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Stanley Milgram's Obedience To Authority Study

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The Study I have chosen to do a critical review of is one done by Stanley Milgram (1963). Milgram is a social psychologist that was interested in what makes people do things and how they think. His famous study is called the “obedience to authority study”.This is a classic study because at the time it wasn’t long after World War 2 (WW2) and Milgram wanted to look into whether the Germans that took part in the Nazi killings were particularly obedient. Which was a common excuse given to justify the acts of genocide at the Nuremberg War Criminal Trials. The Nazis on trial said they were just following orders from an authority figure. This study has changed the way we look at how people think and what they can be persuaded to do. This study has had …show more content…

Eichmann was one of the major organizers of the “Final Solution”, which is the extermination of Jews in Europe by the Germany during WW2. Milgram wanted to answer the question “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (Milgram, 1974). The experiment he created was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher’. This part was fixed so that the learner would be an actor who would be in on the experiment and the teacher would be the participant. The learner would be taken into a separate room and had electrodes attached to himself, the teacher would then go into the next room that would contain the shock generator. The generator had a row of switches marked from 15 volts to 450 volts. The learner would have a list of word pairs he had to learn and the participant (teacher) would test him and if the learner gave a wrong answer then the teacher was told to administer an electric shock and to increase the voltage each

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Thus, the brainlessness and dependence on the thoughts of others of Eichmann again bubbles to the surface. He is a man that has wrapped himself in self-deception, lies, and

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In “The Genocidal Killer in the Mirror”, Crispin Sartwell argues that the average citizen can be convinced to commit atrocious crimes under the right circumstances from the premise that the traits to become a genocidal killer are not that uncommon, using examples from recent history such as the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and the Rwandan Genocide. Sartwell clarifies that although most people delude themselves into thinking that they wouldn’t partake in genocide if they were placed in a similar situation as many have before, it would take a “moral hero” (Sartwell 118) to refuse the opportunity given the circumstances. On the other hand, in “Just Do What the Pilot Tells You”, author Theodore Dalrymple claims that people's response to authority in respect to their obedience is what leads the average man to kill countless others. While both authors address the fact that it doesn’t take a malicious person to engage in genocide, Sartwell focuses more on the qualities that people who commit genocide commonly share, Dalrymple seems more concerned on how people react to authority in

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Milgrams study of obedience is about the tendency to conform to authority Milgram uses a doctor in a lab coat to represent authority and used volunteer subjects to shock another subject if they do not repeat three word correctly it can be compared to the villagers in Barrnetts article because Milgrams study showed that over 50% of the test subjects are willing to do what the authority the doctor in this case instructions or commands. It was proven on how far they went in shocking the other subject with the highest setting on the shocking device. The same can be linked on what the Nazi’s did to the villagers in Muanchaussen with the swift and decisive ways they took care of protesters made the Nazi’s the authority and must be adhered too in any case. And that even if people know it is wrong they still listen to the authority this is the case with the employees like the doctors and nurses also including the maintenance man working in the euthanasia camp they continue to do what they are told to do even when they know what is happening is

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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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(What does the study add to our understanding of the phenomenon?) People are much more likely to obey someone of authority than expected, even if it is against their beliefs or morals. Something such as Hitler’s rise to power could have been just as possible in the United States because Americans are just as likely as the Germans to continue to do something that they know is

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In the book, Arendt describes how the Nazi establishment manipulated individuals like Eichmann, using propaganda tactics and the suppression of free thought to force them to follow the regime's orders. Arendt argues that Eichmann was trapped in a bureaucratic system in which he followed orders without question, convinced that he was doing the right thing. Furthermore, Arendt also emphasizes the role of conformism in Eichmann's involvement in the Holocaust. Instead of making decisions and thinking critically, Eichmann simply followed orders to fit into the system.

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Decades after the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, people are still baffled by the fact that approximately eleven million people were killed in Nazi Germany following the orders of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime (Niewyk & Nicosia, 2000). How is it possible that approximately 500,000 people participated in planning and executing eleven million people, including approximately 1.5 million Jewish children? (Radcliff, 2004; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2014). The atrocious crimes committed during the Holocaust might compel someone to draw the conclusion that humans are innately evil. However, the trail of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major contributors to the Holocaust, stirred animosity as his defense requested the dismissal of

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Many of the accused got sentenced to life in prison or death. Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to explain the correlation of the environmental aspects that make people do terrible things and how far people will go to harm others. Social pressures also play a big role in how people think. Minorities can have their ideas of what is right and what is wrong swept over by majorities which was displayed in Solomon Asch’s experiments. The most important thing to learn from the Nuremburg trials, Milgram’s experiment, and Asch’s experiment is that sometimes it is better to resist authority if it means following moral

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It was a challenge for me not to behave in a certain aspect, how I was taught. The difference between my challenge and that of the participants on the Holocaust was they served to make vivid tragic conclusion, by obedience. Milgram says this, “I would tell them to stop looking at individual responsibility and start looking at social institutions. I’d ask them to examine the conditions that take responsibility away from people, and let them regard others as a species apart.” The connection between the experiment and the reading, “Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri…”brought light about society rules.

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With quotes such as: “ ...the supreme degree of being and the supreme degree of life are one and the same thing. You [God] are being in a supreme degree and are immutable,” it is to no surprise that most readers interpret God as Saint Augustine’s divide ruler (8). To further their position, these same readers may present evidence as in chapter VIII of the Confessions when Augustine converts to Christianity and accepts God as his “helper and redeemer” (155). They may even argue that the whole point of the memoir is to give his thanks and praise to his Lord and Savior. However, I do not believe that is the Lord who Augustine follows.

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The groupthink, or group mentality theory occurs when the majority of the group follows a certain ideal or idea, and causes individuals who might have thought otherwise to support the majority’s conclusions. This has never been more prevalent then in one of the most horrifying events in history: the Holocaust. The events of the Holocaust baffled the world – no one could understand how Hitler convinced thousands of German soldiers to murder millions of innocent Jewish citizens. The world could not understand how a sophisticated and refined European country could follow a mindset that systematically eradicated generations of people for the sole reason that they practiced a certain religion (Tindale, Munler, Wasserman & Smith, 2002). The largest contributor to the events that took place during the Holocaust are the effects of conformity.

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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.

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Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at the University of Yale devised a study that tested people obedience. He conducted a blind study to test a person’s obedience to an authority figure, having a participant deliver out a shock to the other participants if they answered incorrectly, would they ignore their own moral conscience and do as they are told or would they stay true to their beliefs and refuse. At the end of the study what he discovered was disturbing, more than half of the participants were willing to abandon their beliefs ignoring their moral conscience to satisfy the authority figure. A lot of the participants alleviated themselves of all responsibility for their actions by placing blame on the other participant saying that it was not their fault that they were being punished or placing blame on the authority figure saying they were just following orders. When the participants were told the true nature of the study most felt horrible and disgusted

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One reason people did not like this experiment is because the people asking the questions and giving the electric shocks had huge amounts of stress put on them. They wanted to listen to the authority figure but were torn because they knew what they were doing was wrong and inhumane! Many times the people would stop the shocks for a

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The learner was strapped to a chair with electrodes. After he has to learn pairs which was given for him to study, the teacher tests him to learn and tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to remember its partner from a list of the

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