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Stanley Milgram's Experiments On Obedience

1012 Words5 Pages

In 1961, Stanley Milgram (1963) carried out one of the most famous experiments in social psychology. He wanted to examine the conflict between a person’s obedience to authority and their personal conscience. This experiment was conducted one year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann, along with most of those accused at the Nuremberg War Criminal trials, often based their defense on ”obedience”. The justification for their atrocious actions was that they were simply following orders from their superiors. Milgram wanted to find an answer to the question ”Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974) Milgram’s experiment …show more content…

First off, all the participants were male so one could question if the results would transfer to females. Second, the participants were all volunteers- the sample was self-selected. The participants might also have a typical “volunteer-personality”- perhaps it took a certain personality type to respond to the newspaper advertisement and therefore the sample would not be representative for the American population. Ethical considerations Milgram (1963) used deception in his studies on obedience, which has been repeatedly criticised. The participants in the experiments actually believed they had administered painful electric shocks to another human being, and were visibly distressed throughout the experiment. Although they were not forced to stay and complete the experiment, they were consistently encouraged to keep going despite their obvious discomfort. Milgram (1974) was very careful to debrief all of the participants thoroughly, and followed up on them for some time after the experiment. Despite what many people view as a questionable ethical conduct, 83 % of the participants indicated that they were glad they had taken part in the

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In the book “Opening Skinner’s Box”, Lauren Slater discusses many complicated ideas relating to certain experiments of recent times. In every chapter, she focuses on one specific experiment and poses many controversial thoughts. One of the chapters I found most interesting was the second chapter titled “Obscura”. In it she walks readers through the experiments of Stanley Milgram and questions the purpose, results, usefulness, and morality of the experiments. To begin, the purpose of the experiments seem to be off to me.

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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

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This book is not written to find Franz Stangl guilty or not guilty for his crimes. A court had already done that, this book sets out to introduce the type of personality needed to carry out the horrific crimes which served Franz a life sentence. Franz is a classic example of cognitive dissonance. Franz adopted abandoned his morals to allowed him to carry out and make peace with his work during the Nazi regime. One, he wants to make sure people know he knew right from wrong.

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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

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Milgram Experiment Explain Nazi Compliance

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To What Extent Does the Milgram Experiment Explain Nazi Compliance?     The word “Holocaust”, was a word meaning whole (“holos”) and burned (“kaustos”). In 1945, the word stood for the mass murder of about 6 million people; mainly European Jews as well as some homosexuals and Gypsies. The mass murder was committed by the German Nazi regime during the Second World War.

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He saw that the more personal, or close, the real participant had to be to the fake one, while they were being shocked, affected the obedience as well. He also noticed that if there were two other fake participants teaching that refused to shock their learners that the real participant would not comply. Finally, he tested the experimenter telling the real patient to shock the learner by telephone, instead of actually being there in person, reduced obedience as well (McLead). The Milgram experiment and the Nuremburg trials can relate extensively to explain how the Holocaust happened the way it did.

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Stanley Milgram's The Perils Of Obedience

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There are many ways to find out how individuals would react in certain situations, for example, by putting individuals in a simulation. Causing stress and discomfort to individuals in order to gain knowledge is at times necessary. For example, Stanley Milgram’s experiments which focus on obedience to authority and the extent a person is willing to ignore their own ethical beliefs and cause pain to another individual, just because he is ordered to do so. Stanley Milgram writes about his experiments and results in his article “The Perils of Obedience”. In his experiments Stanley Milgram causes subjects who have volunteered to be a part of them some stress and discomfort in order to receive relevant results.

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Zimbardo offered $15 per day for two weeks to take part in the experiment. The experiment was held in the basement of Stanford University Psychology building; they turned it into a mock prison. To begin the experiment Zimbardo interviewed over 70 applicants and done testing on each to eliminate candidates with psychological issues. Only 24 males were chosen to participate in the experiment.

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While arguably one of the defining psychological studies of the 20th Century, the research was not without flaws. Almost immediately the study became a subject for debate amongst psychologists who argued that the research was both ethically flawed and its lack of diversity meant it could not be generalized. Ethically, a significant critique of the experiment is that the participants actually believed they were administering serious harm to a real person, completely unaware that the learner was in fact acting. Although Milgram argued that the illusion was a necessary part of the experiment to study the participants’ reaction, they were exposed to a highly stressful situation. Many were visibly distraught throughout the duration of the test

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"Obedience is behavior that complies with the explicit demands of the individual in authority." (King, 448) If a store manager tells you to put a shirt on before entering the store, you're more than likely going to comply due to their request due to their authority over the store. You might fear that if you do not comply, you won't be permitted inside or even police being called. That is simple obedience, but what if an authority figure asked you to inflict pain on another person?

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The Milgram experiment was conducted to analyze obedience to authority figures. The experiment was conducted on men from varying ages and varying levels of education. The participants were told that they would be teaching other participants to memorize a pair of words. They believed that this was an experiment that was being conducted to measure the effect that punishment has on learning, because of this they were told they had to electric shock the learner every time that they answered a question wrong. The experiment then sought out to measure with what willingness the participants obeyed the authority figure, even when they were instructed to commit actions which they seemed uncomfortable with.

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Name : Muhammed Irshad Madonna ID : 250509 Subject : Medical Ethics Due Date : 8/01/2018 Paper : 1-The Milgram Experiment The Stanley Milgram Experiment is a famous study about obedience in psychology which has been carried out by a Psychologist at the Yale University named, Stanley Milgram. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In July 1961 the experiment was started for researching that how long a person can harm another person by obeying an instructor.

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