Stanley Milgram's Obedience Study

Obedience is a form of social influence where individuals “take marching orders from people who are above them in the hierarchy of authority such as a parent, teacher or boss (textbook citation)”. A prominent social psychologist of the 20th century Stanley Milgram, was renowned for his controversial obedience studies. A child of Jewish parents during the second world war, Milgram questioned how events of the Holocaust occurred, deeming it to be exceptionally immoral and underlying psychological processes giving rise to obedience. Milgram’s work was often reasoned to be a demonstration rather than an experiment yet, this wasn’t noticed by others due to the unethical methods he conducted on answering his paradigm - the causes of obedience (Burger & Jerry 2007).

This was achieved as participants known as the ‘teacher’ were ordered to punish another person (‘learner’) by “subjecting them to increasing levels of painful electric shocks when they incorrectly answered questions through a paired-associative task (De Vos, 2009).” Although, the learner was in fact a confederate receiving no shocks at all and acting out the pain as the voltage increased. On this initial study, Milgram found that majority of participants displayed full compliance going to the highest voltage and hence, accompanied a further variety of studies that could possibly alter obedience to rule out alternative explanations. This research was immensely important to the whole of psychology demonstrating the willingness of individuals to obey instructions from authority figures and reveal true human behaviour to the public in providing reasons why events such as the Holocaust