In Replicating Milgram (The Open University, 2014), Milgram explains how he set up his obedience experiment. His aim was to get a volunteer, a ‘teacher’ to inflict increasing amounts of pain, through electric shocks, to another volunteer a ‘learner’ and to see when the ‘teacher’ would turn to the researcher, the ‘authority figure’ and ask to stop. Unknown to ‘the teacher’, the ‘learner’ and the ‘authority figure’ were aware of the real purpose of the experiment; the ‘teacher’ was told it was to study the effect of punishment on learning, and genuinely thought that they were inflicting pain on the ‘learner’ sat in another room. It was this deception and the emotional stress it generated to the ‘teacher’ that prompted the ethical issues debate…
Most people would agree with doing something horrific to another person, since it is easier to conform, than to fight, people tend to protect themselves before protecting a stranger. Stanley Milgram put a study together to prove that Germans are more likely to be obedient to authority then American are. The study was called “If Hitler Asked You to Electrocute a Stranger, Would You? Probably.” Milgram explains the character aspects of why people listen to authority and why they afraid not to. Social structure and the organization of society have a powerful affect on people. Milgrams set out to New Haven to start the study ad later on planed to go to Germany to do the study on the society there.…
Every human has a unique and complex thought processing system in which it is nearly impossible to determine how each person will react in a given situation. At an early age, people are taught to be obedient and oftentimes are forced to make a decision between being obedient or following their own morals. Usually, obedience wins because of the emphasis society has placed on it. Most of human’s actions are a result of a previous action in which they felt necessary to do. Both authors, Stanley Milgram of “The Perils of Obedience” and Ian Parker of “Obedience” agree that, humans, as a whole, will not respond the same in every similar situation because their actions are usually a result of obedience or of their current situation, rather than their personality.…
John Darley’s criticism focuses on how the findings of the obedience experiments are applied to historical or real-world situations. He points out many ways in which the behavior of the obedience subjects in Milgram’s study differs drastically from the behavior of many others who commit atrocities: Nazi doctors or concentration camp executioners, for instance (Darley 133-134). However, since Darley’s criticism focuses on the behavioral differences between the obedience study and historical events, Milgram responds in a strong, convincing way. Referring to the process of comparing laboratory studies with real-world situations, Milgram writes, “The problem of generalizing from one to the other does not consist of point-for-point comparison between one and the other... but depends on whether one has reached a correct theoretical understanding of…
Nearly half a century after they were conducted, Milgram’s (1963, 1965, 1974) obedience studies remain among psychology’s most widely known and most often discussed experiments. Briefly, under the guise of a learning study, an experimenter instructed participants to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to a ‘‘learner’’ when the learner made mistakes on a memory task. Although in reality no shocks were delivered, participants were instructed to start with a 15-volt shock for the learner’s first mistake and to increase the voltage in 15-volt increments for each successive mistake. In the basic procedure (Experiment 5), participants could hear the learner’s vocal protests and demands to be set free through the wall that separated…
In society, authority and its rules are respected by people in the community through acts of obedience. Authority is not only the government laws, but can also be people with a higher status, such as parents, teachers, or employment managers. As long as people obey those with authoritative power, they will receive rewards, or at least avoid punishment, even when the command requires unjust actions towards another person. For example, Hitler’s propaganda that made the Germans believe that the Jews were the source of their economic problems and scapegoated them in world war two. And years after the Holocaust, some Germans deny their part in the abuse towards the genocide of six million Jews. In other words, people who deny their part in an unjust action place the blame on…
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.…
In 1963, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted a series of social psychology experiments to study the conditions under which the people are obedient to authorities and personal conscience. The purpose of his experiment was to determine whether or not people were particularly obedient to the higher authority who instructed them to perform various acts even if they violate their own morals and ethics. It was one of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology as it has inspired other researchers to explore what makes people question authority and more importantly, what leads them to follow orders. There were several replications of his experiment and the results were identical to those reported by Milgram about how…
Basically, he had trained an accomplice who would pretend to have electric shocks. The experimental subjects were placed in front of a dial, which they were told would administer an increasing levels of electric shocks to the actor. They asked the subject a series of straightforward word pair questions, and when he got the answers wrong, they had to give an electric shock. The subjects were told that this was part of an experiment, by someone in a white coat. In one case, the subject was informed that the person they were administering "shocks" to had a heart condition.…
Milgram’s study of obedience (1963), had participants distributed electric shocks from 15 volts to 450 volts to confederates. The findings showed 65% of participants continued up to the maximum voltage of 450 but all participants went up to 300 volts with only 12.5% refusing to continue at the point the confederate first objected. They concluded that ordinary people are extremely obedient to authority even when asked to behave in an inhumane way. This suggests that it is not evil people that commit inhumane crimes but it is ordinary people who are just obeying orders. Taking this into consideration, this experiment suggests and explains why the soldiers obeyed the orders they were given; the behaviour of the perpetrators were the outcome of situation factors rather than dispositional factors.…
In The Perils of Obedience, Stanley Milgram expresses his findings of an experiment he conducted trying to prove the lengths people will go to be obedient to authority.…
In this chapter on the research of obedience, studying the psychological actions and reactions, the implications brought forth are the surprising effects of simple commands and the subliminal influence. The articles “The Perils of Obedience”, by Stanley Milgram, and “Opinions and Social Pressure”, by Solomon E. Asch, both exhibit the traits of simple, ordinary test subjects following orders and actions by someone who is illustrated to have power or the general consensus but realistically do not.…
Obedience results from pressure to comply with authority. Children are taught to obey from an early age by their care givers, in order for them to conform in society. The authoritarian rule continues through their education and working life, and is then passed on to the next generation. This essay will focus on the work of the American psychologist Stanley Milgram. It will also look at other studies into obedience that evolved from Milgram’s experiments from the early 1960s.…
23. What is obedience? What was Stanley Milgram’s experiment? What are factors that affected the level of obedience in the individuals he studied?…
Obedience to authority is an aspect present in all societies throughout known history. For the entirety of this paper, obedience to authority will refer to any act a member of society performs that he or she was told to do by a position of higher authority. This paper will focus on the idea that members of society will follow commands that may go against their moral beliefs on the sole account that the commands come from a place of higher authority. This statement has been tested multiple times beginning with Stanley Milgram’s experiment in 1963, in which he set up a scenario that convinced people they were harming an individual they had met only minutes before through electrical…