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Analysis Of Stanley Milgram's The Perils Of Obedience

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Recommended: Compliance 3 variety of social influence

Obedience is a form of social influence where an individual acts in response to a direct order from another individual, who is usually one with authority. If the order was never said, it is believed that the person would not have acted the way they had. From a young age everyone is taught to obey and listen to your parents, teachers, police officers, and figures on a higher hierarchy of power, or status. Stanley Milgram mentioned in his essay, The Perils of Obedience, that “Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living and it is only the person dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, with defiance or submission, to the commands …show more content…

The learner, or victim, is actually an actor who receives no shock at all. The point of the experiment is to see how far a person will go in a situation where he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim. Milgram, during his study, noted when a conflict occurred, ”At 75 volts, he grunts; at 120 volts, he complains loudly; at 150, he demands to be released from the experiment. As the voltage increases, his protests become more vehement and emotional. At 285 volts, his response can be described only as an agonized scream. Soon thereafter, he makes no sound at all.” Although nothing is happening to the actor being “shocked,” the teacher knows they are hurting the learner only because they are answering wrong. The teacher can see that the victim, the learner, is indeed in extreme discomfort. Yet the teacher continues to shock the learner when he is wrong.They are being inhumane, but believe they are doing right because they are just told to do so. Milgram said “For the teacher, the situation quickly becomes one of gripping tension. It is not a game for him: conflict is intense obvious. The manifest suffering of the learner presses him to quit: but each time he hesitates to administer a shock, the experimenter orders him to

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In the video of the Stanley Milgram Experiment People were given roles as teachers and students. The students had been hooked up to an electrical system were they had been received questions and whenever they had answered incorrectly they received a dosage of electricity and got progressively got stronger each time they were wrong. At a certain point the student stopped responding to pain and the scientist had kept making them give a voltage. Some People discontinued the experiment.

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In the article of “The Perils of Obedience”, written by Stanley Milgram, the experimenter explains that the experiment is to see how far a person could hurt a victim in a situation where he is ordered to do so. Also, in the article “The Stanford Prison

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The student and teacher were placed in separate rooms and an instructor was placed in the same room as the teacher. He would then attempt to convince the teacher to continue the experiment even if the student starts crying out or wanting to leave. The teacher was required to “shock” the student if they said an incorrect answer. However, the ‘shocks’ became more intense and came with each incorrect answer. They eventually started getting very dangerous and potentially life threatening.

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Switches were clearly labelled with voltage 15-450 volts. The teacher was actually naïve subject but Learner was an actor who didn’t even get a single shock. The purpose of this experiment was to see how far Teacher can go in the critical situation when shocks volts rise and Learner’s pain increased. Screaming and pain of the Learner made Teacher hesitating in proceeding far. To get freedom from this situation, Teacher must disobey to the

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In the article, “The Perils of Obedience,” by Stanley Milgram,

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The Milgram Experiment was a test done originally in the 1960s. It involved bringing people in to be a “teacher” and having the “teacher” give a test to another person who is hooked up to a generator. Whenever the “learner” gets a question wrong the “teacher” issues a shock. These shocks go all the way to 450 volts. The point of the experiment was to see how far people would go with the shocks.

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the student is unconscious/dead). Milgram wanted to see how far the participants would go with the shocks before they stopped the experiment. If they continued to order shocks, just because that was the rules of the experiment, Milgram claimed this would prove that people will commit acts of violence simply because they were ordered to do so. The results were that all participants continued to administer shocks well into the range at which the student was screaming in pain, and around 60% kept going until “XXX”. At the time, the Milgram experiment ethics seemed reasonable, but by modern day psychology, this experiment would have never been allowed today.

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In the experiment, Milgram uses purposeful deception as the teacher is the naive subject and is told they are participating in a memory and learner psychology experiment and are in charge of delivering shocks to the learner, who, in fact, is an actor. The majority of the participants in the study were obedient to the experimenter even though the experimenter "did not threaten the subjects with punishments such as loss of income, community ostracism or jail for failure to obey. Neither could he offer incentives" (Milgram 651). Despite having nothing to gain, the subjects continued participating in the experiment. The participants continued to administer shocks to the student because they were instructed to

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This made them believe they won't get in trouble for their actions. As the experiment took place Milgram knew what might cause each individual to consider it okay. This way Milgram had one of the experimental scientists express to the experimentee, “The responsibility is mine. Correct. Please go on (Milgram, 83).”

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He saw that the more personal, or close, the real participant had to be to the fake one, while they were being shocked, affected the obedience as well. He also noticed that if there were two other fake participants teaching that refused to shock their learners that the real participant would not comply. Finally, he tested the experimenter telling the real patient to shock the learner by telephone, instead of actually being there in person, reduced obedience as well (McLead). The Milgram experiment and the Nuremburg trials can relate extensively to explain how the Holocaust happened the way it did.

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The purpose of the experiment was to see if the teacher, the one being tested, would be willing to shock the student and eventually kill him if told to do so by an authority figure. The teacher would ask a question to the student and if answered incorrectly the teacher had to shock the student by pressing a button. The more questions the student answered incorrectly the higher the voltage. The catch to it was that the student was actually not getting shocked, but screamed as if he was to see if the teacher would eventually stop. The voltage started from as low as 15 and went up as high as 450.

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Summary The main difference between the original Milgram study and the “A Peer Administers Shock” variation was shift in responsibility. Instead of the experimenter placing full responsibility on the participant of whether to shock the victim or not, the experimenter gave the participant the option of placing the responsibility onto someone else. From there the participant would either decline or obey. If they carried on the participant then acted as a teacher and instructed another participant (a confederate) to press the lever on the shock generator.

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The "teachers" continued, at the 180 volts mark the "learner" cried out that he cannot take it any longer. Once reaching 300 volts, the fifty-year-old "learner" yelled about his heart condition and begged to be released. At these points, a decent amount of "teachers" halted the experiment while a large percent continued until the final 450 volt question even though the "learner" had stopped responding. At the 150 volt mark those who were going to stop, did so. If I were in this position I would stop at the first sign of discomfort from the "learner."

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The Milgram experiment was conducted to analyze obedience to authority figures. The experiment was conducted on men from varying ages and varying levels of education. The participants were told that they would be teaching other participants to memorize a pair of words. They believed that this was an experiment that was being conducted to measure the effect that punishment has on learning, because of this they were told they had to electric shock the learner every time that they answered a question wrong. The experiment then sought out to measure with what willingness the participants obeyed the authority figure, even when they were instructed to commit actions which they seemed uncomfortable with.

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His experiment was all a hoax. The shock machine was fake. All he wanted was to know how many people would be obedient and how many would be defiant. Much to Milgram’s surprise sixty-five percent of people did what were told of them, and only thirty-five percent were

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