Stanley Malgram: An Analysis Of Dr. Stanley Milgram

In the beginning of the documentary it showed an experiment that was conducted in 1961, by a psychologist from Yale University named Dr. Stanley Milgram. The purpose of this “obedience study” was to observe an individual’s willingness to inflict pain when ordered to do so. The participants were required to use a machine to shock other person in a different room. What the participants did not know that the shocks were fake and the victim was an actor. Despite the fact that the participants knew that they was hurting someone most continued to shock the victim up to 450 volts, because they was told by the person in charge to continued. This showed that people will take an order even if they are morally against it, as long as the person giving the order is in charge of the situation or have a certain status. By giving this power to hurt someone without being in any trouble, some participants might have loss individuality for a short amount of time during that process.
After the attack on 9/11 the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan. During the war many Afghans and Taliban
Prisoners were naked for days, had their hands and feet chain up to the beds, on their feet for many hours, had barely to none sleep and many more disgusting and unmoral things. Groupthink started when the first person starts to apply the new policies to the prisoners, for example the first time they had prisoner strip naked. They question what they were doing and why they was supposed to treat there people so bad. But, they couldn’t question their higher rank officer. Doing these activities every day the soldiers became normal job for them. They loss the individuality from the harsh environment they was in due to war, with no one there to remind they what is moral wrong, they were forced to numb their feeling. Giving these soldiers new job a prisoner guard with no proper training and lot of power of people’s life corrupted