Obedience To Authority Experiment By Stanley Milgram
1547 Words7 Pages
For what reason do humans, in specific circumstances, delegate their own autonomy to authority? Are people able to execute orders, that are conflicting with their own morality and virtue, when those orders are given by an authoritarian figure? How far would they go, in order to obey, if by doing so they would hurt another individual?
Those are the questions that stimulated my interest in the studies conducted by Stanley Milgram. In the first section of this essay, I will discuss how the experiment was carried out by Milgram, including results and findings, while in the second section, I will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of his methodology and ethical issues regarding the approach.
Methods
Milgram 's intent was to study the behaviour of individuals subject to a certain authority. In this instance, the experimenter impersonated the authority figure.
The experiment took place in Yale University, in July 1961. Forty subjects were recruited through an advertisement on a local newspaper, and they were paid 4.50$ just for taking part to the experiment,
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