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Milgram's Disobedience

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Milgram says that obedience is caused by the shift of responsibility. A person will say that they were just following orders. The consequences should then not apply to them because it was not their fault. Could it be possible, that a person decides to hurt another person because of evil nature? Freud believed a person acts out aggression, because of a human’s animalistic instinct. Milgram tries to disprove this theory continuously throughout his experiments. In chapter 11, Milgram allowed the subject to choose the voltage on the shocks administered to the learner. The average amount of voltage used was 75. However, one must take in consideration that the voltage was still administered to the subject. Three of the subjects administered 15 volts of electricity to the learner. This is a small current yet, it is still a current. In the beginning, when Milgram asked the three groups to make a prediction; people mentioned that only the most sadistic humans would administer 450 volts to the learner. Milgram’s experiment disproved this constantly throughout the series of experiments. But that does not mean the subject solely performed this act because he is told so. Yes, the subject did not repeatedly shock the subject on 450 volts while doing an evil laugh to satisfy his/her aggression; but, the subject did administer a shock to achieve results. Also, in experiment 18 when the …show more content…

The answer would have to be yes. Obedience happens on an everyday basis. It does not happen in such a large scale like the Nazis, but it does happen. For example, in an ordinary classroom a student will choose to remain silent and listen to the instructor or he will be loud and disrespectable. The teacher can be viewed as the experimenter while the student is the subject, and an assignment can be put in the place of the learner. Milgram’s experiment could be conducted in that very setting and he would receive the same result.
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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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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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