The Milgram Experiment Summary

What would you do if your boss asked you to do something that inflicts pain on another human? Would you still do it? Keep in mind, if you did not comply you would be fired. This concept was studied by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University. He composed an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Stanley Milgram conducted this experiment because of his curiosity with World War II. Adolf Hitler gave orders to kill millions, and his army completed this cruel act of killing innocent people. Was it because of this concept obedience to authority? Even though obedience is being respectful there must be a point when obedience is to much, for instance killing someone is very immoral and the worst crime. When a boss or elder is asking you to injure someone else for a job, you should know that this is not a good job or it is not one you should partake in. Stanley Milgram conducted this experiment to figure out if we as humans were weak under peer pressure. Hitler was one man that was extremely powerful, one who has that amount of power can be consumed by the power and do wrong, because of the thought of wanting more and more. Once you have hit that point in your life you may want to be the best, which inturn means you do what you must to get to the top, even if that means asking people to do dirty work for you. Hitler did that exactly, he was very

Stanley Milgram: 'electric shock' experiments (1963) - also showed the power of the situation in influencing behaviour. 65% of people could be easily induced into giving a stranger an electric shock of 450V (enough to kill someone). 100% of people could be influenced into giving a 275V shock.

The Milgram experiment is the famous study. Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be into the atrocities committed by Germans WWII. People should know about the Milgram experiment because it show how to make people obedient, people less obedient and learn people from different cultures.

A Yale University psychologist named Stanley Milgram started a research experiment that investigated the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience (McLeod, 2007). This study was conducted in response to the Nuremburg Trials in Germany, as German officials had claimed they were just following orders that were given to them by their superiors. Milgram formulated the experiment so that it could 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). However, the objectives of this experiment were not achieved. The objectives were not achieved because the act of shocking a person cannot be compared to the genocide the Germans committed during WWII. Also, Milgram wanted to study whether the Germans were more obedient to authority figures, but he

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

The Milgram’s Experiment was an experiment to see how authority figures effects the way people obey conducted by Social psychology by the name Stanley Milgram this experiment was conducted in 1969. Milgram hired about 500 men between the ages of 20 and 50 from a newspaper ad he had placed. Milgram was looking for men that came from all walks in life. Milgram did not care if they were educated, uneducated, rich or poor he wanted them all. The men that were chosen to participate in the experiment were told that they would be paid 4.50 for one hour of their time if they participated in the experiment.

In Stanley Milgram 's essay Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority, the self-proclaimed "social psychologist" conducted a study while working as a psychologist at Yale University. The primary goal of Milgram 's experiment was to measure the desire of the participants to shock a learner in a controlled situation. The experiment was based on three primary roles: the authoritative figure, the learner, and the teachers. The authoritative figure instructed the teachers to shock the learner when they answered the question wrong. This form of punishment is typically believed to conflict with personal morals and the main reason for the experiment was to evaluate the teacher 's response to

While I feel these two experiments give insight to how people can act in certain circumstances, they are without doubt unethical by many standards. I would not say that the reward outweighed the risk at all and I personally would not want to participate or allow such an experiment to happen.

They also weren’t aware of the ‘electric shocks’ being fake. The participants were free to leave at any time but wasn’t aware of this as when they questioned anything the prods used by the ‘experimenter’ suggested that they couldn’t. The study was unethical as participants were put in situations which could have caused psychological harm and they presented certain behaviours such as extreme nervousness, tension, sweating, trembling and laughter which shows signs of distress an even three of the participants even had seizures. Milgram couldn’t tell the participants that the experiment was fixed as it wouldn’t have shown real levels of obedience. After the study, there was a debrief for the participants where they were introduced to Mr Wallace and told that he wasn’t actually electrocuted so the participants could see that he was okay and no harm was brought to him, even though psychological harm may have been brought to the participants.

During the procedure, there wasn’t a learner on the other side. It was a voice recording so each participant (teacher) was equal on what they were hearing so it couldn’t differ on the results. This recording had a fact that could have stopped the teacher to continue. The recording said that the learner had a heart condition. Although Milgram expected most of them to stop after 150 volts, they obeyed the orders of the white-collar experimenter. This experiment couldn’t have been carried out in nowadays because of the ethical issues. The experimenters have to be fully aware and notified about the procedure but if they were told that the main focus of the experiment was to test obedience, they wouldn’t have got complete true results. An important critique of this experiment is that although there are a wide range of occupation, they were all males. Obedience in females could have resulted differently. Another interesting factor of this study that the same terms were carried out again but this time the learner and the teacher could see each other. This difference effected the obedience level as the teacher could see what he was doing to the

Today, Milgram’s experiment would be conducted differently; prior approval of members of the institutional review board would ensure the rights of the individuals participating. The primary concern Milgram’s experiment was that the participants in the experiment were explicitly deceived, both about the nature of the study and about the reality of the electric shock. The procedure of Milgram’s experiment study would be considered unethical and would be not be approved by the standards upheld today. People involved in making the research focus on how to protect best the participants as well as a valid purpose of the study. Protective guidelines like the IRB and inform consent are made to ensure ethical research. An ethics panel must approve research

Milgram deceived his participants through vaguely informing them of the study therefore they weren’t aware of the true nature of the study. He also told them that they would be administering ‘real’ electric shocks to a ‘real’ participant therefore gauging an accurate reaction to the prods. Furthermore, he didn’t stick to his statement that they could withdraw at any time, making them forget that they have the ability to be defiant. Milgram also didn’t consider the long term effects that these participants may face after the study.

During the current events in the world, we tend to believe that we wouldn’t have obeyed a command or a favor that was against who we are and our beliefs. Is true that we wouldn't obey or we are oblivious of how we will act? Psychologists before Milgram’s experiment expected most people will refuse to obey rising the amount of shock, but the reality was way off as more than 65% of the participants delivered the maximum shock. What are the reasons behind the surprising level of obedience observed in Milgram’s experiment specifically, and in real life in general? In my opinion, no one can determine if they would be more or less likely to fall prey to obedience, especially if they don’t have any psychological disorders.

Compliance has been defined as a change in an individual’s behaviour due to the request of another person or group despite refusing or declining being possible, (Wiggins, Olsen and Breckler, 2006). In Milgram’s experiment this idea was investigated by testing an individual’s likelihood to comply with instructions given by a perceived authority figure. This was conducted by designating participants as the teachers and a confederate – who posed as a participant – as the learner. The learner was placed in a room, separate to the teacher and researcher, and had electrodes attached to his arms, while the teacher’s room held an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked with their voltage level and the severity of the shock impact (McLeod,

The results came back conclusive on the behalf of peer pressure. In Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65% of participants administered the strongest voltage shock (450), although many were not comfortable in doing so. At one point, every single participant in the experiment paused and inquired about why the learners were being shocked for this, but many continued once informed that the testing was acceptable.