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.…
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…
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?…
At first Milgram believed that the idea of obedience under Hitler during the Third Reich was appalling. He was not satisfied believing that all humans were like this. Instead, he sought to prove that the obedience was in the German gene pool, not the human one. To test this, Milgram staged an artificial laboratory "dungeon" in which ordinary citizens, whom he hired at $4.50 for the experiment, would come down and be required to deliver an electric shock of increasing intensity to another individual for failing to answer a preset list of questions. Meyer describes the object of the experiment "is to find the shock level at which you disobey the experimenter and refuse to pull the switch" (Meyer 241). Here, the author is paving the way into your mind by introducing the idea of reluctance…
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…
Stanley Milgram is one of the leading researchers into the psychology of obedience. Rice et al (2008) and was interested why thousands of German soldiers blindly obeyed orders that resulted in the death of millions of Jewish people during World War II. However if a soldier is obeying orders from their superiors, then should responsibility for the consequences be held to those superiors? But evidence suggests that there was a mass willingness of tens of thousands of people to cooperate with the Nazi regime, even to the extent of shopping neighbours to the Gestapo. Rice et al (2008). The Allies saw the Germans as an authoritarian, militaristic and obedient nation. Suggesting an explanation for this extreme behaviour. Adorno et al (1950) claimed that it was the authoritarian personality that was responsible for the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Milgram was sceptical of this, believing that obedience was owed more to the situation than to the national character of a particular nation. So in the early 1960s Milgram conducted a series of experiments to support his theory.…
Before actually conducting these experiments, Milgram asked for predictions from various groups of people. It was predicted that almost all the subjects would deny to obey the experimenter, but these predictions were proved wrong. In the first group of subjects, only 25 of the 40 who participated in the experiment obeyed all the orders from the experimenter. In another scenario where Yale undergraduates were used as subjects, 60 percent of them were obedient to the experimenter.…
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'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…
According to the findings of Milgram’s experiment, individuals including those who knew each other would indeed harm others if subjected to the experimental situations in Milgram’s experiment because under extreme conditions, people would do anything. If the teachers were men and the women were learners, the level of conformity would be high because in most societies, the system in operation is patriarchal and as such, men would have undue influence on the actions of women. Teenagers would deviate from the norm in some instances and in some conform to what they are instructed to do depending on the cultural set up they were brought up in, with the majority obeying the orders of the elders.…
“Was Milgram’s Experiment Ethical?”Psych Web. Psych Web. n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2013. Retrieved from < http://www.intropsych.com/>.…
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.…
Obedience is a characteristic ingrained in every person. No matter who a person is, there is always a more authoritative figure that they must obey to. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted experiments that tested obedience towards authority. These experiments were conducted in 1963 at Yale University. The experiments Milgram performed gained many different reactions from people. Two authors that wrote their thoughts on the experiments done by Milgram are Diana Baumrind and Richard Herrnstein. Diana Baumrind, who wrote the “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience”, believes that the experiments Milgram conducted were not necessary and should not have been conducted unless the subject knew the harms that could occur after the experiment was done. Baumrind is a psychologist, who was employed at the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkley at the time that Milgram’s experiment was performed. Richard Herrnstein has a different belief. Herrnstein, the author of the article “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience”, believes Milgram’s experiments were well done and show great potential of what we are able to do in the future. Milgram’s experiment is valid because it was conducted in an appropriate setting, there was minimal psychological harm done, and it contained valuable results.…
The inspiration for social scientist Stanley Milgram’s work was the acts of Nazis during World War II. His experiments showed how obeying authority could supersede the thoughts of personal conscience. His experiments on obedience showed subjects appearing to inflict electrical shocks to another person on the instruction of an authority figure. The results of the experiment were that repeatedly people were willing continually to administer the shocks for no personal gain or loss, on the instruction of an authority figure. Milgram also worked with Solomon Asch on understanding conformity.…