Milgram Experiment

Jane Dutcher Dutcher 1

English 1013

10/18/10

In nineteen sixty-three, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment on obedience to authority figures. It was a series of social psychology experiments which measured the willingness of the study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience and confronted them with emotional distress. The experiment resulted in twenty-six out of forty of the participants administering the final massive shock of four-hundred and fifty volts, that is sixty-five percent. Milgram believes his experiment to be effective because (need to finish this sentence) On the other hand, Diana Baumrind argues that Milgram’s experiment is unethical to alter the participant’s trust for a figure of authority and believes they could be hesitant to do so in the future in any circumstance. (what else can i write here?) In the experiment, the participants would draw slips of paper to determine their role. Unknown to them, both slips of paper read teacher. The person assisting the experimenter claimed that their’s read leaner, therefore the participant was always guaranteed to be the teacher. The two would then separate into different rooms where they could not visibly see one other but could still communicate. The teacher would read a word pair and follow with four possible answers. To indicate the answer, the learner would press a button. If correct, the teacher would continue on to the next word pair. If wrong, a shock would be administered to the learner, with the voltage increasing in fifteen volt increments for each wrong answer. The subjects were led to believe that the learner was receiving actual shocks when they respond with the incorrect answer. In reality, there were no shocks administered at all. It was simply a tape record of pre-recorded sounds for each shock level.