Milgram's Experiment brings up the point that people under the pressure of other, will more likely obey orders even if it goes against their moral beliefs. In "To Obey of Not to Obey", most of the soldiers obeyed their superiors because they were taught to do so. Similarly in Migram's Experient, the "teachers" obeyed when the experimenter pressured the subject to continue with the shocks. This can be related to Slaughterhouse Five because the German soldiers are under the command of their superiors who are requiring them to take American prisoners. This pressure was passed down from the German soldiers who demanded the American soldiers to clean up the charred remains of dead civilians after the bombing of Dresden.…
The Milgram experiment demonstrated that people have been socially conditioned to follow instructions by an authoritarian figure. The participants in the Milgram experiment are pressured and almost verbally forced into continuing to deliver shocks to other participants for giving false answers. They had falsely been told the experiment was to determine the influence of punishment on memory. The results showed that 65% of the participants delivering the shocks delivered a fatal amount of voltage even knowing the destruction of it. It is hard for people to disobey because they have been socially conditioned to follow orders.…
In Milgram’s article, he explains an experiment he designed to test whether the subjects of the experiment would refuse the orders of authority and follow…
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…
However, in Milgram’s experiment, people complied due to the authority figure urging them to continue and appealing to their sense of responsibility. However, this has caused many of the participants to reflect in quiet horror that they were willing to harm another by executing up to 450 volts of electricity. It is a dreadful thing to realize that humans can be so easily manipulated to participate in heinous acts, causing us to take a second look on where we stand…
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…
The experiment was inspired by the Holocaust - were the Germans in league with the Nazis, or where they simply following orders as they exterminated the Nazi's victims? Milgram wanted to study whether people would obey an authority figure, or would their own morals make them stop the experiment?…
The Stanley Milgram experiment takes normal everyday people and gives them orders to do horrible…
Stanley Milgram was an extremely famous psychologist who was best known for his groundbreaking experiment on the subject of obedience during the 1960s. Milgram began his career as a psychologist just around the time that the horrifying truth of the concentration camps came out. The fact that almost an entire nation obeyed one man, who commanded them to do inhumane and grotesque acts to other human beings intrigued Stanley Milgram. He became even more interested when he began watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who simply did not seem to be the appalling monster that many people expected and portrayed him to be. In fact, Milgram described Eichmann as being less of a “sadistic monster…[and] that he came closer to being an uninspired bureaucrat…
Yale University psychologist, Stanley Milgram, conducted an experiment in 1961 focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on "obedience" - that they were just following orders from their superiors. Milgram's experiment, which he told his participants was about learning, was to have participants (teacher) question another participant (learner), and when the learner got a question wrong the teacher would shock the learner. For every question wrong, the teacher would increase the amount of volts used in the shock. Of course the experiment was actually about obedience, the learner was an experimenter, and the shock was faked (McLeod). Milgram's was one of the first psychology experiments to use…
Milgram (1963) himself, however, recognises a plethora of caveats – demonstrating a scientific awareness of his experiment’s scientific limitations such the location of the experiment was cited as a possible influence as Yale University is and was considered to be prestigious, thus reinforcing the reliability and plausibility of the experimenter himself. This was demonstrated by a follow up study which replicated the procedure in a rundown location, in which the obedience rate dropped to 47.5% (McLeod,…
Milgram's experiment in 1960 by social psychologist Dr. Stanely Milgram's (1963, 1965) was a controversial experiment. He researched the effect of authority on obedience. I don't think the scientific community overreacted to this experiment because it is unethical to reduce subjects to "twitching shuttering wrecks". Though the human mind is amazing strong we still do not know its breaking point. For interviewers to carry out the kind of experiment they did, they have to be willing to face the consequences of the experiment which could be a permanent damaged mental state. I do believe we need to do experiments like this as the outcome was very eye opening but it has to be better regulated and the background and methods of experimentation clearly…
Throughout our nation's history, we have taken part in many unethical means of gaining information or knowledge. Some of the more famous cases include, The Milgram Obedience and Authority experiment, The Stanford Prison experiment, and of course the Abu Ghraib scandal involving our own U.S. soldiers. While two of these instances were not intended to cause physical harm, they were all branded unethical due to the extent of not only the physical abuses that took place, but the painful psychological impact it left on those involved.…
This idea that perhaps seemingly “good” people can be able to ignore what is obviously morally wrong led me to an article about an interesting experiment: The Milgram experiment. This experiment, developed and run by Stanley Milgram, took place at Yale University in 1961. Milgram’s experiment consisted of having volunteers from a diverse range of backgrounds and occupations individually brought into a room and sat at a table with an array of levers. Across from this volunteer was another person who knew about the parameters of the experiment, who was strapped into a fake electric chair. A “scientist” in a lab coat would come in and tell the volunteer that he or she was to administer increasingly powerful shocks to the individual in the chair.…
He set out to prove that individuals would obey with the request of authority figures. McLeod in his summary states, “Milgram was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities for example, Germans in WWII.” (McLeod, The Milgram Experiment, 2007) The experiment was carried out by asking participants/teachers to deliver a series of electrical shocks to another person when a question was answered incorrectly. Also, if a mistake was made, the teacher could deliver an increased voltage level to the student. The general findings were that individuals who were going to disobey were those who responded not to the learner’s cries of pain but to the learners request to be set free. People are more likely to obey if there is an authority figure there to take the blame. “The power of legitimate, close-at-hand authorities is dramatically apparent in stories of those who complied with orders to carry out the atrocities of the Holocaust, and those who didn’t.” (Social Psychology) Milgram’s experiment further proves that obedience plays a major part in behavior and people are going to do what is necessary to fit…