Milgram Vs Zimbardo

Matter of Obedience

Obedience plays a major role in today’s lifestyle and is an extremely important aspect of our society. Individuals are raised to believe that obeying has positive outcomes, and disobeying has negative outcomes. Two of the most known psychology studies were conducted by Stanley Milgram, with obedience, and Philip G. Zimbardo, with the prison experiment. Philip G. Zimbardo, author of “The Stanford Prison Experiment”, held an experiment at the Stanford College to study the behavior in prison situations. Zimbardo made it as realistic as he could with police cars pulling up to the school in a mass arrest. Another experiment was conducted at Yale University by Stanley Milgram, author of “Perlis to Obedience.” Milgram had his participants

The general idea of the two experiments was to see how far an individual would go in order to stay obedient or change their beliefs to fall under an authoritative figures commands. Both of them expressed how personalities contrast was very limited. The prisoners in Zimbardo’s experiment were able to last longer against the conditions, expect a few who were released due to stress and signs of depression. No physical pain was needed to decipher if the prisoners would obey the guards. Conversely, he did stop his experiment early for social reasoning, as emotional trauma was done to the prisoners. Consequently, Milgram had taken the opposite approach, while his experiment did use pain to see if the learner would obey the teacher more. “When the destructive effects of their work became patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority” (Milgram 587). The participants knew that these actions were not in their best interest but still decided to obey. It can be argued that more experiments may be taken on in the near future that will appear ethical to the public eye. Both Milgram and Zimbardo can agree that they were in shock from their findings. These experiments proved that people can be easily impacted by authoritative figures to carry out the actions that go against their own morals. “Under such circumstances, how could a prisoner have respect for his fellows or any self-respect for what he obviously was becoming in the eyes of all those evaluating him?” (Zimbardo 627). Zimbardo was trying to state that one will go beyond their personal limits just to obey strict rules to avoid negative consequences. Human beings since childhood were raised to obey by their parents or teachers. As long as they thought it was the right thing to do, they would