Compare And Contrast Milgram And Lorenz

Stanley Milgram is a psychologist who conducted the famous Obedience experiment, which studied how far people would obey authority when it involves harming another person. Meanwhile, Konrad Lorenz is an ethologist who believes that aggressiveness is an innate emotion in humans that drive us to cause harm to others. Both of these scholars studied a common detail in their experiments and observations; why would humans harm each other?. This essay discusses the reasons why we harm other human beings, where I will focus on Milgram’s and Lorenz’s views on the subject, and argue whether they have similar or different perspectives on the issue. First, people harm others due to the presence of aggression, which is a constructive force that is

Milgram’s experiment of Obedience has proven that ordinary people are inclined to carry out an authority figure's directions, even if it means killing an innocent person. This is because the power of the authority makes them believe that being obedient is the best choice when pressured under an unethical order, despite it causing harm to others. Lorenz also mentioned in his book, On Aggression, chapter 3 that authority is linked with an individual’s aggression by which they tend to follow a higher ranking individual, where a community is usually composed of a ‘senate’ or ‘leader’ which gives out orders and decisions for the good of the community. I believe there is a link between obedience towards authority and aggressiveness, for example when referring to the Lorenz in the On Aggression book, on how a group of baboons is led by a group of ‘senate’. It shows that in every society we will seek the guidance of a person which we view as an authority. Thus in terms of harming others, it is natural for humans to carry out unethical orders just because they were instructed by an authority whom they

In his 1963 study, Milgram looked at the arguments for genocide committed at the World War II Nuremberg War Criminal proceedings. He wanted to find the reasons why dozens of Nazi War criminals willing to cause harms to other people, which took place in a war setting. This proves that Milgram acknowledged the harms that happens during a civilization processes of power. Meanwhile, Lorenz has an opinion that the drive for aggressiveness can be dangerously thwarted by civilization. This is a concern of his since Lorenz believes that people’s aggression will cause awful outcome in the future, where humans are a threat towards their own species. Overall, both scholars have views that human may cause harm to each other in a situation where power and politics are