Stanley Milgram's Obedience To Authority Study

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.
This poses the question as to why humans are so prone to conform to situations. Social influence can be defined as a groups indirect or direct influence over another person’s decisions and behavior (Bernstein, 2014, 563). This is extremely important concept in correlation to this topic. We discussed in class that Milgram’s prompting question for this experiment was: How did the Holocaust occur? Many would say, “Well, because Hitler was a bad man.” However, Milgram realized the situation ran deeper than that, because Hitler could not commit mass genocide on his own. Instead, his used his authority to persuade Germans to take arms against Jews, relying on their desire to conform and comply (Bernstein, 2014, 564).
Also, obedience to authority is also seen in the high school social pyramid. When you are subjected
However, in Milgram’s experiment, people complied due to the authority figure urging them to continue and appealing to their sense of responsibility. However, this has caused many of the participants to reflect in quiet horror that they were willing to harm another by executing up to 450 volts of electricity. It is a dreadful thing to realize that humans can be so easily manipulated to participate in heinous acts, causing us to take a second look on where we stand