teachers would hear the pleas of their participants to be released,

As one may know, social influence has been around for many years and continues to play a major role in society. Regardless of age, gender, race, or social class, a person’s change in behavior will somehow dependably influence someone else’s behavior. Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist, studied the effect of authority on obedience.

Case Study #3 – The Milgram Experiment If you were told by an authority figure to administer a high voltage shock to a possibly innocent person simply because it is “necessary,” and because the figure is intimidating and part of the authority above you, would you follow the order? Stanley Milgram, who was a psychologist from Yale University, set out to experiment on this idea beginning in the year 1961, to gain data to try and figure out the correlation between obedience to an authority and personal and ethical conscience. The idea for this study came from Milgram’s interest in the defense that the German Nuremberg war criminals who were put on trial gave for their actions during World War II: that they were just following orders and being

According to Cardwell (1996) obedience is a type of social influence whereby somebody acts in response to a direct order from another person. There is an implication the actor is made to respond in a way that they wouldn’t have otherwise done without the order. You are in no doubt when you are obeying an order (explicit). It is obvious when you are following an order and you won’t change your attitudes as you are behaving as instructed. We will always find ourselves in situations in which we are told to do things by other people, for example boss or supervisor at work. Within society we work in a hierarchy. We may disagree or resent the orders we are given even when they are legitimate. It is unlikely we will be given an order or instruction that goes against our conscience or involves us inflicting serious harm on another person.

This essay will explore to what extant does the empirical research can help us understand the aspect of obedience in human behavior. Many scientists and psychologists are interested in what triggers certain actions and emotions in humans. And so, different methods and techniques were used to help them identify and understand these behaviors. Methods such as, observation, lab experiments, case study and other. These methods helped them understand human nature and both negative and positive sides of it, to create and maintain healthy relationships with others within a society and identify different possible mental illnesses. Obedience is one of the behaviors that was studied by many researchers. And it is the compliance to an authority or

They used this anguish to describe mental confliction between stopping for the “learner” and continuing for science. This is evidence that participants are considering the experimenters expectations and not blindly obeying (Haslam and Reicher, 2012). Furthermore, Burger (2009) replicated aspects of Milgram’s experiment in an ethical manner, but found difficulties in gaining strong results. For example, Burger allowed a maximum voltage of 150mv (contrasting to Milgram’s 450mv) and could only predict whether participants would go further. Milgram’s unethical practices played critical roles in gaining the robust results he did.