Milgram Experiment: Heinous Crimes

Milgram experiment
Have you ever wondered how people could do some of the heinous crimes that you have heard about in the news or in history? Have you ever thought what would possess someone to do some of the awful thing like the things they did in the holocaust? Well you aren’t alone in that thinking. Stanley Milgram a famous psychologist thought about the same thing. He wanted to figure out if what the Nazi soldiers was true when they said that they only did those awful things to the Jews because it was their orders or if they did it because they were just that evil. He wanted to figure out if people are capable of following orders that involve cause pain to a stranger just cause the were told to be an authority figure or would they defect
Milgram wondered if it could be true that Eichmann and all the rest of the soldiers were just following orders that they didn’t really want to carry out the atrocities and they were just doing what they were told. Like most scientist he had to find the answer to his question so what does he do? The only thing that he knows to do when he wants to know something he does an experiment to find out. He creates an experiment to figure out just how obedient a normal person will be when the orders involve inflicting an immense amount of pain to a random innocent person. This was the question of the hour just how obedient can one get. This question is what drove Milgram’s whole
Milgram first put an ad in the newspaper asking for male participants for his experiment. The male participant were put with another guy and those two drew lots to see who would be the teachers and who would be the learners, but it was rigid so that the participants were always the teachers and the learner was one of Milgram’s confederates that was simply acting as real participants. The learner was taken into this room and had these electrodes put on his arm and the teacher and the person doing the research walking into a room next door that had an electric generator that had these switches that were marked with the amount of voltage that each switch gave the learner. The switches were marked with 15 volts to 450 volts. 15 volts is not a huge deal, but when you get up to 450 volts it gets pretty serious pretty fast. The Learner after being strapped in was taught some words and the he was asked to recall the words pair word from a list of four choices. If the learner got it wrong, which he did on purpose, the teacher was instructed to give him a shock and increased the shock every time the leaner answered wrong, and if the teacher refused to administer the shock then the researcher would give him a series of commands or prods to make sure that the teacher followed the orders. There were four prods and every time one wasn’t followed then the experimenter read out the next one and so