The Perils Of Obedience Stanley Milgram Summary

Milgram Stanley, “The Perils of Obedience” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. 12th ed. Boston: Pearson 2013. 630-643. Print.
In Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” Stanley Milgram designed an experiment that would involve an experimenter, a teacher, and a learner to determine how far obedience would play a role on willing participants. The purpose of Milgram’s experiment is to see how far a willing participant would go based on orders to continue knowing that the orders would result in another person’s pain. The experiment was set up so that two willing participants went into the experiment understanding that they were taking part in a memory and learning exercise. One of the two willing participants played the role as the
teacher, and the other participant was called the learner.
The experimenter, teacher, and the learner were all in the same room, the learner would be strapped to a chair. The experimenter explains to the learner that “[h]e will be read lists of simple word pairs, and that he will be tested on his ability to remember the second word of a pair when he hears the first one again,” the experimenter also advises the learner that “[w]henever he makes an error, he (learner) will receive electric shocks of increasing intensity” (632); the intensity of the shocks ranged from slight shock to a severe shock. After the teacher read out loud the simple pairs or words, the experimenter would read out the first word of the pair, and the learner would attempt to answer with the second word of the pair. The teacher participated in the experiment not knowing that learner was an actor and that the learner was not receiving any electric shocks. Stanley Milgram explains that“[t]he point of the experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measureable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim” (632). Milgram found that participants were more than willing to go pass what was comfortable to them to please authority; “Milgram found that few participants could
resist the authority’s orders, even when the participants knew that following these orders would result in another person’s pain” (630).
In his article “The Perils of Obedience,” Stanley Milgram effectively explains how obedience plays a role on willing participants; the purpose of this experiment was to see how far a willing participant would go to please authority and to test a participant based off of their knowledge, even if the willing participant knew it could ultimately cause pain or injury to the other participant. Milgram’s study was effective because other subjects like Yale, Princeton, Munich, Rome, South Africa, and Australia conducted the same experiment and the level of obedience was much greater than what Milgram originally expected. In Milgram’s studies he uses factual information to test the participants, and with that factual results are given. Milgram separates the teacher and the learner into two different groups, but one of them believes that the other participant is an ordinary participant like themself, when one of the participants is really an actor. That focuses the attention on the willing participant to see the reaction, behaviors, and level of obedience. I believe Stanley Milgram’s experiment to be credible because Stanley came up with the experiment, he tested the experiment, other organizations tested his experiment, and the results showed consistent results or even higher results of obedience in some cases. I find Milgram’s experiment to be accurate based off of the numerous studies Milgram and other groups conducted, most people were less likely to go against what the authority was telling them to do in fear of disobeying authority. Whether they believed it was morally correct, they continued to do it because they were told by the experimenter to do so.