Summary Of The Milgram Obedience Experience

The famous experiment of The Milgram Obedience Experience, tested by Stanley Milgram in 1961, demonstrate that “often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act”. (1 ) When people are faced with desperate situations and circumstances, they often respond with their worst behavior possible. This situation is demonstrated in the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding when a group out British boys crashed onto an unknown isolated island. Ralph, the protagonist wanted to organize the boys back to a civilized society where they have come from in the beginning of the story. He stressed about the importance of shelters and a signal fire as the way of being rescued.
Piggy, who was considered the outcast of the group due to his contradistinctive body size to the other boys and abnormal asthma, remained the only one who supported Ralph throughout the book. Later in the novel, Ralph’s idea of a civilized society was contradicted by Jack, who just want to focus on the excitement of the hunt. Slowly jack shows his dictatorship towards the boys and slowly turning them into savage monsters that enjoys killing and flesh and blood. The boys’ savage and immoral behaviors, shown in the novel, are due to the environmental factors because of their isolation from the rest of the world, manipulation of fear and excitement, and lack of positive authoritative figure.