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Critique of the Milgram experiment
Milgram's study of obedience summary
Ethical issues of milgram's experiment
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The Milgram Experiment Usually, people follow given orders from authority. Authority can be a work boss, parents, teachers, etc. We are taught to follow orders at a young age so we won’t have issues with obedience in the future. The Milgram Experiment was basically testing how far someone could commit to their obedience before it became too much.
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.
In “The Perils of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram describes the situation of obedience to the authority through the series of experiments of testing people and determine if they submit themselves to the authority’s orders or not. Milgram believes that obedience in many people come from their training, attitude and ethical background. This dilemma is inherited in human beings from the beginning of human race e.g. the story of Abraham, Plato’s argument. According to some conservative philosophers, society’s base or strength is being threatened by disobedience. On the other hand, Humanists think that individual’s conscience is very important for society.
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,
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
In the wake of Adolf Eichmann’s prosecution for commanding the slaying of over 1 million Jews, Psychologist Stanley Milgram called the role of authority into question. What would propel such evil acts from a seemingly normal man? In spite of what top psychologists assumed the outcome would be, the results were astounding. Despite the deep rooted convictions of the subjects opposed to causing physical harm to others, obedience to authority overcame the majority of the time (The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram) According to Milgram in his famous writing, The Perils of Obedience, “Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers.”
Milgram’s experiment displays how much was situated in a time and how his life affected his choices, and his experiments have gained notoriety. The discursive approach to attitudes builds on a criticism of key assumptions and methods of the cognitive social approach and highlights the limitations of the experimental method for developing a comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon such as obedience. Through Gibson’s rhetorical analysis he highlighted the importance of the interaction between participant and experimenter which suggests that the standard view on experiments could do with revising. The experimental setting although it is great in most cases it can create a hostile environment with individuals acting out of character and therefore not creating the best results. Gibson has highlighted that the nervous anxious participants that were portrayed in the original papers were in fact passive and argumentative and that’s just by looking at it differently and examining different things such as the language people use to be persuasive.
Deception from a moral viewpoint would be something that is seen as wrong, but in a study or experiment for research I think deception is something that is necessary to gain certain knowledge that we wouldn 't be able to gain using regular methods. Usually, the ends justify the means to a deceptive experiments and they usually have good intentions behind them. Many people may be angry after the experiment is over but it is shown that people enjoy an experiment with deception more than an experiment without deception; and people also benefit from them more, educationally. I believe deception is a necessary tool for learning about human behavior and human reaction. Deceptive experiments are experiments that really make you think when the experiment
Milgram reported that 26 out of 40 subjects obeyed the orders of the experimenter right until the end, despite the learner pounding on the wall at 300 and at 315 vaults. (Jones 2006:271) These results led Milgram to believe it to be possible for a subject to obey orders passively and dutifully, and slip into an ‘agentic state’, where they are simply an instrument of authoritative orders. (Helm and Morelli 1979:324) Lifton offers a thesis of doubling to support this claim.
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
Milgram's experiment is about how people have blind obedience to authority it also called a shock experiment. His Experiment was created to explain some of the concentration camp horrors of the World War 2, where Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs and other enemies of the state were slaughtered by Nazis. In the holocaust, jews people were tortured because Hitler told their people to torture Jewish people, so people were following this world blindly without knowing why they are doing that. Many people claim that they were just following the orders, and could not hold to be responsible for their action.
(Russell 2014) Conclusion: Despite controversy Milgram’s experiment was ground breaking. It remains relevant today and is frequently cited in demonstrating the perils of obedience.
An order from an authorised figure would be adhered to – thus was the most relevant influence in obedience. Milgram presided over a number of experiments. There have been a number of reduplications of Milgram’s experiments and they formed resembling
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.
The experiment set up at Yale University was to measure how much pain an ordinary citizen would mete out onto another person just because an authoritative direction or instruction to do so was given. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.” Agency theory says that people “will obey an authority when they believe that the authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.” This idea is reinforced by some characteristics of Milgram’s evidence in his
