Behavioral Study Of Obedience Summary

The article, Behavioral Study of Obedience written by Dr. Stanley Milgram of Yale University was published in 1963 by the American Psychological Association (Milgram, 1963). In this article we explore one of the most widely studied articles of obedience in psychology. Dr. Milgram conducted an experiment that focused on the connection between the conscience and obedience to authority or commands. The first of many experiments took place in July 1961 after the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was accused of war crimes such as enforcement of Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies and genocide. Milgram sought to find out if Germans were more obedient to the authority figures. His experiment was designed to answer the following question: Was Eichmann and his million accomplices simply following orders? To answer this and many other questions, Milgram selected participants for this experiment by advertising for male participants to participate in a study of learning at Yale University.
The draw was naturally fixed, as the participant was always the teacher and the learner were a confederates or allies of Milgram. The confederate’s task was to pretend to be a real participant and act as the learner. The learner, a real confederate named Mr. Wallace, was taken into a room and connected to electrodes. The teacher and the researcher would proceed to the next room which contained an electric shock generator and a set of controls labeled 15 volts to 375 volts to 450 volts. The 15-volt control was also labeled as Slight Shock, 375 volts was labels as Danger: Severe Shock and the 450-volt control was labeled as