There had been experimentation on obedience but none had been done like Milgram’s. The experimenter warns, “In this experiment, one of you will be the learner and receive shocks when you make a mistake in word pairs read to you, and the other one will be the teacher and administer the shocks when the word pair repetition is wrong.” (Slater 33). He wanted to see if people would shock a person continuously because someone had told them to. Milgram wanted to know how far people would go.
In, “If Hitler Asked You to Electrocute a Stranger, Would You? Probably” Phillip Meyer discusses Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment and the probability of normal people electrocuting a stranger. Milgram’s experiment was originally to show that Germans were different, which would explain the Nazis and the Holocaust. However, what he found was even more shocking. Milgram discovered that most people, not just Germans, are naturally very obedient.
Stanley Milgram: The Perils of Obedience Stanley Milgram experiment is concerning peoples’ willingness to conform to an authority figure. The question Milgram was trying to answer was would a subject kill with electrical shock, due to an authority figure instructing them too. One individual was the learner being hooked up to electrodes, however, not literally.
In the article of “The Perils of Obedience”, written by Stanley Milgram, the experimenter explains that the experiment is to see how far a person could hurt a victim in a situation where he is ordered to do so. Also, in the article “The Stanford Prison
Slater references Daniel Goldhagen who argues that “‘His obedience theories just don’t apply,”’ and that Milgram’s experiments don’t include any time to consider their actions, unlike the real world (56). Milgram forced his subjects into an unrealistic position. If the subjects had been given time to think about what was happening and choose the best action, I am confident that nearly every subject would have held their hand. Slater even says that the experiment had subjects in hysteria to the point of “…strangled hee-haws and belly-aching bursts,” (44). This just shows how unrealistic of a scenario Milgram had created.
During Stanley Milgram’s 1960’s study, he made subjects believe that they were harming another subject in order to test obedience. He did this by having the subject ask an actor, who was pretending to be another subject, to remember a word out of a series of words. Whenever the actor fail to get the word correct, the subject would flip a switch that he believe was administering an increasing electric charge. They were told not to stop and to continue increasing the voltage even after the actor began yelling and begging them to stop, and even after he stopped responding all together. The study was to see just how far people are willing to go to follow the orders of an authoritative figure.
This Milgram research on respect to authority figures was a series of cultural science experiments conducted by Yale University scientist Stanley Milgram in 1961. They assessed the willingness of survey participants, men from a different variety of jobs with varying degrees of training, to obey the authority figure who taught them to do acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to think that they were helping an unrelated research, in which they had to distribute electrical shocks to the individual. These fake electrical shocks gradually increased to grades that could have been deadly had they been true. McLeod's article about the Milgram experiment exposed the fact that a high percentage of ordinary people will
Several of the elements of the experiment protocol were changed, so that Burger (2009) complies with the ethical standards of its time, as far as human participation in experiments were concerned. According to the research findings, obedience estimations were almost to those of Milgram 45 years earlier than the date of Burger’s (2009) experiment. Participants’ responses did not differ in terms of their gender. The above results indicate the validity of Milgram’s agentic state theory in explaining human obedience. It is worth noting, though, that research findings also showed that participants’ responses differed up to a point in terms of their empathic concern and desire for control.
During the 1960’s Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments to test how a person reacts to authority. He started these tests in response to World War Two and the reports of the German soldiers who claimed they were “just following orders’ when asked about
Stanley Milgram’s 1963 Study of Disobedience was unethical, based upon scholarly research. Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) is, perhaps, best known for his research studies into disobedience, referring to a person’s following of rules (or instructions) received from an individual viewed as an authority figure. Milgram’s Study of Obedience also analyzed the effects of peer pressure. In Milgram’s study, forty males between the ages of 20 and 50, representing all types of vocations, were recruited and then reimbursed $4.50 for their participation in an alleged learning study (Holah-Psychology, n.d.). The study’s goal was to investigate what extent of obedience would be demonstrated when study participants were told by an individual perceived as an authority figure to shock another person (Holah-Psychology, n.d.) whenever the study “learner” made an error.
When the Milgram obedience experiments were being conducted the core of the experiments were all based on the false impression that an electrical shock would be administered to another individual at the push of a button with an incorrect answer, when in fact they weren’t. If the Milgram experiments were not based on lies and each participant did in fact administer a shock to another individual in response to a wrong answer, I feel that the results would have been the same with no alternative result. The reason for this would be because from the very beginning of the experiment the participants already believed that they would be actually administering an electrical shock. The participant’s reactions and concerns before, during and even after the experiments were all real with their true feelings and thoughts about their participation of either walking away from the experiment or completing the experiment. If the participants were to know that the electric shocks they were administering were not real, then the whole purpose of the experiment would have been useless and unnecessary.
The Milgram experiment and the society Speaking of one of the most renowned psychological experiment, which even replications on TV are done, is the Milgram experiment, on obedience to authority figures. It involves the measurement of how much participants will to obey the authority, in order to explain the reason why soldiers obeyed to allow the Holocaust, the homicides of millions of Jews, happened. With the participants’ roles as a teacher to punish a learner by incrementing degrees of electric shocks, though they didn’t know it’s staged, 65% of them did it to the last under the horrendous moans and the commands of the experimenters, which surpassed the expectation of 1.2%. Milgram himself elaborated two theories, encompassing theory of
(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.
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.
Name : Muhammed Irshad Madonna ID : 250509 Subject : Medical Ethics Due Date : 8/01/2018 Paper : 1-The Milgram Experiment The Stanley Milgram Experiment is a famous study about obedience in psychology which has been carried out by a Psychologist at the Yale University named, Stanley Milgram. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In July 1961 the experiment was started for researching that how long a person can harm another person by obeying an instructor.
