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Milgram Vs Zimbardo

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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 …show more content…

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

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Since the beginning of the human existence, man has always dominated and ruled over one another be it empires, corporations, or small groups. Authority and obedience has always been a factor of who we are. This natural occurrence can be seen clearly through the psychological experiments known as The Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Both of these studies are based on how human beings react to authority figures and what their obedience is when faced with conflict.

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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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Situational effects and personality come into conflict when discussing behavior. Personality is someone’s “usual pattern of behavior, feelings, and thoughts” (Twenge, 2017, p.20). It remains constant throughout different situations, but some situations can be stressful enough to make a person act out of character. The transition between a person’s normal personality and behavior to a more evil, sinister behavior fascinates a man named Philip Zimbardo, who conducted the infamous Zimbardo Prison Experiment, or Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). Zimbardo is an American psychologist at Stanford University and the mastermind behind the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment (The Story).

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This experiment fits into Kidder’s ethical dilemma paradigms of short-term vs long-term. In fact, Zimbardo choose the long term effects of his experiment over the short term effects of it. The Stanford prison experiment had a short-term effect on the university students that could not bear the prison life for long and the prison was ended after 6 days only. The long hours of imprisonment revealed that the students had become depressed while the guards had already become cruel at their maximum. The prisoners were humiliated and embarrassed by the guards.

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There are many ways to find out how individuals would react in certain situations, for example, by putting individuals in a simulation. Causing stress and discomfort to individuals in order to gain knowledge is at times necessary. For example, Stanley Milgram’s experiments which focus on obedience to authority and the extent a person is willing to ignore their own ethical beliefs and cause pain to another individual, just because he is ordered to do so. Stanley Milgram writes about his experiments and results in his article “The Perils of Obedience”. In his experiments Stanley Milgram causes subjects who have volunteered to be a part of them some stress and discomfort in order to receive relevant results.

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On day six Zimbardo and Milgram decided to conclude the experiment. Zimbardo originally intended to explore how prisoners adapt to powerlessness, but he has contended that the experiment demonstrates how swiftly arbitrary assignment of power can lead to abuse. (Maher, The anatomy of obedience. P. 408) Once the experiment was completed Zimbardo and Milgram concluded that generally people will conform to the roles they are told to play.

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Zimbardo would then go out of his way to have kind,intelligent, and compassionate individuals try out for his experiment, when all participants were accounted for, he appointed half the participants as prisoners and half as guards, appointing himself as the warden (The Stanford Prison Experiment). He then allowed these guards to do whatever they pleased, except for physically abuse the participants. To his shock he found that all his once kind, compassionate participants were becoming into ravenous monsters that had no idea of the true damage they were causing to the other participants, Zimbardo himself began to feel these effects. Zimbardo ended the experiment early due to these effects and the mental well being of the participants being in jeopardy . When interviewing the participants he found, that these guards did truly feel remorse, but knew they had to please the higher officials in order to feel accomplished (The Stanford Prison Experiment).

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Milgram himself concluded how easily ordinary people ‘can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become 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 1974) As this report has highlighted the research is not without controversy with many questioning to what extent Milgram’s experiment is true to real life and has been criticized for not highlighting further situational variables in determining obedience to authority. Regardless of this, there is no doubt Milgram highlighted a rather troubling phenomenon.

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