Stanley Milgram's Justification Of Aggression

justifications have been identified by Bandura and Kelman that are used to reduce the psychological discomfort an individual may feel about aggressive actions. These four kinds of aggression justification involve manipulating one’s perception of the aggressive action, motivation, harm, or victim to provide comfort for individuals’ aggressive behavior. The aggressors’ justifications for aggression serve as a “distancing” function making it easier for the aggressor to engage in harmful actions. The first justification provided is finding ways to excuse the aggression. By sanctioning it or calling on moral principles the aggressor feels his actions are excused. The aggressor can also compare their action to something much worse, or using a label
The Milgram study was based off Stanley Milgram’s curiosity about the issues of obedience. Milgram wanted to investigate the question is Germans were particularly susceptible to showing obedience to authority figures since that was the excuse for so many Nazi’s during World War 2. The experiment used one subject, “the learner” as an actor to see how far the other participant, “the teacher”, would obey to authority. The task included “the teacher” asking “the learner”, who was strapped to an electric chair, a series of questions. If “the leaner” answered any of these questions wrong, Milgram would order “the teacher” to administer electric shocks to the participant hooked up to the electric shock generator. While progressing into the experiment, “the teacher”, who was aware of Milgram’s study, would act more and more in pain after each shock distributed by “the teacher” acting on Milgram’s authority. While at times the participant showed discomfort and sometimes objections to administering high shock volts to “the teacher”, “the teacher’s” belief that their participation was essential to the experiment resulted in the 65% of the participants continuing to administer shocks to the highest volt level, even when “the teacher” saw that “the learner” was “in pain”. Milgram concluded that average people were likely to obey authority figure, even in the Nazi’s cases. Milgram decided that situational factors could impact and foster obedience. One factor was the legitimacy of the environment. During the exhumation of the Jewish corpses in Schindler’s List, Jewish people obeyed doing the horrendous task of digging up people’s bodies and throwing them into the fire like an object. This was due to the fact that the environment of mass corpses and Nazi intimidation cause the Jews to obey their orders. Proximity of the victim is also a situational factor that heightens obedience. When Schindler’s Jewish women arrive at Auschwitz in the film, they are instructed that they are