Stanley Milgram's View Of Obedience

Obedience is omnipresent; it is difficult to differentiate between obedience and conformity, therefore it is a complicated subject of social psychology. However, Stanley Milgram was devoted to understand the phenomena of obedience, and created a dramatic masterpiece. Interested in many different aspects of life, Stanley Milgram was an influential key figure in psychology. However his work on the field of obedience is respected and still exiting for both psychologists and lay people. The aim of this essay is to expose the historical context of his book together with its influences, while demonstrating a deep understanding of his groundbreaking work.
During the Second World War, Stanley Milgram grew up as a Jew in New York, horrified to learn what was happening in Europe under the Nazi regime. One of Hitler’s best men in the crime against humanity was Adolf Eichmann. Upon his capture and trial, he claimed: ‘ I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn’t escape left or right because of the will of the driver’ – (Eichmann cited by Marchione, 2002) shifting the blame to Hitler itself and insisted that he was only obeying Hitler’s orders. As an undergraduate student Milgram was working with
An advertisement was placed in a newspaper to ask for volunteers, which inspired 296 people to respond to the advertisement. However, Milgram was aiming for a larger sample size, therefore invitation letters were posted out to several thousand people, with approximately 12 % of return rate. Participants ranged between 20 and 50 years old from varying occupations. Misleading the participants, Milgram told them that the aim of the study is to determine ‘the effect of punishment on learning’ (Milgram, 1974). However the true purpose of the study was to identify how far would participants go to comply with the authority (the experimenter) before disobeying the authority