Reflection Paper On Obedience

701 Words3 Pages
I have chosen to do my reflection paper on Stanley Milgram and his experiment on Authority and Obedience. Stanley Milgram was born in 1933 to a Jewish family in New York. He earned a great reputation in school for being studious, hardworking and having good leadership skills. Milgram went on to obtain in a Bachelors degree in Political Science at Queens College in 1954. However, he realized his interests lie in psychology. He went on to obtain Ph.D in social psychology in 1960 from Harvard. Milgram spent a year working as an assistant with Solomon Asch. It was Asch’s famous conformity experiment that went on to inspire Milgram to conduct his experiments and research that were to make him famous and lead him to benefit modern psychology. In 1960 he started working at Yale and soon began his experiments on obedience and the conflict between authority and personal conscience on obedience in 1961; his experiment was one of the most famous yet controversial experiments done for obedience. Milgram was interested in studying the extent people would go to, to obey instructions for harming another person based on whom the instructions are coming from. He began his experiments a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He wondered if the many accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders against their will due to authority. He was also interested in the idea that the Germans may have just followed orders in World War II due to authority and fear of not obeying. To conduct