milgram's report
Are you an authority figure? How far are you willing to go?
"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." –Stanley Milgram, (1974)
This report is about obedience to authority which will take you into Milgram's experiment and how this study applies to trainee police officers.
The following experiment was designed to test obedience to authority conducted by the psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1961. He was motivated by the Jewish genocide in the second world war and tried 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)
Since Milgram was looking at how soldiers behaved, forty male volunteers were recruited for an experiment on memory research in which there was two roles: teacher and learner, the learner being an accomplice. The experiment aimed to measure the teacher's behavior in a controlled environment. An 'experimenter' was overseeing the operation and dressed in a white lab coat and would say how to proceed.
The point of this experiment was to observe how far people would go in obeying orders if it involved harming another person by administering an electric shock when the learner made a mistake, increasing the level from 15 switches to 450 severe shock. An initial survey among college students predicted that none of the 'teachers' would administer the maximum voltage and that most of them would refuse to administer more than 140 volts.
Now, think for few seconds, at which level would you stop?
The set-up was a room where the learner was strapped in and the teacher and the experimenter, were in the next room. There were a number of word pairs to be matched by the learner and for every time a wrong answer was given, an electric shock was administered.
"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." –Stanley Milgram, (1974)
This report is about obedience to authority which will take you into Milgram's experiment and how this study applies to trainee police officers.
The following experiment was designed to test obedience to authority conducted by the psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1961. He was motivated by the Jewish genocide in the second world war and tried 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)
Since Milgram was looking at how soldiers behaved, forty male volunteers were recruited for an experiment on memory research in which there was two roles: teacher and learner, the learner being an accomplice. The experiment aimed to measure the teacher's behavior in a controlled environment. An 'experimenter' was overseeing the operation and dressed in a white lab coat and would say how to proceed.
The point of this experiment was to observe how far people would go in obeying orders if it involved harming another person by administering an electric shock when the learner made a mistake, increasing the level from 15 switches to 450 severe shock. An initial survey among college students predicted that none of the 'teachers' would administer the maximum voltage and that most of them would refuse to administer more than 140 volts.
Now, think for few seconds, at which level would you stop?
The set-up was a room where the learner was strapped in and the teacher and the experimenter, were in the next room. There were a number of word pairs to be matched by the learner and for every time a wrong answer was given, an electric shock was administered.