The study measures the willingness of ordinary individuals to adhere to an authority figure who told them to commit acts on another individual which may conflict with their personal morals. The experiment found that 65% of the individuals completely obeyed the authority figure and made it through to inflict the final shock of 450 volts on another human being for an incorrect answer. These findings shocked me and led me to believe that it would have been entirely possible for a seemingly ordinary person such as myself to commit horrible acts against another person if I was instructed to do so. I sincerely hope that through being educated on such experiments and the holocaust itself, I would now have the strength to stand up for what I morally believe in and refuse any order outside of my
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).
Milgram’s experiment, that tricks subjects into believing that they have killed someone of their own free will, seems to point to the fact that a situation has the larger effect on how someone acts, than their personality. Slater writes that Milgram agreed with this and that he believed that any normal person could be commanded to do any number of terrible things if put into the right situation (32). An astounding 65 percent of the people put into that said
The followers in Jonestown executed every task Jones asked them to, and this decreases cult member’s agency because they become less responsible for their actions. Those in Jonestown followed every order their leader commanded to please him, and this is exactly what happened in the Stanley Milgram Experiment. The American Psychological Association states, “In the middle of the jungle in Guyana, South America, nearly 1,000 people drank lethal cyanide punch or were shot to death, following the orders of their leader, Jim Jones… And when people are uncertain, they look to others for cues on what to do, research has shown.” Jones’ church members were willing to do anything for him, even kill themselves.
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
This concept sparked a curiosity in psychologist Stanley Milgram to discover how authoritative figures influence a person's decision making---which soon led him to conduct his most famous experiments known today. After watching Nazi generals, one after the other, plead they were only following orders during the Nuremberg trials he took away one main concept; people can, and will blindly follow authority. To test this idea,
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
1. What rationale do the author(s) give for conducting the study? The author that is conducting this research is testing the obedience of a subject when dealing with “stocking a victim” by use of a shock generator. There are thirty levels of shock that are generated varying from a slight shock to a severe shock.
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
The subject of obedience has long been discussed all around the world. What is it that makes individuals follow orders or fall into line when told to by people in authority? Milgram (1963) became increasingly interested in the subject after the tragedies of the Second World War. He himself was of Jewish descent which situated him and informed his research and choices. Obedience as a determinant of behaviour can have catastrophic consequences, and through his studies of obedience Milgram was looking at the extent a participant will go with administering electric shocks to a victim in the presence of an individual in authority.
In both Milgram's experiment and the Holocaust by cultivating an “us and them” mentality ordinary people were able to undermine their own feelings of responsibility (Newman 15). Thus obedience not a massive group of heartless individuals contributed to the events during the Holocaust, as was shown with fundamental psychology gained by Milgram’s obedience
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.
In 1961, social scientist Stanley Milgram carried out research that explored what makes people do evil things even when they know that, morally, they are wrong (Milgram on Milgram (Part 1): Obedience experiments (The Open University, 2014). This study, known as the Milgram’s Obedience Study, aimed to see how far people would go in obeying an authority figure, particularly a malevolent one, who would advocate the administration of electric shock to fellow human beings. In 2009, this study was partially replicated by psychologist Jerry Burger in order to identify whether the outcomes of the study would be the same, even though the societal context had moved on by approximately four decades (Byford, 2014). In this essay, I will discuss key similarities
Stanley Milgram’s (1963) experiment is one of the most widely recognised psychological experiments of all time, aiming to explain obedience in the Holocaust, focussing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Milgram’s obedience experiments suggest that in the face of authority people can’t help but obey orders. This essay will critically discuss this statement in relation to recent reappraisals of MIlgram’s experiments. Milgram’s famous experiments involved a teacher who would in fact be the participant within the experiment, administering shocks to the learner, who was in fact one of Milgram’s confederates, when they did not recall information correctly. Ultimately the learner would answer incorrectly in order
Stanley Milgram wants to know how people would go in obeying an instruction. For his experiment he stand a procedure it is different from others. His experiment taken at human beings. 40 males aged between 20 and 50 were selected for the experiment, These 40 males were professionals who is unskilled. There is a teacher and learner in his experiment.
