The Perils Of Obedience

Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram conducted controversial experiments that had to deal with obedience. Zimbardo conducted an experiment in a mock prison that showed the roles of the guards and prisoners. Milgram conducted an experiment that tested how much pain a teacher would inflict on someone else at the command of an experimenter. The experiments that they conducted have been called wrong and unethical. Although the experiments vary from each other, they both changed the way the world looks at obedience and Authority. Zimbardo wrote the Article over “The Stanford Prison Experiment”. He set up an experiment that would test how subjects conformed to roles they were given. He started the experiment by picking out subjects through the newspaper. Zimbardo got seventy-five males interested in completing the experiment. Then the subjects went
His article was first published in 1974. The experiment was design to see how much pain a person would inflict on another person at the command of the experimenter. For the experiment, they selected an ordinary person as the teacher and an actor as the learner. The experimenter explained to the teacher that they were studying the effects of learning with punishment. The learner was then put into an electric chair. The teacher was given a list that had word pairs on it. The teacher was supposed to read the first word and the learner was supposed to recall the second word. When the learner got the word incorrect, he was shocked with increasing intensity. The real focus of the experiment was the teacher and the learner was an actor who never received any shocks. The teacher sat in front of a shock generator, which had thirty switches on it. The switches were labeled 15-450 volts. There were subcategories labeled on the switches and it went from “Slight Shock” to “Dangerous: Severe Shock”. (Milgram