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Stanley Milgram's Experiment On Obedience

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You are responsible for setting up a replication of Milgram’s experiment on obedience. What would you change and why?
The concept of obedience can be determined by a type of behaviour or social influence of which is subsequent to a perceived authority figures order. In terms of aims and context Stanley Milgram’s (1963) objective was to observe direct social influence to unjust authority. Primarily Milgram’s aim was to create research to support Solomon Asch’s (1955) study of opinions and social pressure, however alternatively he wished to direct his studies toward making his research more humanly significant due to the fact that the results of Asch’s (1955) tests of conformity were difficult to generalise to real world situations (Hock, 2005). …show more content…

Milgram’s experiment was centred on the concept of the authoritarian personality of which was historically relevant to an early 1940’s German society and more specifically ‘The Germans are different Hypothesis’ (Adorno et al, 1950). Aldorno proposed that we can explain authoritarian personality in terms of an idiographic view point and thus in this instance the totalitarian figure is only prevalent due to society perceiving it in that way. This is a concept which also translates to Milgram’s study, as he aimed to test this hypothesis in terms of dispositional factors. However within Milgram’s experiment the authority figure /experimenter can also be seen as an extraneous variable, with many critics arguing that the extreme levels of obedience are purely due to demand characteristics. (Orne and Holland, 1968) Argued that the participants did not truly believe that the experimental situation was real, thus only acted in a way of which the experimenter suggested. Thus we are lead to believe that we are not truly witnessing the effects of the independent variable (orders from the authority figure) on the dependent variable (maximum voltage administered), and so a consequence the results may be invalid. Consequently I believe that a ‘Double Blind’ method would be well applied to this research, meaning …show more content…

(Baumrind, 1964) criticised Milgram on the terms of which his experiment caused unjust psychological damage to his participants, however it could be argued that the benefits of understanding a behaviour such as obedience outweighs the costs of ethical issues . However Berscheid et al (1973) used a role playing paradigm to determine whether potential participants would provide informed consent to participate within Milgram’s experiment subsequent to being given different levels of information concerning the procedures of the experiment, and found that most participants were willing to participate after only being given the cover story. Thus supporting that any remaining ethical issues were due to the nature of the unexpected results (Milgram,1963) . An alternative way to tackle ethical issues could be to introduce a two-step screening process, for example individuals whom had been treated for mental illnesses previously would not be used within the experiment. It may be argued that the sample may not be truly representative however more importantly unnecessary psychological damage with be kept to a

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Opening Skinner’s Box by Lauren Slater tells of experiments conducted by a physiologist named B.F. Skinner and controversies that surrounded them. Since some people did not agree with Skinner and his experiments, legends were created regarding him. One of these legends being that, “He built a baby box in which he kept his daughter Deborah for two full years in order to train her, tracking her progress on a grid.” (Slater 7) Skinner strived to shape the behavior of people, so while he did build his daughter, Deborah, a baby box to test out theories and experiments, she did not spend a full 2 years of her life in this “baby box” as the legend says. However, since there was some controversies surrounding Skinner’s experiments legends such as these

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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

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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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The novel written by the venerable Mary Higgins Clark is a suspense novel about the abduction of a set of twin girls named Kelly and Kathy Frawley, the story behind the abduction, and them and their parents journey throughout it. Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor’s chapter 8 “It’s Greek to Me” analyzes how many modern and historical pieces of literature echo Greek mythology, and this novel Two Little Girls in Blue meets the criteria of Foster’s chapter 8. Mary Higgins Clark’s novel is similar to the story of Cronus, a Titan of Greek mythology, for Clark’s novel echoes the beginning of the story of Cronus involving the abduction and the reasons for it, the emotions of the characters and their use of deception throughout the story, and also the end of the story involving the liberation of the captives.

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His family was primarily made up of Jewish immigrants; he grew up learning what happened to his relatives in Europe and he was particularly intrigued by Hannah Arendt’s report on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram wondered whether her claims about “the banality of evil” – that evil acts can come from ordinary people following orders as they do their jobs – could be demonstrated in the lab (Blass, 2002). The Milgram Obedience Experiment then began in July 1961, the same month as Adolf Eichmann’s trial (Greenwood, 2018). The experiment contained 3 people, the experimenter, the teacher, and the

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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

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In his experiment there were nine guards and nine prisoners, the guards have a dark shade glasses and uniforms to show their authority to the prisoners. The result, power can influence behavior to turn bad. Then he talks about Milgram’s study on obedience

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In 1963, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a controversial, but highly revered, study on obedience. The experiment was designed to test people’s morals versus an extreme authority, but, as predicted, obedience prevailed. Then in 1973, Philip G. Zimbardo created his own experiment, not unlike Milgram’s, that analyzed the potential of individuals to withstand the pressure of succumbing to an obedient role based on the environment. Both Stanley Milgram, author of “The Perils of Obedience,” and Philip Zimbardo, author of “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” conducted these experiments to show how an ordinary person’s obedience could be affected based off of the situation they are put in.

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Jerry M Burger's replication in 2009 of Stanley Milgram's Obedience study (1963, 1965 and 1974) specifically experiment 5, attempted to recreate this controversial and influential research whilst avoiding the ethical issues that the original study brought into play. How close was this to the original? What are the parts of the original that Burger was unable to recreate? Did these alterations effect the results when compared to Milgram's? What follows is my selection and explanation of key similarity’s, those components of Burger's that match Milgram's, and major differences, where Burger's replication deviated from Milgram's methods.

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The Milgram experiment and the society Speaking of one of the most renowned psychological experiment, which even replications on TV are done, is the Milgram experiment, on obedience to authority figures. It involves the measurement of how much participants will to obey the authority, in order to explain the reason why soldiers obeyed to allow the Holocaust, the homicides of millions of Jews, happened. With the participants’ roles as a teacher to punish a learner by incrementing degrees of electric shocks, though they didn’t know it’s staged, 65% of them did it to the last under the horrendous moans and the commands of the experimenters, which surpassed the expectation of 1.2%. Milgram himself elaborated two theories, encompassing theory of

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In this paper we will be discussing the famous psychology studies completed by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo. Both of these studies had a huge impact on psychology and are still relevant to this day. They gave psychologists an insight into how humans react in social situations when an authority figure is present in a simulated environment. The experiments also showed how people’s norms and values can change when assuming certain social roles.

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keywords: Milgram's Baseline study, OTA, obedience, dissent 'I was just following orders': Reviewing Milgram's Paradigm and the Underlying Causes of Obedience

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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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The Milgram experiment is the most obvious indicator of how authority influences the actions of people. It is jointly fascinating and yet terrifying how far participants will take their actions- if they believe that the figure of authority will cover them. The limits of authority should ethically stop at the point where others will get unjustly treated. A fair argument to lay out is- how do we know that our own judgement is better than our supposed superiors?

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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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