One of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology was carried out by Stanley Milgram (1963). Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on "obedience" - that they were just following orders of their superiors. The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram (1963) wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II. Milgram selected participants for his experiment by advertising for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University. The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher’. The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s confederates (pretending to be a real participant).
There were a lot of things unethical about this experiment. The main one being that the participants were lied to be about what they were participating in. As a researcher, it was Milgram's job to invent an experiment were his hypothesis could be tested but also were participants would be informed of what they were participating in. This leads to the unethical issue that this experiment caused most of the participant’s extreme distress, which was an indirect result of them being lied to about the experiment. The fact they that also used the Yale campus and the Yale name of the fliers is also unethical since the article stated that Yale had no hand in the experiment, particularly as a safeguard should the experiment go wrong. This just added even more to the participants' fake sense of assuredness that the experiment was legitimate and the false sense of security they felt that their psychological well being would be looked after, which is was apparently not from the study
We are satisfied that no lasting harm was done to the participants. In our opinion, the Milgram experiments caused no harm, although they did reveal a basic flaw in the way most people respond to authority. The subjects were told that they could stop at any time and the calm orders to continue the "experiment" they thought they were participating in were merely a prod. They were not bound to a chair and told that they would not be unbound unless they complied. They complied willingly, even if against what their own conscience may have been telling them. Had there been someone actually wired up to receive voltage though... That would definitely have carried it into the territory of harm. It’s fair to say that the debriefing at the end of the experiment eliminated both long and short-term problems. Participants were debriefed after the experiment and showed much relief at finding they had not harmed the student. One cried from emotion when he saw the student alive, and explained that he thought he had killed him. To Milgram's credit, he took pains to make sure his subjects suffered no lasting harm. Milgram did debrief his subjects. In other words, he revealed the true nature of the experiment. He also arranged a reconciliation with the learner as soon as the experiment was over, asking the confederate who played the role to come into the room and shake hands with the teacher before the teacher left. categories:Milgram also asked the subjects after debriefing whether they were very glad, glad, neither sorry nor glad, sorry, or very sorry to have participated. He found less than 2% in any group said they were "sorry" or "very sorry." In fact, the subjects who had been most obedient, going all the way to the top of the shock scale, were most likely to say they were "very glad" to have participated in the experiment. Milgram explained to them everything that they needed to know so that no long or short-term effects would occur.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority (Milgram, 1964). Many of the experimenters were still confused on exactly what happened in the experiment. The short term effects would be that some of the people, might still be shaken up, experiencing nervousness and sometimes confusion from being reminded of the experiment. Was this experiment justified? To many no, ethics plays a major part in this experiment. Even though the participants were inform, how can you sit back and watch a person go crazy or have seizures off what you are doing to them.
Had Stanley Milgram’s study been done before or during World War II, the Nazi’s would have definitely used this information to their defense. They would have used this as an excuse for their wretched behavior, even though their actions were completely inexcusable. The results from this experiment definitely removed responsibility from the individual. The Nazis’ could say that they were simply “following orders”. This could potentially be an example of institutional authority. Institutional authority is following orders or instructions from a higher power or group. They may lack in personal responsibility because they could blame the person for their actions by saying “they told me to”. The money was responsible for the findings. It influenced the participants to do what they were told. The money helped the participants to put their morals to the side even if what they thought they were doing was wrong. It was the drive that was pushing them to do the experiment.
Nonetheless, paying someone doesn’t changes the dynamics of the situation. Throughout the experiment there was little said about money. It was more focused on the factor obedience played in the experiment. The article talked about the tension the subjects felt when being obedient and how relieved they felt when it was over. The subjects probably weren't thinking about the money. Being paid is most likely what got people to sign up but their willingness to obey is what made them stay. Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up. Obey parents, teachers, anyone in authority etc.
You May Also Find These Documents Helpful
-
Milgram's Experiment brings up the point that people under the pressure of other, will more likely obey orders even if it goes against their moral beliefs. In "To Obey of Not to Obey", most of the soldiers obeyed their superiors because they were taught to do so. Similarly in Migram's Experient, the "teachers" obeyed when the experimenter pressured the subject to continue with the shocks. This can be related to Slaughterhouse Five because the German soldiers are under the command of their superiors who are requiring them to take American prisoners. This pressure was passed down from the German soldiers who demanded the American soldiers to clean up the charred remains of dead civilians after the bombing of Dresden.…
- 119 Words
- 1 Page
Satisfactory Essays -
In Replicating Milgram (The Open University, 2014), Milgram explains how he set up his obedience experiment. His aim was to get a volunteer, a ‘teacher’ to inflict increasing amounts of pain, through electric shocks, to another volunteer a ‘learner’ and to see when the ‘teacher’ would turn to the researcher, the ‘authority figure’ and ask to stop. Unknown to ‘the teacher’, the ‘learner’ and the ‘authority figure’ were aware of the real purpose of the experiment; the ‘teacher’ was told it was to study the effect of punishment on learning, and genuinely thought that they were inflicting pain on the ‘learner’ sat in another room. It was this deception and the emotional stress it generated to the ‘teacher’ that prompted the ethical issues debate…
- 128 Words
- 1 Page
Satisfactory Essays -
In Milgram’s article, he explains an experiment he designed to test whether the subjects of the experiment would refuse the orders of authority and follow…
- 1226 Words
- 5 Pages
Better Essays -
John Darley’s criticism focuses on how the findings of the obedience experiments are applied to historical or real-world situations. He points out many ways in which the behavior of the obedience subjects in Milgram’s study differs drastically from the behavior of many others who commit atrocities: Nazi doctors or concentration camp executioners, for instance (Darley 133-134). However, since Darley’s criticism focuses on the behavioral differences between the obedience study and historical events, Milgram responds in a strong, convincing way. Referring to the process of comparing laboratory studies with real-world situations, Milgram writes, “The problem of generalizing from one to the other does not consist of point-for-point comparison between one and the other... but depends on whether one has reached a correct theoretical understanding of…
- 1351 Words
- 6 Pages
Powerful Essays -
Nearly half a century after they were conducted, Milgram’s (1963, 1965, 1974) obedience studies remain among psychology’s most widely known and most often discussed experiments. Briefly, under the guise of a learning study, an experimenter instructed participants to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to a ‘‘learner’’ when the learner made mistakes on a memory task. Although in reality no shocks were delivered, participants were instructed to start with a 15-volt shock for the learner’s first mistake and to increase the voltage in 15-volt increments for each successive mistake. In the basic procedure (Experiment 5), participants could hear the learner’s vocal protests and demands to be set free through the wall that separated…
- 156 Words
- 1 Page
Good Essays -
In society, authority and its rules are respected by people in the community through acts of obedience. Authority is not only the government laws, but can also be people with a higher status, such as parents, teachers, or employment managers. As long as people obey those with authoritative power, they will receive rewards, or at least avoid punishment, even when the command requires unjust actions towards another person. For example, Hitler’s propaganda that made the Germans believe that the Jews were the source of their economic problems and scapegoated them in world war two. And years after the Holocaust, some Germans deny their part in the abuse towards the genocide of six million Jews. In other words, people who deny their part in an unjust action place the blame on…
- 816 Words
- 4 Pages
Good Essays -
Over the past century, the field of Psychology has prospered, giving way to a more in depth knowledge and understanding of people’s social interactions with one another and what drives those connections. 20th century psychologist, Stanley Milgram, executed a series of Obedience to Authority test on random participants. As seen in the YouTube videos online and in class, Milgram’s study found that over 65% of the participants carried out the experiment, despite potentially hurting someone, due to the authority figure urging them to continue.…
- 529 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
Stanley Milgrams experiments are some of the most recognized behavior experiments in psychology today. Milgrams most known experiment was ‘shocking’ to people and has also been controversial ethically. As Ian Parker stated it would “make his name and destroy his reputation.” Parkers Obedience essay talks much of Milgrams life before the experiment and how the psychology community thought about his ethics.…
- 560 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
In 1963, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted a series of social psychology experiments to study the conditions under which the people are obedient to authorities and personal conscience. The purpose of his experiment was to determine whether or not people were particularly obedient to the higher authority who instructed them to perform various acts even if they violate their own morals and ethics. It was one of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology as it has inspired other researchers to explore what makes people question authority and more importantly, what leads them to follow orders. There were several replications of his experiment and the results were identical to those reported by Milgram about how…
- 1558 Words
- 7 Pages
Powerful Essays -
A well known study into obedience is the Milgram experiment, Milgram had a found interest in why during the Second World War hundreds of people obeyed the orders of others in authority. Millions of innocent people were killed on command. He wanted to test out this potential destructive obedience in a laboratory. Each participant out…
- 738 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
Stanley Milgram was an extremely famous psychologist who was best known for his groundbreaking experiment on the subject of obedience during the 1960s. Milgram began his career as a psychologist just around the time that the horrifying truth of the concentration camps came out. The fact that almost an entire nation obeyed one man, who commanded them to do inhumane and grotesque acts to other human beings intrigued Stanley Milgram. He became even more interested when he began watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who simply did not seem to be the appalling monster that many people expected and portrayed him to be. In fact, Milgram described Eichmann as being less of a “sadistic monster…[and] that he came closer to being an uninspired bureaucrat…
- 1583 Words
- 7 Pages
Powerful Essays -
Milgram’s infamous 1963 study into the nature of obedience is often portrayed in the media as strong evidence for an innate human predisposition to obedience, “resistance is futile” (Parker, 2007) when it comes to the human condition to obey – even in a “destructive” (Milgram, 1963) sense. As Milgram (1963) himself states, obedience as a concept is one of the most fundamental aspects of society, and much has frequently been made of drawing parallels with the atrocities carried out by the Third Reich and the data produced by Milgram’s obedience studies [most notably the dramatic results of the baseline study (Haslam, 2012)]. The ideation is frequently asserted that Nazis themselves were displaying blind obedience (Debattista, 2012) to their superiors, and this blind obedience is what is captured in Milgram’s 1963 experiment, although this proposition must be questioned in lieu of a scientific analysis of Milgram’s actual works,…
- 1215 Words
- 5 Pages
Good Essays -
Milgram's experiment in 1960 by social psychologist Dr. Stanely Milgram's (1963, 1965) was a controversial experiment. He researched the effect of authority on obedience. I don't think the scientific community overreacted to this experiment because it is unethical to reduce subjects to "twitching shuttering wrecks". Though the human mind is amazing strong we still do not know its breaking point. For interviewers to carry out the kind of experiment they did, they have to be willing to face the consequences of the experiment which could be a permanent damaged mental state. I do believe we need to do experiments like this as the outcome was very eye opening but it has to be better regulated and the background and methods of experimentation clearly…
- 580 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
One experiment, called The Milgram experiment, also raised ethical concern. The experiment consisted of 40 men recruited using newspaper ads. The participants were paid $4.50 for their involvement in the study. Milgram…
- 1492 Words
- 6 Pages
Powerful Essays -
Milgram’s study was done after the trial of Adolf Eichmann. This was after the holocaust where 6 million Jews were murdered. This trial displayed an example of destructive obedience where people were said to have complied with what they were told to do, even if it had a negative impact on others, which in this case was murdering innocent people, although being completely mentally aware of what they were being asked to do and yet still carried out the task.…
- 471 Words
- 2 Pages
Satisfactory Essays