The Perils Of Obedience, By Stanley Milgram

Psychologists take the effort to contrast the influences of people in regard to thinking, awareness, feelings, actions, attitudes, and behavior. Society tends to form responses from how one person’s actions ultimately causes various stereotypes and prejudices to be generated. Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram, discusses various subjects such as impression, stereotypes and prejudices, attribution, attitudes, social influence, attraction, obedience and authority, groups, and helping behavior. Milgram explains, “A person does not get to see the whole situation but only a small part of it, and is thus unable to act without some kind of over-all direction. He yields to authority but in doing so are alienated from his own actions.” (Milgram 11). In this passage, the author shows how in a workplace, people are given small and narrow jobs which is arguably taking away human qualities. Due to the fact that, workers cannot see the full overview of the job that is being done and can only see the specific job that was designated, forces the workers to comply with authority, with the concept in mind that the workers are inferior. This works in many cases, if someone is told a small portion of a project is designated to them, instead of the full project; the worker will feel more inferior to the superior workers, which is an astute way to run an operation. Milgram also discusses, “Within the experimental setting, we find the three elements: position, status and action. Position

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

“Why is man so prone to obey?” People are herd animals because they realize that the power of solidarity can help them develop, and have strength to fight against difficulty. Therefore, they gather together to help each other and gradually become our society. Within a group or a society, there must be a leader and rules, which becomes government and laws. The government uses the laws to control and keep the society stable. In our society, people will be protected which makes them feel secure. In addition, they have to obey the laws to receive protection and not to be punished. Moreover, people can change their decision when they are under social pressure or traditional pressure. One thing is also important that if people have to take responsibilities

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, an American social psychologist, aggrandized many minds as he delved into a very common habit that humans exhibit every day. One could infer that it was his curiosity which prompted him to write on this topic provided that he was born into a Jewish family. This topic is the human behavior of obedience. “The Perils of Obedience” was written by Stanley Milgram in 1974. This essay is based upon the findings of his experiment he conducted at Yale University in 1961. The objective of the experiment was to find out how far an ordinary citizen would inflict pain on another because of his/her orders given by the experimental scientist. (Milgram 1)

The complexities of a human 's readiness to submit to someone else 's will have fascinated humankind since the development of societal gatherings. Just in late history there has been many investigations directed which so totally catch the layman 's creative energy as the submission tests led by Stanley Milgram. As one of only a handful couple of mental analyses to have such a consideration getting criticalness, Milgram found a concealed quality of the human mind that appeared to demonstrate a shrouded insane in even the most coy individual. Milgram presents his startling discoveries in "The Perils of Obedience". By first investigating what Milgram is endeavoring to find in his examination of acquiescenceis that it is conceivable to better

How far would you go to be obedient? At Yale University, Stanley Milgram set up an experiment testing how much pain a person would cause to an ordinary citizen, only with the reason of being told to do so by an experimental scientist. The subject is told that they are helping with an experiment on punishment-based learning and believe they are conducting this test on someone other than themself. What the subjects do not know is that the true experiment is testing them, not another person. The subjects send an increasing amount of pain to another person. If the subject wishes to discontinue, he must complete the experiment or clearly resist authority. What Milgram found in this study was that adults would go to severe lengths to obey their

The experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram have become one of the most controversial and most influential experiments in the world of psychology. In 1963 the Milgram experiments took place at Yale University, and tested subjects on obedience to authority. While reading Stanly Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience” the topic of authority to obedience is discussed by Milgram stating: “Obedience is one of the most basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to” (691). Submission to authority is not a new concept, but with the Milgram experiments it has been given a new insight to Obedience to authority. Milgram was inspired to conduct the experiments because of the events before and during World War II, and the Nazi’s ability to maintain control of the Jewish people. While the experiments performed were cruel and insensitive, I agree with the conclusions Milgram gained from the experiments because people are taught to obey authority from childhood, and Ordinary people can commit immoral acts and, defiance can result in punishment.

This experiment called for people to shock another human being when the researcher told them to. The results of this were shocking. 65 percent of participants were recorded to continue to the highest voltage of 450 volts to shock someone else. The concluding report showed that ordinary people were willing to shock others without hesitation when given orders by a higher authority, even when it was possible that the person being shocked could die. This is a result of being brought up in a fashion in which we should obey any authority

The study was observing how far a person would go inflicting pain onto another person. According to Milgram’s study, the subjects would rather please the experimenter and show him or her they can do the job rather than take on the responsibility that they are harming another human being. “The essence of obedience” as Milgram says is when the person follows orders for another person and is not held responsible for his or her own actions. It is much easier to do a task even if it means harming someone as in the experiment if the subject is not held liable for anyone. “The experimenter did not threaten the subjects with punishment-such as loss of income, community ostracism, or jail-for failure to obey” (Milgram 181). The subject did not really have a choice in the experiment, they were compliant, and when they expressed signs of tension or anxiety or even voiced their concerns, they were told to “continue” and that “the experiment must go on.” Obedience to authority is generally, what most people, as proven in Milgram’s experiment, tend to follow. Nevertheless, is obeying authority always the “right” thing to do?

Obedience is a facet of every society, it helps structure social life and maintain social order. However, there are instances where obedience can become destructive, as is the case when crimes of obedience are committed. Crimes of obedience can be most closely identified with war crimes or even to some extent torture. Many of the people who commit crimes of obedience, or who participate in torture may seem like normal people. This is exemplified in Stanley Milgram’s famous behavioral study of obedience. In his 1963 experiment Milgram revealed how strongly the participants complied with the experimenter’s demands to continue the harmful behavior, even though it was against the participant’s own beliefs (Milgram,

The Obedience study that was conducted by Stanley Milgrim in 1974 addressed a person’s obedience to an authority figure. The participants in the study were asked by a person in a lab coat (authority figure) to shock learners (who were confederates). Milgrim found that the participants in the study obeyed the authority figure, because they felt that they were not in control and were not responsible for the shocking of the learners (Gardner, Williams, & Sadri, 2007; Myers & Twenge, 2013). The idea of obedience is linked to the power of situations for people, which can induce seemingly normal people into the engagement of cruelty against other people (Myers & Twenge,

According to (Herrera, 2001) many people that participated in the Milgram obedience study found that they were more prone to being obedient to authority figures than to follow their own intuition. Some individuals are aware of their actions and mentally and emotionally knowingly what they are doing is ethically wrong but chooses to follow protocol

Milgram’s study of obedience was conducted in order to observe the conflict between personal morality, and the word of authority(McLeod 2007). In this study, Stanley Milgram set up a group of unsuspecting people to determine whether they will shock another human being(50th… 2011). These participants were men aged from twenty to fifty years old, all ranging in different professions(McLeod 2007). Milgram had them randomly select a role, either teachers or learners; however, this was deception, as it was set up so that the participants would always receive the “teacher” role(McLeod 2007). The learners, who were actually part of Milgram’s group of researchers, sat in a chair with electrodes strapped to them(). “Teachers” would ask a series of questions, and every time the “learner” would answer incorrectly, the participants were instructed to give them an intense shock of electricity by the push of a button(50th...2011).No matter how many times the learner pleaded for them to stop, the teacher was encouraged to continue giving the shocks(50th...2011).

In 1963 Stanley Milgram performed several experiments motivated to understand the dynamics of obedience. He created a simulated shock generator, which consisted of a large box with 30 switches labelled for each specific shock levels. During the experiment participants believed they were administering painful electric shocks using this device, unknowing that it was simulated and that the learners were confederates in the study. Milgram found that 65 % of participants obeyed when they were pressured, had lack of responsibility and/or were appraised by the teacher for their compliance. These findings suggest that obedience may not be a result of the kind of person you are but rather the type of situations you are positioned in. For instance, when individuals are pressured to