milgrams study into obedience

The first reason that Milgram found that people obey is because people feel like they have to obey someone if they have a high social status or a highly respected job, this is called legitimate authority. Bickman (1974) supported this theory by doing an experiment on the streets of New York. Bickman had three men dress up as a policeman, a guard and a regular passerby in a shirt and tie, he then had the three men ask other passerby’s to either pay a parking fine or pick something of the floor, it was found that

“The Perils of Obedience” was written by Stanley Milgram in 1974. In the essay he describes his experiments on obedience to authority. I feel as though this is a great psychology essay and will be used in psychology 101 classes for generations to come. The essay describes how people are willing to do almost anything that they are told no matter how immoral the action is or how much pain it may cause.

The purpose of Stanley Milgram writing his “The Perils of Obedience,” is to show to what extent an individual would contradict his/her moral convictions because of the orders of an authority figure (Milgram 78). He constructed an experiment wherein an experimenter instructs a naïve subject to inflict a series of shocks of increasing voltage on a protesting actor. Contrary to Milgram’s expectations, about sixty percent of the subjects administered the highest voltage shock. (Milgram 80). According to Milgram, experiment variations disproved the theory that the subjects were sadists. (Milgram 85). Milgram states that although the subjects are against their actions, they desire to please the experimenter, and they often

The Milgram Obedience Study performed by Stanley Milgram proved that people are willing to following instructions given by figures of authority even though the instruction could result in the infliction of pain to others and goes against their personal values. The study had three participants. The first person is the person running the study known as the authority person. The second person is a pretend volunteer who is aware of the course of the study. The third person, who is the only person not aware of the situation, would draw a paper that was fixed to make them be the volunteer of the study. In that role, they would receive

The acts of conforming and obeying shape us significantly, whether we are conscious of it or not. They do so in ways that psychologists Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram attempt to explain through their research. Asch touches base on the topic of conformity and discusses the ways in which group behaviors and social norms can influence the decisions an individual makes. On the other hand, Milgram’s focus is on obedience, and he studied it by measuring average, everyday people and their willingness to obey authority figures, even if it involves actions that go against their personal beliefs and morals. They have provided evidence through experiments, and with this information, it becomes easier to understand the world of politics, and how these

In his article "The Perils of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to determine if the innate desire to obey an authority figure overrides the morality and consciousness that had been already established in a person. After Milgram conducted his experiments he concluded that 60% of the subjects complied to an authority figure rather than their own sympathy. There was additional testing outside the US which showed an even higher compliance rate. Milgram reasoned that the subjects enjoyed the gratification from the experimenter, who was the authority figure in the experiment. He noted that most of the subjects are "proud" to carry out the demands of the experimenter. Milgram believed for that reason, why the

In his study on obedience, Milgram found that the presence or absence of a clear authority directly affects people's behaviour.

In his article “The Perils of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to determine if the innate desire to obey an authority figure overrides the morality and consciousness that had been already established in an individual. After Milgram conducted his experiments he concluded that 60% of the subjects complied to an authority figure rather than their own morals. There was additional testing outside the US which showed an even higher compliance rate. Milgram reasoned that the subjects enjoyed the gratification from the experimenter, who was the authority figure in the experiment. He noted that most of the subjects are "proud" to carry out the demands of the experimenter. Milgram believed for this was the reason, why the German

Parker and Baumrind also question the legitimacy of the experiment and whether the results were influenced by the authority figure alone or by multiple factors. Baumrind states that the experimenter’s cold demeanor and apathetic demands caused the subjects to act in ways they would not have regularly (Baumrind 225-227). The isolation of the subjects is another factor according to Baumrind. The lack of someone to strengthen the subject causes the subject to fold to the authority (Baumrind 225). Parker also questions the legitimacy of Milgram’s experiment. He says it is a combination of several different factors that will result in the subjects actions, not solely a man demanding a subject to complete a task. He continues in saying that people’s actions are influenced by the situation and what is happening around them (Parker 238). Parker quotes Ross in saying, “We can take ordinary people and make them show a degree of obedience or conformity… to a degree that we would normally assume you would only see in a rare few” (Parker 239). Parker continues with saying a subject’s obedience is not determined by a simple command but by a range of factors. In Understanding Behavior in the Milgram Obedience Experiment: The Role of Personality, Situations, and Their Interactions, the author Thomas Blass states that

Multiple arguments are made about Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiments. Diana Baumrind, author of “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience” and a former psychologist at the University of California in Berkeley, strongly believes that Milgram’s experiments should not have taken place. Baumrind focuses on the aftermath of the experiment and how even when subjects were told that the screams they heard were merely recordings, participants experienced lasting effects (Baumrind 90). Ian Parker, author of “Obedience” and a writer for the New Yorker, also believes the trauma experienced by participants was unethical; some participants suffered from heart attacks after the experiment, and others were in therapy several years later when Milgram conducted a survey (Parker 98).

Jerry M. Burger repeated Milgram’s conformity and obedience behavior to see how people would react to a similar situation as Milgram’s. Burger did have to modify his experiment from Milgram’s because of today’s ethical standards, and for a scientific comparison to Milgram’s study. “Nonetheless, current standards for the ethical treatment of participants clearly place Milgram’s study out of bounds” (Burger, 2009, p. 2). This is one of the reason’s Burger decided to modify his experiment. Milgram’s experiment would be considered unethical

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

To Milgram, obedience occurs when the subject complies with the entire series of commands, if he rejects one command then the subject is disobedient. Milgram discovered that the proximity of the authority figure to the subject, greatly effected their willingness to obey. He concluded that obedience sharply increases, as the experimenter is physically in the room with the subject. The results from his study also demonstrate that “physical presence of an authority is an important force contributing to the subject’s obedience or defiance…manipulation of the experimenter’s position yielded more powerful results” (Milgram, 1965). This is in contrast to the proximity to the subject to the victim. Finally, in order to test the importance of background authority, he conducted the same experiment in a commercial building in Bridgeport, instead of at Yale University. By doing this, he discovered that the location of the experiment did not matter much because, “subjects may consider one laboratory to be as competent as another, so long as it is a scientific lab” (Milgram, 1965). As previously mentioned, a reoccurring

Task: outline and evaluate findings from conformity and obedience research and consider explanations for conformity (and non-conformity), as well as evaluating Milgram’s studies of obedience (including ethical issues).

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