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Stanley Milgram's Obedience Study

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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). …show more content…

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

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There were two groups in this experiment, the teachers and students. All of the volunteers to the experiments were the teachers and they had some actors play the students. The idea was to punish the students for their wrong answer through a shock treatment (http://nature.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7article/article35.htm 1). Throughout the experiment, they began to realize that the “test subjects”

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544 Words | 3 Pages

During Stanley Milgram’s 1960’s study, he made subjects believe that they were harming another subject in order to test obedience. He did this by having the subject ask an actor, who was pretending to be another subject, to remember a word out of a series of words. Whenever the actor fail to get the word correct, the subject would flip a switch that he believe was administering an increasing electric charge. They were told not to stop and to continue increasing the voltage even after the actor began yelling and begging them to stop, and even after he stopped responding all together. The study was to see just how far people are willing to go to follow the orders of an authoritative figure.

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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,

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619 Words | 3 Pages

Psychologist, Stanley Milgram, wanted to know if people would cause harm on other humans simply because they were ordered to do so (he was inspired by Nazi soldiers, who corrected their actions in World War II by saying they were just following orders). Milgram designed an experiment where participants were told they were testing a learning technique, where a student had to learn a word pattern, and were punished by electric shock if they got the answer wrong. The “student” was an assistant of Milgram’s, but the participant, who was the “teacher” and the person to give the electric shock, thought this person was just an innocent participant. The teacher would read out a question, and if the student (who sat in an adjacent room, where they

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The Milgram Obedience Experiment Logan Pratts Mount Saint Michael Academy Advanced Psychology Ms. Johnson February 26, 2023 Throughout human history, the world has gone through many eras of different leaders. Leaders such as Alexander the Great, Basil II, and Napoleon Bonaparte were all successful because of their tactics and their ability to fully utilize the capabilities of their subordinates. The authority that people of power have allows others to be used as tools, but how far does authority go? Think back to Nazi Germany, many German soldiers knew of the atrocities that Hitler incited, but they all continued to follow orders. The reason why many people continue to follow orders even if they bring harm to others is the fear

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1) One real life example of the Milgram Obedience Experiment can be seen during Hitler's and the Nazi's reign in Germany from 1933 to 1945. Each Nazi was presumably paid, and if they defied Hitler's demands or higher ranking Nazi's orders they would be executed. As a result, as a fear tactic to ensure their lives. In the decades since the Milgram Experiment, the results have been held up as proof of the depths of ordinary people’s depravity in service to an authority figure. At the time, this had deep and resonant connections to the Holocaust and Nazi Germany.

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371 Words | 2 Pages

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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970 Words | 4 Pages

Obedience is a form of social influence where an individual behaves in a way as a response to an order from an authority figure. Conformity is the act of matching behaviors or beliefs to a group norm. Obedience is different from conformity because obedience occurs when a person is told to do something, whereas conformity occurs through social pressure; there is a hierarchy of power involved with obedience. Stanley Milgram studied obedience shortly after World War II when Nazi soldiers defended themselves on the basis of obedience of their superiors during the Nuremburg Trials. Milgram was interested to find if these soldiers were truly just following orders, or if they were accomplices finding a defense for their actions.

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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

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The author begins by describing obedience in relation to social life and how it is often framed in history and literature. For example, Plato is thought to have grappled with the age old question of whether one should obey even if it does not comply with your conscience. This line of thinking is precisely what Milgram was observing in her experiments. Milgram conducted an experiment in which she tested the limits of how much pain an ordinary person can inflict on another person after being ordered to by an

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'I was just following orders': Reviewing Milgram's Paradigm and the Underlying Causes of Obedience Susan Jaramani Psychology 288 American University of Beirut Abstract Fifty years after Milgram's famous Obedience to Authority Paradigm, a lot of studies are reexamining Milgram's findings, and finding gaps and discrepancies between the actual data and the published results. In this study I present the Milgram's Baseline Study, which drove the entire paradigm. I also present Milgram's "agentic state" explanation and provide its arguments that were based on footage evidence, reexamined at Yale. I also explain the situational features present when obedience is elicited, the motives behind doing those studies, and the positive and negative implications that obedience has. Having an inclusive understanding of obedience can be a breakthrough in countless aspects of our day to day lives by trying to do a positive social change.

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Obedience to authority For instance, Milgram’s Obedience to Authority, experiment provided critical information on human interaction based on blind obedience that is given to authority figures. As a result, the forty-five-year-old study was re vamped to demonstrate the statistics still rang true in modern day science. For example, social psychologist Jerry Burger provided compelling evidence on how similar both sets of data compared when compelled by an authority figure over seventy percent of test subjects performed the task of shocking another individual just because the teacher told them to perform the task. According to Burger, "People learning about Milgram's work often wonder whether results would be any different today," Burger says.

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950 Words | 4 Pages

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.

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987 Words | 4 Pages

Essentially, the participant was assigned “teacher” and the confederate, who appeared to be another participant, was assigned “learner” in an experiment that was told to investigate the effects of punishment on incorrect memories (Milgram, 1963). Whenever the learner made a mistake, the teacher was ordered to administer shocks. Unbeknown to the teacher, the learner/confederate never received any shocks; he merely acted as though he was in pain. Milgram found

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1072 Words | 5 Pages

Arguably, one of the most well-known experiments regarding the tendency of humans to inflict harm upon strangers under orders from perceived authority figures is Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiments in 1963 (Smith, Aquino, Koleva & Graham, 2014). The experiment was based on the Nuremberg Trials, wherein the Nazi soldiers on trial claimed that they were only following orders, and as such implied a lesser role in their crimes during the Holocaust. While there are many factors that influence injustice against a people, in this paper, the role of moral exclusion will be examined in detail in order to ascertain how those excluded from powerful groups by virtue of their lineage and race could then be subjected to significant harm, and perhaps

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