The Perils Of Obedience By Stanley Milgram

When Mrs. Brant started with the experiment she had no problem with it at first. After starting to hear the learner's sounds of agony, she turned to the experimenter questioning him if she should continue; the experimenter without hesitation commanded her to do so. A second later she asked him again, then remarking firmly. She discussed with the experimenter about the learner's medical condition. In this particular case the learner has heart problems. The experimenter explained to Mrs. Brant that the shocks may be painful but they are not dangerous and again asked her to continue with the experiment. At that point she was not willing to ask the experimenter to stop anymore; she then wanted to ask the learner himself. She told the experimenter that she would continue only if the learner wished to. The experimenter once again told her she had no choice and that she was obligated to continue. She then refused to go further and the experiment was terminated.

In Stanley Milgram’s ‘The Perils of Obedience’, Milgram reports from his studies of how far an individual can go in obedience to instructions and he pointed out that individuals can go as far as causing serious harm to the other people. Basically, the experiments are meant to test the choice that an individual would make when faced with the conflict of choosing between obedience to authority and obedience to one’s conscience. From the tests, it was found out that a number of people would go against their own conscience of choosing between what is wrong and what is right so as to please the individual in authority (Milgram 317). However, the experiments conducted by Milgram caused a wide range of controversy for instance; according to Diana Baumrind, the experiments were immoral. Baumrind notes in ‘Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience’ that Milgram did not only entrap his subjects, but he also potentially caused harm to his subjects (Baumrind 329). Based on the arguments that have been presented by the two authors, it is apparent that the two authors are concerned with real life situations, authority and ethics but the difference is that they both view these perspectives from different points of view as indicated by their writings. By and large, they also tend to show the importance or the insignificance of the experiments.

In "The Perils of Obedience," Stanley Milgram conducted a study that tests the conflict between obedience to authority and one's own conscience. Through the experiments, Milgram discovered that the majority of people would go against their own decisions of right and wrong to appease the requests of an authority figure.

The Milgram experiment was conducted in 1963 by Stanley Milgram in order to focus on the conflict between obedience to authority and to personal conscience. The experiment consisted of 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, and who’s jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. The roles of this experiment included a learner, teacher, and researcher. The participant was deemed the teacher and was in the same room as the researcher. The learner, who was also a paid actor, was put into the next room and strapped into an electric chair. The teacher administered a test to the learner, and for each question that was incorrect, the learner was to receive an electric shock by the teacher, increasing the level of shock each time. The shock generator ranged from

Batta obeys the orders of the experimenter and pays no attention to the cries and complains of the learner. Batta administers all the way up to the 450 volt shock and feels glad to have helped with the experiment. Batta did not feel as though he was responsible for the life of the learner but it was his duty to finish the task at hand. This was the brutal and astonishing experiment that Milgram chose to show that some people are very obedient to anything the authority figures order. The heading of this particular section is intriguing and pulls the reader in to find out what happen in this case. He slowly builds up to the twist of the results to shock the audience. The organization of the article made the results of the experiment more unexpected, surprising and effective Milgram did a great job within his organization and ability to portray his studies to his audience.

The control panel was adorned with 30 switches, labeled from 15 volts or a slight shock to 450 volts, which was labeled “XXX”, implying a lethal dose of voltage. However, the voltage was labeled incorrectly and inflated as to intimidate the subject. As the rooms were adjacent, the subject could hear Milgram’s colleagues cry out in agony when they were shocked, and the subject began to start questioning the researcher about the condition of their “student” and asked, and eventually demanded that they could leave. Each time, the researcher would provide a prod to continue forth. If one prod was disobeyed, then the researcher would escalate to the next prod. The prods were “1. Please continue.”, 2. “The experiment requires that you continue.”, 3. “It is absolutely essential that you continue.”, and 4. “You have no other choice than to continue.”

The Milgram Obedience Experiment was misleading but definitely had a purpose that gave sociologist more understanding to human obedience. The research was a deviant situation, which is ?a violation of social norm? 1,

Milgram's experiment was believed to "effect an alteration in the subject's self-image"(Baumrind 332). Normal people would go into Milgram's lab expecting to just take part in an experiment, but would in fact be traumatized for possibly the rest of their life. Not only was self-image jeopardized, but so was the subject's trust in the experimenter. Because of this experiment, many of the adults that took part in this experiment are believed, by Baumrind, to have the inability to "trust adult authorities in the future" (332). When told the truth about the experiment, the subject was probably embarrassed and felt like a fool. Many of the subjects experienced severe distress after the experiment. This could be from the anger that they wanted to express towards the experimenter or from the shock of what had just happened to them. Baumrind makes some very convincing points about the disaster that is caused to many of the subjects, but Milgram believes differently. Milgram believed that this experiment provided a way of release for these sadistic impulses. While many might have had negative effects, many responded postively to the survey shown in Milgram's study. This experiment taught the subjects a little something about themselves. It also showed a side of themselves that maybe they didn't know they had. It made many of them hope that they would "deal more effectively with any future conflicts of values" (Milgram 323). With the whole trust issue, if the experimenter

One conclusion is that most people are willing to do whatever an authority figure tells them to do. Most people believe that an authority figure probably knows more than they do so they are willing to do what authority figures say. Another important conclusion from his experiment is that people are easily deceived. They are willing to look past their own moral judgements and do what they are told to do. They believe in what an authority figure says even if it is not true. A third conclusion about human behavior is that there is no exact personality trait that is linked with defiance or obedience. This means that our view of authority is most likely learned through observational learning. It is engrained in children to listen to authority figures. Through school, work, and our parents people’s behavior toward authority figures are molded. Those are the three most important conclusions about human behavior that were gained through Milgram’s

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?

Milgram theorized that if a person was asked to shock another person within an experiment, they would quit before reaching high voltages. The three roles in his experiment would be the learner, the experimenter, and the teacher; the subject of Milgram’s study was

Stanley Milgram was a psychology professor at Yale University, a prestigious school in Connecticut. He was interested in why so many German people in the 1930s and 1940s had followed instructions which involved causing pain or killing innocent human beings. His experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments that measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.

To authenticate the potential electrical intensity to the learner the teacher is sampled with a 45-volt shock to the wrist. The teacher is then instructed to administer an incrementally increasing punishing electrical shock for each incorrect answer. This follows several methods to inform the teacher of the potential impact of the electrical shock that they will administer. These included, warnings listing the voltage range of 15 to 450-volts labeled Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Extreme Intensity Shock, Danger Severe Shock, and XXX, bright red

Between the Milgram experiment and all the other little experiments ended up raising a lot of eye brows and controversial discussions about the ethics of doing such research. Subjects were exposed to emotional stress, psychological stress and physical stress while being in the experiment (Cherry). Milgram wanted to answer questions which plagued society for a long time, such as “Was human nature inherently evil or could reasonable average people be coerced by authority into performing unnatural actions?” Many believe the study to be unethical due to the fact that the subjects were not fully aware of what it was Milgram was doing. The subjects were deceived into believing they were causing pain and suffering to another human being, when in reality the victim was not in any suffering or pain at all. The fact that they believe they were causing pain to someone else could have caused the

Perhaps being one of the most famous studies when it comes to human obedience, the Milgram Experiment was one that psychologists debate to this day. Conducted by Stanley Milgram, the aim of the experiment was to investigate whether Germans were particularly compliant to dominant figures, as this was a common justification for the Nazi murder spree in World War II.