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Stanley Milgram's Behavioral Study Of Obedience

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BACKGROUND “Obedience is an active or deliberate form of social influence, which involves someone in authority requiring us to behave in a particular was in a particular situation.” (Gross, R 2015:446) Stanley Milgram (1963) ‘behavioural study of obedience’ was “originally attempting to test the ’Germans are different’ hypothesis” (Gross, R 2012:226) to explain how a dictator like Hitler was able to coerce thousand to execute millions of Jews, Poles and others within his Nazi reign between the 1930s and 1940s. Milgram had planned to conduct this study in Germany, once he had completed these American studies but due to the conclusion, further studies were not necessary. This study focuses “on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal …show more content…

It may be due to humans needs to please or be seen to ‘do as they are told’ or simply to be on the right side of the law and do the right thing, either way, an immense number would kill another person if given the order to do so. In current times an experiment of this nature would not have been given permission to go ahead, as it is seen as ethically and morally wrong to harm another person. It also goes against the British Psychological Society (BSP) code of ethics, which provides guidelines for how research should be conducted. Milgram’s study goes against 2 of the main principle; Deception, all participants was misled about the aims of the research and the true identities of participants. Withdrawal from an Investigation, a study should respect the participants right to leave or refuse a study at any time if they feel uncomfortable. “They should be told at the start of the study that they have the right to withdraw. They should not have pressure placed upon them to continue if they do not want to.” (McLeod, S. A.

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Among multiple issues including giving misleading information, the most dominate is the lack of consent Milgram received from his subjects to participate in such a test (102). While I do see that this is immoral, there is no way that Milgram could have completed his experiments effectively if he had done it morally. The first issue is if he explains what is actually going to happen during the experiments, that would obviously hurt the integrity of his results. Also, going back to how the experiments help us, if those who participated knew what was going to happen, it wouldn’t have affected them as severely. It was the shock that the experiment gave that brought their life choices into question.

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In “The Genocidal Killer in the Mirror”, Crispin Sartwell argues that the average citizen can be convinced to commit atrocious crimes under the right circumstances from the premise that the traits to become a genocidal killer are not that uncommon, using examples from recent history such as the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and the Rwandan Genocide. Sartwell clarifies that although most people delude themselves into thinking that they wouldn’t partake in genocide if they were placed in a similar situation as many have before, it would take a “moral hero” (Sartwell 118) to refuse the opportunity given the circumstances. On the other hand, in “Just Do What the Pilot Tells You”, author Theodore Dalrymple claims that people's response to authority in respect to their obedience is what leads the average man to kill countless others. While both authors address the fact that it doesn’t take a malicious person to engage in genocide, Sartwell focuses more on the qualities that people who commit genocide commonly share, Dalrymple seems more concerned on how people react to authority in

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1189 Words | 5 Pages

Ian Parker, author of “Obedience”, provides accurate depictions of the immediate and long-term effects of Dr. Stanley Milgram’s Experiment. In addition, he includes that under complex situations, individuals are easily induced to react through a destructive manner (Parker103). Americans commonly underestimate the influences of a situation; however, Parker thoroughly delineates the consequences behind blind obedience (Parker 104). Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, authors of “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience” construe the atrocity of blind obedience committed by the United States Military. In March of 1968, crimes of obedience occurred due to an elusive order commanded by a higher ranked officer (Kelman&Hamilton 131).

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He conducted this study to understand or generalise the findings to the case of Nazi battle in World War 2 to investigate if Germans obeyed to an authority and how easily an ordinary person can be persuaded to

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The author explains that there are many philosophies about obedience but they don’t give much information about the behaviors of subjects in critical or complicated situation. Milgram sets up an experiment at Yale University to see the reaction of a citizen when ordered by the experimenter to hurt other person. The author

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1297 Words | 6 Pages

Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, shares his results from an experiment he conducted in 1963 regarding the obedience to authority in “The Perils of Obedience.” His experiment illustrates that when placed under peculiar circumstances, ordinary citizens are capable of performing terrible and unexpected actions (Milgram 85). Milgram rationalizes these proceedings by concluding that the average individual will decide to please the experimenter rather than resist his authority to protect the well-being of the learner (Milgram 86). Herbert C. Kelman, a Harvard University Social Ethics professor, and V. Lee Hamilton, a former University of Maryland Sociology chair, share of a U.S. military massacre in “The My Lai Massacre: A Military

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Obedience is tested by how long the subject will continue to “shock the victim”. The point of this study is to determine if Americans are obedient even if they know the act is wrong. 2. What is/are the research questions and/or hypothesis/hypotheses? How obedient would subjects be to researchers when it comes to shocking a victim?

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Essentially, the researchers kept every participant in the dark in order to continue their research even a the expense of the subjects. The second

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Since the beginning of the human existence, man has always dominated and ruled over one another be it empires, corporations, or small groups. Authority and obedience has always been a factor of who we are. This natural occurrence can be seen clearly through the psychological experiments known as The Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Both of these studies are based on how human beings react to authority figures and what their obedience is when faced with conflict.

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Renowned psychologist and social experimenter Stanley Milgram once said that “obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority.” In other words, man succumbs to authority because it is rooted in his obedience to jurisdiction. An example of this is the American judicial system, which man is obedient to because that is what’s known. His political or societal purpose however is a learned behavior, or one that he matriculates from the dynamic of his culture.

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Conformity and group mentality are major aspects of social influence that have governed some of the most notorious events and experiments in history. The Holocaust is a shocking example of group mentality, or groupthink, which states that all members of the group must support the group’s decisions strongly, and all evidence leading to the contrary must be ignored. Social norms are an example of conformity on a smaller scale, such as tipping your waiter or waitress, saying please and thank you, and getting a job and becoming a productive member of society. Our society hinges on an individual’s inherent need to belong and focuses on manipulating that need in order to create compliant members of society by using the ‘majority rules’ concept. This

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950 Words | 4 Pages

Milgram himself concluded how easily ordinary people ‘can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority". (Milgram 1974) As this report has highlighted the research is not without controversy with many questioning to what extent Milgram’s experiment is true to real life and has been criticized for not highlighting further situational variables in determining obedience to authority. Regardless of this, there is no doubt Milgram highlighted a rather troubling phenomenon.

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1072 Words | 5 Pages

Arguably, one of the most well-known experiments regarding the tendency of humans to inflict harm upon strangers under orders from perceived authority figures is Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiments in 1963 (Smith, Aquino, Koleva & Graham, 2014). The experiment was based on the Nuremberg Trials, wherein the Nazi soldiers on trial claimed that they were only following orders, and as such implied a lesser role in their crimes during the Holocaust. While there are many factors that influence injustice against a people, in this paper, the role of moral exclusion will be examined in detail in order to ascertain how those excluded from powerful groups by virtue of their lineage and race could then be subjected to significant harm, and perhaps

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We have been trained to be obedient to authority. This quality is deep-rooted in us all from the manner in which we were brought up. It is natural for people to obey orders from those whom they recognized as their authority. This is the natural response to legitimate authority and can be learnt in a variety of situations. In a summary written in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), states: “The legal aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations.”

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industry relies on the fame of national politicians and celebrities” in order to thrive (Brandt 549). Speechwriting is one of the most common and accepted practice of ghostwriting. In 2003, Dennis Kucinich argued that because he never used ghostwriters to write his speeches or his books, he was trustworthier than the other candidates. Common people have a general distrust towards people who use ghostwriting services, because ghostwriters are never recognized on even a copyright page. Therefore, one can never be certain of the information they are reading and whether or not it is an actual representation of the “author.”

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