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Stanley Milgram's Obedience Study

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Recommended: Diana baumrind review of stanley milgram's experiments on obedience

. In Behavioral Study of Obedience, Stanley Milgram revealed two unexpected findings he discovered from his experiment. The first finding was that humans clearly had a natural tendency to willingly or unwillingly obey to authorities. The subjects in the experiment were all aware of the fact that harming others was morally wrong. As they had to electrically shock the learner, the subjects showed the symptoms of nervousness. Some subjects looked reluctant to go further with the experiment and the others criticized the research. They knew what they were doing was horrific and the learner was probably in great pain. However, the subjects were unable to defy the experimenter, or the authority. Their once thought to be clear judgment became clouded. In other words, people quickly submit to their authorities in difficult situations and kept continuing what they were told even though it was wrong. The second finding was that the tension created from this experiment was incredibly difficult for these subjects to perform. Initially, the expected result was that a subject could easily refuse to go on, when he felt uncomfortable. However, the result was not as predicted. One observer for the experiment …show more content…

When the experiment was conducted outside of Yale University, the obedience level fell to 48%. Yale University was one of the most prestigious universities in the world. It was easier for the subjects to believe that the experiment was legitimate and important. Subjects felt they were obligated to carry out this significant experiment and not ruin it by refusing to go further. When the experiments were performed outside of the university, the credibility of the experiment fell down. Also, it was easier for the subjects to refuse to continue the experiments because the experiments were thought to be not as important as the ones at Yale

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In the article of “The Perils of Obedience”, written by Stanley Milgram, the experimenter explains that the experiment is to see how far a person could hurt a victim in a situation where he is ordered to do so. Also, in the article “The Stanford Prison

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Obedience is tested by how long the subject will continue to “shock the victim”. The point of this study is to determine if Americans are obedient even if they know the act is wrong. 2. What is/are the research questions and/or hypothesis/hypotheses? How obedient would subjects be to researchers when it comes to shocking a victim?

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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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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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Baumrind believed that Milgram’s experiment was unethical because of the amount of psychological stress brought onto the subject, Milgram’s lack of awareness for the subjects’ well-being, and the possible harmful effect on the subject’s trust of other authorities in the future. She brings into attention how even though the subjects were only following orders from the experimenter, they may still take responsibility for their actions and dwell on the fact that they could’ve actually hurt someone. It terms of procedures, Baumrind criticizes the way Milgram tried to assure that the participants left the laboratory in a state of well-being. She says that it would be hard to get rid of that amount of psychological stress inflicted on the participant, and Milgram’s casual reassurance is not reliable. She also points out how the objective manner in which Milgram reports the participants’ discomfort by stuttering, trembling, and profusely sweating contradicts the way he graphically presented these disturbances.

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When the experiment was being conducted in the film The Experimenter, the administrator of the experiment was very strong and resolute with his commands. This led to them believing that they had to do as they were told, else a punishment would come upon them. When they heard that the man’s screaming stop,

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Obedience to Authority experiment, which was also known as the Milgram experiment, was considered as one of the most famous and ethically criticized experiment in psychological history. In 1961, Milgram performed the first of a series of experiments to test how far individuals would go in obeying orders given by authority, even when the orders could violate their moral standards and cause harms to innocent individuals. In the experiment, the subjects were told that the purpose of the study was to test how punishment effects the learning. Milgram selected 40 normal adult men between the ages of 20 and 50 from different backgrounds and occupations as the experimental subjects. The participants were assigned the role of the teacher, whereas a

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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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In, “If Hitler Asked You to Electrocute a Stranger, Would You? Probably” Phillip Meyer discusses Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment and the probability of normal people electrocuting a stranger. Milgram’s experiment was originally to show that Germans were different, which would explain the Nazis and the Holocaust. However, what he found was even more shocking. Milgram discovered that most people, not just Germans, are naturally very obedient.

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For example there is a famous study known as the Milgram Obedience study, named after Stanley Milgram. In the Milgram study participants were asked

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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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The experiment was executed well. Yet, there are unethical practices happened during the experiment. First, the participants were not fully informed about the experiment. The researchers did not explain to the participants the processes in conducting the experiment. The participants were not informed that they would be arrested by cops in their homes.

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There had been experimentation on obedience but none had been done like Milgram’s. The experimenter warns, “In this experiment, one of you will be the learner and receive shocks when you make a mistake in word pairs read to you, and the other one will be the teacher and administer the shocks when the word pair repetition is wrong.” (Slater 33). He wanted to see if people would shock a person continuously because someone had told them to. Milgram wanted to know how far people would go.

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He first took a poll on how his experiment would turn out. He asked residents of New Haven, Yale undergraduates, and a group of psychiatrists how they thought a group of people would behave in this situation he wanted to enact. They all told him the same answer, and predicted that every person who was to be involved in this experiment would not go all the way and shock someone all the way up to 450 volts (Slater, 40). He ended up with the result of 65% were obedient, and the other 35% were defiant. Why didn’t the 35% carry out the experiment?

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