Review Of Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments

The obedience experiments of Stanley Milgram can tell sociologists about the human tendency to obey immoral orders. This explains how atrocities, such as the Holocaust, come about and augment to the extent that they do. Furthermore, the Milgram experiment can be connected to how anti-authoritarianism is viewed as a detriment or sickness in the United States, as well as how people in the United States can actually be more prone to obey illegitimate authority than those who already reside in oppressive, authoritarian countries. Milgram aimed to prove the common belief that the cause of acts of atrocity is not necessarily because those perpetrators are innately unprincipled but that these historical tragedies are more so the result of following

No one is being held accountable for these crimes currently as they are viewed to have been following orders in order to protect national security. Educating people on how human nature has a major flaw in which they naturally comply with these immoral orders is how society can try to not let tragedies like these happen in the future.

Literature Review In 1961, Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments which tested obedience to immoral orders among New Haven residents. The participants would randomly choose one of two cards: Learner or Teacher. However, what the participants did not know was that they were always going to choose Teacher while one of Milgram’s men acted as a clueless participant and chose Learner. When the “learner participant” went into the room, he was instructed to study a list of word pairings on which he would be tested on later. Meanwhile, the actual participant went into a separate room, not being able to see the learner, and was told to administer a shock to the learner every time

Although the students in the 1971 experiment were instructed to pretend to be guards while the other half of students were told to act as prisoners, the “guards” took their roles to an unintended level of abuse and according to Zimbardo, it was because of how anonymous the costumes made the guards and the expectation of aggression among the participants. It did not help that the participants were also told that this experiment was to further the knowledge of human behavior and that they should take their roles somewhat seriously. The Stanford experiment unfortunately came to life during the Iraq War of 2003 in the Abu Ghraib prisons and post-9/11 in Guantanamo Bay where innocent Muslim detainees were severely tortured for years in efforts to find the culprits of the devastating attacks. Since some of these soldiers had that advantage of anonymity and belief that they were contributing to the greater good, they felt excused in what they were doing for their government. All three of these scenarios were cases where the abusers claimed to be following orders from their