Obedience In Stanley Milgram's 'The Perils'

Karen Perez

Professor Cirlio

English 102

March 7,2023

Formal Essay #2 Final Draft

What is obedience? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, obedience is compliance with an order, request, law, or submission to another's authority. Whether individuals are aware of it or not, obedience is an integral part "in the structure of their social lives." The children are submissive to their parents, and the parents are submissive to their elders. Everyone is subservient to someone, whether it be an employer, the police, or the law; obedience is a part of the social hierarchy. Few individuals have the resources to oppose such authority, as doing so can tarnish their reputation in the eyes of society. Obedience to a person or a thing

The CivilWarLand is a family-oriented theme park close to closing as the gangs have been vandalizing and creating problems for the park owner Mr.Alsuga. Mr.Alsuga is determined to keep the park open, using the narrator and other characters to do his dirty work regardless of the consequences. In "The Perils of Obedience," Stanley Milgram conducts an experiment to test how far people are willing to bend their morals and go against their own conscience to appease the authority figure, in this case, the Experimenter. Milgram's hypothesis was proven wrong as the majority of people would go against their conscience and appease the authority figure despite the harm they were doing to the learner. Milgram's experiment demonstrated that people would go to extreme lengths to obey a superior, regardless of the consequences. Saunder's story refutes Milgram's explanations because the narrator's obedience to Mr. Alsuga, the big boss, was motivated by personal gain despite having reservations on

Alsuga. As a married father of two children who must provide for his family, the narrator has many incentives to be the "clean-up man." Milgram's experiment was initially created to see how people would perceive authority, even if it was against their morals. The experiment consisted of the experimenter, teacher, and learner. 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