The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram Essay

Obedience to people in authority is a deep-rooted trait that we all possess by virtue of our upbringing, and as Milgram put it, “it is only the person dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, with defiance or submission, to the commands of others” (Milgram 1974). This trait is exhibited every day in family circles, workplace and school. People are most likely to obey instructions from people they perceive their authority to be legal or moral. We see people obeying their pastors, leaders in various societies and other people they see as higher to them; and they obey anything they are being told even if it involves killing another human being. They justify their actions, however wrong, on obedience to authority.

1. The researcher in this experiment was psychologist, Stanley Milgram. The study took place at Yale University in the year 1963. The researcher’s hypothesis was that if there is a demanding authoritive figure, then the other person will obey that authoritive figure just because of their position, even if it violates their morality and their ethical beliefs. He based this of his theory that people who would never hurt someone purposely, would if told to do so by a figure of authority.

Obedience is the requirement of all mutual living and is the basic element of the structure of social life. Conservative philosophers argue that society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the priority of the individuals' conscience. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, designed an experiment that forced participants to either violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands. Milgram's study, reported in "The Perils of Obedience" suggested that under a special set of circumstances the obedience we naturally show authority figures can transform us into agents of terror or monsters towards humanity.

Individuals often yield to conformity when they are forced to discard their individual freedom in order to benefit the larger group. Despite the fact that it is important to obey the authority, obeying the authority can sometimes be hazardous especially when morals and autonomous thought are suppressed to an extent that the other person is harmed. Obedience usually involves doing what a rule or a person tells you to but negative consequences can result from displaying obedience to authority for example; the people who obeyed the orders of Adolph Hitler ended up killing innocent people during the Holocaust. In the same way, Stanley Milgram noted in his article ‘Perils of Obedience’ of how individuals obeyed authority and

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.

When individuals disregard their freedom for the good of the whole, they are no longer considered individuals but products of conformity. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, engineered an experiment to test the ordinary person’s level of obedience. Many of Milgram’s colleagues admired his intricate experiment, and thought that he provided valid information on the complexity of obedience. One of his colleagues, Diana Baumrind, however, strongly disagreed with Milgram and has good reasons to criticize his experiment. She thought his experiment was unethical and very harmful to the social well-being of the participants. In her article, “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience”, she castigated Milgram’s experiment and provided

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.

In Stanley Milgram’s article “The Perils of Obedience,” several people volunteer to participate in Milgram’s experiment. It consists of a learner and a teacher. When the learner fails to memorize a word pair, the teacher applies a shock to the learner. The shocks increase in severity with each wrong answer, attaining a maximum voltage of 450 volts. Milgram states many psychiatrists he interviewed before the experiment predicted most subjects would not go past 150 volts, or the point at which the learner starts to ask to leave (Milgram 80). In his first experiment, twenty-five out of forty subjects continued the experiment until the end (Milgram 80). After several more experiments at different locations, Milgram obtained the same results. Milgram

In The Perils of Obedience, the experiment was modified by having three subjects administering the test. When two of the subjects refused to obey the experimenters instructions, thirty-six of the forty subjects followed their peers and refused as well. (Milgram 659) Increasing the number of subjects impacted the likeliness of disobedience to authority compared to conducting the experiment with just one subject. Authority was less influential in a subject’s decision when in a group because the rebellious acts of others created awareness among the subjects about the situation they were in. Doris Lessing states that people living in the West trapped in the concept of living in a free society. Their mind is their own, their opinions are chosen by them and the only problem they have is economical. “ People in the West therefore may go through their entire lives never thinking to analyze this very flattering picture, and as a result are helpless against all kinds of pressure on them…” (Lessing 669). This concept that these individuals posses could be a factor in Milgram’s experiment. It could explain why many subjects were submissive to the authoritative pressure of the experimenter’s

In 1974 Stanley Milgram conducted the classic study of obedience to authority. The study looked into how far individuals would be willing to go, and were asked could they deliver increasingly devastating electric shocks to a fellow human being, as they were requested to do so by the professor in charge of the experiment.

Obedience and Disobedience has been a part of key moments in history. Many have studied forms of obedience to learn how it affects people and situations. For example, Stanley Milgram conducted a well-known experiment in which the subject, named the “teacher” must shock the “learner” every time he doesn’t remember a word pair from a memory test. The focus of this study is on the teacher, and whether they will administer killing shocks when told to by an authority figure. Another well-known experiment is the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo. A group of college boys were separated into two groups, prison guards and prisoners, and were put

Stanley MIlgram is a Yale University social psychologist who wrote “Behavioral Study of Obedience”, an article which granted him many awards and is now considered a landmark. In this piece, he evaluates the extent to which a participant is willing to conform to an authority figure who commands him to execute acts that conflict with his moral beliefs. Milgram discovers that the majority of participants do obey to authority. In this research, the subjects are misled because they are part of a learning experience that is not about what they are told. This experiment was appropriate despite this. Throughout the process, subjects are exposed to various signs that show them

In 1963 Milgram had his assistant demonstrate authority. Milgram chose teachers at random to administer electric shock to learners (Milgram’s colleagues). The learners were to mesmerize parts of words, if mistakes were made, the teachers were to administer electric shock with the touch of a button. More mistakes, led to higher voltage. The learners began to scream and cry out as the voltage increased. Even though the teachers faced moral dilemmas, when Milgram’s assistant told them to continue over half of the teachers continued increasing the voltage until the learners were presumably dead. (1)

Stanley Milgram’s (1963), Behavioral Study of Obedience measured how far an ordinary subject will go beyond their fundamental moral character to comply with direction from

Whether one acknowledges it or not we all obey authority in one way or another. It is something that is embedded into us from the day that we are born. We begin to become obedient to our parents, elders, our teachers, law enforcement, the list goes and on. Authority has a major impact on human behavior. This is especially evident in the case of the concentration camps in Germany. There were hundreds if not thousands of people following Hitlers unethical orders, and clearly they outnumbered the one person controlling it all. However, they did not go against him but they simply followed his orders. For a person to obey authority, one has to accept that it is legal, and right for the order to be made of them. It also involves somebody of a higher power or status to be involved in making the commands.