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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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