Stanley Milgram's Obedience To Authority

In 1963, Stanley Milgram was interested in the psychology behind people who blindly follow authoritative figures. His interest in this idea peaked because of WWII and the atrocities practiced by the subordinates of Hitler. As a way to test this question, Milgram came up with a university study that would put people’s conscience to the test. This observation of the human mind would lay a groundwork and test the boundaries of understanding the thought process behind genocides. It did not examine the psyche of the main leader of a genocide (the authoritative figure), but instead analyzed the followers thereof (the loyal submissives who went against their conscience to follow the leader’s orders) (McLeod, 2007). This obedience to authority is
The volunteer believed the experiment was testing whether or not using an electrical shock as punishment would cause the student to memorize the information quicker than no punishment, but this was not the true purpose of the experiment. The volunteer would be appointed as the teacher, while the student and experimenter were merely actors. The student was placed in a separate room, out of sight from the teacher (See picture to the left). The teacher would have a list of words which the student was told to memorize. If the student got the answer wrong, he would receive an “electrical shock” from the electric shock switch panel; the “voltage” increased with each incorrect answer (there were 30 voltage levels, increasing by fifteen volts each level). The panel included switches ranging from a slight shock of 45 volts to a deadly shock of 450 volts. What the teacher didn’t know, was the student never received any electrical shock whatsoever. They were merely faking it. The person truly being tested was the teacher, who was instructed to administer very harmful shocks to the student by the experimenter. This naturally went against the volunteer’s conscience because the possibility of harming, or even killing the student seemed immoral. Although it went against their morals, the volunteer- in most cases- continued because they were prodded to do so
Mao Zedong was arguably the most prevalent communist leader in history. He was born a peasant during a very tough period of poverty and, therefore, strived for greatness as a child. His father had a disciplinarian parenting technique, which heavily influenced Mao Zedong in his future communist endeavours. He eventually reached this “greatness” after forming the lower class/ poor citizens into a powerful communist party called the Red Army (Microsoft Corporation., 2001). This army eventually won the Civil War of China and launched Zedong into the beginning of his famous reign. Unfortunately, he abused his excessive amount of authority and ran the country into the grungy soil by creating campaigns like the Great Leap Forward. This specific campaign was created in an attempt to increase agriculture development/industry by “mass mobilization” of people. The citizens were instructed to move to different parts of the country, which may have contradicted their conscience. Although they may have disagreed with Zedong’s authority, the mobilization continued, with everyone obeying his orders anyway. This resulted in horrid disease and eventually killed millions (BBC,