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The Milgram Experiment of The 1960s Essay

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The Milgram experiment of the 1960s was designed to ascertain why so many Germans decided to support the Nazi cause. It sought to determine if people would be willing to contradict their conscience if they were commanded to do so by someone in authority. This was done with a psychologist commanding a teacher to administer an electric shock to a student each time a question was answered incorrectly. The results of the Milgram experiment help to explain why so many men in Nazi Germany were recruited to support the Nazi cause and serve as a warning against the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques by the United States government. The Milgram experiment was designed and performed by Yale University social psychologist Stanley Milgram in …show more content…

Milgram’s experiment sought to determine if a person would be obedient to an authoritative figure if the latter demanded that physical pain be inflicted upon another person as punishment. Milgram’s experiment consisted of three people: a teacher, a student, and an authoritative figure, or “experimenter.” Each person who volunteered for the experiment was given the role of the teacher. The teacher was instructed to punish the student by inflicting an increasingly stronger electric shock every time the student answered a question incorrectly. However, the teacher only believed that he or she was administering shocks. In reality, the student was not being harmed at all. This illusion was made complete by the student in the adjoining room banging on the wall and screaming, seemingly in pain. Once the administered shock reached the three hundred volt level, the student stopped responding, and the experimenter encouraged the teacher to continue increasing the shock level up to four hundred fifty volts. If the person acting as the teacher wished to stop the experiment, he or she was repeatedly prompted by the experimenter to continue (Cherry). Of the forty people involved in the experiment, sixty-five percent of them delivered the maximum shock, despite the fact that they thought they were causing intense pain to the student. Additionally, although the participants seemed to experience growing agitation and stress as a result of

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