Milgram's Summary

Summary about The Perils of Obedience Obedience is something everyone has to follow growing up. Whether it is parents, grandparents, teachers, or even a manager, society implements a process of obeying people in charge. People often wonder how far someone will go to avoid disobeying authorities about a controversial topic. Throughout the article “The Perils of Obedience” by Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, people become aware of the necessity to obey higher authority no matter what pain they are causing to another person. Throughout the article we find out that social life is about obeying others and how conservative people who obey are threats to society and how humanists are individuals. Stanley Milgram sets up a study to see how far people will go to obey what they are being told to do by an authority. There is an “experimenter”, a “learner” and a “teacher”. The learners get into an electric chair and receive word pairs told by the experimenter, and they have to recall the second word after being told the first. Failure to answer correctly, results with the experimenter instructing the teacher to shock the learner. The shock generator starts with volts at 15 increasing all the way to a voltage of 450. The teacher increases the voltage amount with every incorrect answer. Before the study, the teacher gets a shock of 45 volts just to understand the belief of the machine. But, the twist is that the learners are receiving no shock and the real test is to see how far the teacher will obey the experimenter. Through the study when the learner is showing pain due to the shocks, most likely the teacher will want to discontinue, but the experimenter orders them to continue. If the teacher quits, that would mean they disobey authority. The experimenter says, “Her behavior is the very embodiment of what I envisioned would be true for almost all subjects” (634). The experimenter figures that the teachers will complain about what they are doing. Before the actual