Stanley Milgram's Use Of Deception In Civil Disobedience

According to Milgram, every human has the dual capacity to function as an individual exercising his or her own moral judgement and the capacity to make their own moral decisions based on their personal character. Yet, what happens to an average person who is obedient to authority when it overrides their own moral judgement? It is ironic that “virtues of loyalty, discipline, and self-sacrifice that we value so highly in the individual are the very properties that create destructive organizational engines of war and bind men to malevolent systems of authority” (Miller, Stanley Milgram). His gruesome experiment is considered by some to be one of the darkest in the field. In a series of about 20 experiments, hundreds of decent, well-intentioned

This method is called deception, in which the participants are not told something, for benefit of the experiment as a whole. In the experimenter’s point- of-view, the actor is strapped to the metal armchair and the deceived participant acts as a teacher that is testing memory and reads off pairs of words (Blass, Print). After this procedure, the actor must repeat the pairs, only given one of the two words. The actor soon begins to get the words incorrect and the participant who is teaching must electrocute the actor when they answer a question wrong. In reality, the actor really wasn’t receiving the shocks, yet pretended to. Soon, the actor began to groan in agonizing pain after answering many phrases incorrectly. The participant was told by the experimenters to continue, despite obvious “pain” from the actor. This was continued until the actor’s cries of pain became dead silent. Most participants showed signs of hesitation and concern for the actor, yet continued to inflict pain because they were told so by the experim-enters, who held authority (Blass, Print). After this whole procedure, the experimenter questioned the participant on how they felt and what they thought happened when the actor completely went silent. Then, the participants were fully debriefed about the situation and how no physical harm was inflicted. Generally, “the obedience experiments produced a disturbing view of human behavior” (Blass, Print). The procedure heavily relied on the experimenter because the participant, upon instinct, chose to turn to them when in doubt or when showing nervousness. They were always commanded to continue the