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Milgram's Experiment Of Obedience Essay

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Milgram’s experiment of obedience was done in 1961 soon after WW2 and the trials for war crimes against the Nazi’s were being done. In Milgram’s obedience to authority experiment, two people came per session. They thought they were testing the effects of pain on memory. Only one of the participants was an actual volunteer. The other person worked for Milgram. The actual volunteer was labeled as the teacher and the other person (the one that worked for Milgram) was labeled as the learner. For the experiment ,Milgram designed a shock generator: an electric device with 30 toggle switches labeled with voltage levels starting at 30 volts and increasing by 15 volt intervals up to 450 volts. These switches were labeled in groups such …show more content…

The teacher was instructed to increase the voltage every time the learner missed a question. The learner began screaming in pain. At 300 volts, the learner refused to answer any more questions. The experiment was supposed to end when the learner received 450 volts or when the teacher refused to continue. Surprisingly, 65% of the teachers continued to administer the shocks until they reached the 450 volts, the end of the experiment. This shocked Milgram and his team. The teachers had nothing to lose by stopping and could have left at anytime. Milgram's research was important to the study of human behavior because it questioned many parts of it, especially submission to authority. The participants in his experiment would have had nothing to lose if they chose to walk out of the room they were in, but instead they decided to follow "unwritten rules of acceptable social behavior”.Following the experiment participants were debriefed and they were informed that the shock apparatus was not real and that the protests from the learners were scripted. Many of the subjects expressed emotional upset as they thought that they were inflicting immense pain on another person and that the high voltage shocks that they apparently administered had the capacity to kill

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In the article, ‘Obey at any cost’, Milgram’s reason for research was because Milgram believed humans obey authority even when obeying authority could change their own behavior. Milgram’s experiment consisted of 40 men. The men were paid so they would all stay throughout the experiment. The participants were told a “story” telling them that it was a study on the effect of “punishment on learning.” They then had to draw a paper out of a hat to determine their roles.

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In the video of the Stanley Milgram Experiment People were given roles as teachers and students. The students had been hooked up to an electrical system were they had been received questions and whenever they had answered incorrectly they received a dosage of electricity and got progressively got stronger each time they were wrong. At a certain point the student stopped responding to pain and the scientist had kept making them give a voltage. Some People discontinued the experiment.

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The Milgram Experiment Usually, people follow given orders from authority. Authority can be a work boss, parents, teachers, etc. We are taught to follow orders at a young age so we won’t have issues with obedience in the future. The Milgram Experiment was basically testing how far someone could commit to their obedience before it became too much.

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Two children from Indonesia, Yoyo and Duku eight and ten years old have been mining for two years. These two children mine every day, with no childhood and no education. Yoyo mother believes that mining all these children will have in their future. Yoyo is only able to read few words, while Duku has never had an education. When asked Duku would he rather be in school than mining, he seems not to mind to be at school rather than mining.

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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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Another contemporary experiment conducted in 2009 by Jerry Burger, replicated the method of Milgram’s experiment, but instead adjusting the ethical issues that were identified in Milgram’s study. The ways in which Burger’s (2009) study ensured principles like nonmaleficence were not violated included utilising a screening process to exclude participants with any negative mental issues, emphasising multiple times that they could withdraw at any time and still receive remuneration and using a lower set of voltage shocks up to 150V unlike Milgram’s which shocked up to 450 volts (Milgram, 1963). To aid the participants psychological wellbeing, when the experiment had concluded the participant was informed that the person was not actually shocked

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Similarly, an experiment performed by Stanley Milgram in 1963 proves that obedience to authority figures can become very harmful. In Milgram’s experiment he asks for volunteers to come and “take part in the study of learning” (McLeod 584). This is the first dilemma with his research. He was advertising a completely different experiment. The volunteers are asked to read to a “student” a set of words and if the “student” did not respond correctly then the volunteer must shock the “student” with increasing voltages of electricity.

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The Milgram experiment is an experiment which test the way people do terrible things because of orders they are given. The experiment consists of filming two people, one asks questions, the other is being asked a series of memory questions. The person who is asking the series of memory questions thinks he is being told what questions to ask by a “scientist”, the scientist is actually just an actor. The people are hooked up to a voltage machine that can give off anywhere to no voltage to the legal amount of voltage a human can be given. The “scientist” is instructed to increase the voltage each time the person gets a memory question wrong.

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In 1963 Stanley Milgram conducted a controversial study of the effects of obedience. The focus of the experiment was on the apparent conflict between obedience to authority and an individual’s conscience. At the time, Milgram was concerned with investigating whether Germans were characteristically obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the atrocities of the Nazis during the Second World War. The experiment was conducted in a manner that paired the participants. One would be the “teacher” and one the “learner”.

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(Russell 2014) Conclusion: Despite controversy Milgram’s experiment was ground breaking. It remains relevant today and is frequently cited in demonstrating the perils of obedience.

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In the Milgram study we watches as humans through the ages of 20-50 were sat down and given a shock test when answering questions, in the replicated study there as “teachers” that didn't know what was going on and thought the were shocking a person in the next room. In the the original motive was to test the difference between “obedience for authority and personal conscientious”(Mcleod) this meant they got a confederate and would see how many volts this individual would give to the volunteer when a question was answered wrong. After conducting this experiment it was very important to see how everyone reacted because you got to see many different emotions of people and weather they stopped at the half way mark or hit the full voltage . In this study Social psychology which means “the scientific study of

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The Milgram experiment was conducted to analyze obedience to authority figures. The experiment was conducted on men from varying ages and varying levels of education. The participants were told that they would be teaching other participants to memorize a pair of words. They believed that this was an experiment that was being conducted to measure the effect that punishment has on learning, because of this they were told they had to electric shock the learner every time that they answered a question wrong. The experiment then sought out to measure with what willingness the participants obeyed the authority figure, even when they were instructed to commit actions which they seemed uncomfortable with.

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His experiment was all a hoax. The shock machine was fake. All he wanted was to know how many people would be obedient and how many would be defiant. Much to Milgram’s surprise sixty-five percent of people did what were told of them, and only thirty-five percent were

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