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Stanley Milgram Social Influence

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It is possible to recognize and measure the individual differences in emotions as well as behaviour in early human ontogeny by the first few months of life. Therefore, personality traits can be defined as the relatively enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings, as well as behaviours that differentiate individuals from others. Social influence, on the other hand, refers to the shifts in a person’s thoughts, feelings, attitudes and behaviours that may result from interaction with another individual or group. According to many social service professionals and counselors, the power of personality traits is often superior as compared to the power of social influence. However, a social psychologist, Stanley Milgram asserts that social influence sometimes …show more content…

Moreover, Milgram established that every single one out of the 110 experts on human behaviour, including psychiatrists, predicted that no one could reach the 450-volt level. Milgram conducted many several variations on his basic experiment and determined two main ways that obedience to the authority could be reduced. Firstly, through increasing the obviousness of the learners suffering and to reduce the authority or influence of the experimenter. According to Eysenck (2004), the effect of the first factor was analyzed by comparing obedience in four situations, differing in the extent to which the learner was made aware of the suffering that he or she was made to …show more content…

Notably, most of the participants who utilized the maximum electric shock accepted but with much reluctance. Moreover, the participants demonstrated clear signs of stress and internal conflict. Notably, it has been contended that the levels of obedience may be reduced in real life situations when groups of people challenge the authority. Ultimately, the experiment by Milgram demonstrated that conformity, as well as obedience, are influenced by many factors and that they are more prevalent than might be imagined. According to Lunt (2009), as the experiment unfolds, it is evident that the participants are involved in a complex situation that may result to the learner being harmed. Consequently a personal value, that of respecting and not harming others comes into play. Therefore, the experiment in general places the participant in a dilemma. If they obey the authority figure, they go against the social norms that sanction is doing no harm to others. On the other hand, if they decline to harm the other person in the experiment then they would be acting against the social norms where good citizens defer to legitimate authority. Stanley Milgram acknowledges that the experiment creates an unusual social situation, an intensification as well as a distillation of everyday occurrence of the

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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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This Milgram research on respect to authority figures was a series of cultural science experiments conducted by Yale University scientist Stanley Milgram in 1961. They assessed the willingness of survey participants, men from a different variety of jobs with varying degrees of training, to obey the authority figure who taught them to do acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to think that they were helping an unrelated research, in which they had to distribute electrical shocks to the individual. These fake electrical shocks gradually increased to grades that could have been deadly had they been true. McLeod's article about the Milgram experiment exposed the fact that a high percentage of ordinary people will

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The Milgram experiment was an experiment that tested an individual's willingness to follow the instructions of an authority figure. Subjects were told to shock a person, who they believed to also be a subject, if they answered a question wrong. The people getting shocked were actors and were not actually receiving electrical shocks. Many of the subjects continued to give high voltage shocks because they were told to. This proves that in high-stress situations people are willingly listen to authority figures despite what the say to do.

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This essay is occupied with analyzing whether the agentic state theory developed by Professor Stanley Milgram is a valid explanation for the behaviour of participants in obedience experiments. It starts with defining and describing the abovementioned theory and continues with providing academic research evidence, in order to illustrate the arguments for and against the statement presented above. The essay ends by providing the key conclusions drawn from the analysis, while also attempting to give an answer to whether Milgram’s agentic state theory could indeed be characterized as valid in explaining the behaviour of participants in obedience experiments. The agentic state theory is one of the two main theories that Milgram has developed (the other is the theory of conformism), in order to explain the behaviour of its participants in its obedience

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In the experiment, Milgram uses purposeful deception as the teacher is the naive subject and is told they are participating in a memory and learner psychology experiment and are in charge of delivering shocks to the learner, who, in fact, is an actor. The majority of the participants in the study were obedient to the experimenter even though the experimenter "did not threaten the subjects with punishments such as loss of income, community ostracism or jail for failure to obey. Neither could he offer incentives" (Milgram 651). Despite having nothing to gain, the subjects continued participating in the experiment. The participants continued to administer shocks to the student because they were instructed to

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During the 1960’s Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments to test how a person reacts to authority. He started these tests in response to World War Two and the reports of the German soldiers who claimed they were “just following orders’ when asked about

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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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Similarities between the Stanley Milgram, and Stanford prison experiment extend beyond the conventional commonalities of psychological experiments. The approach of setup were at extremes with one having a student teacher relationship, compared to that of a prisoner and a guard, but the results of human responses were unnervingly relatable with both teacher and guard, being in the superior position and allowing themselves to degrade the inferior to extremes of death. Psychologist Zimbardo may have compromised the legitimacy of his experiment with the inability to remove himself, as he admitted in his conclusion, to remain objective and from influencing the results, but the authenticity of the reactions were not compromised. The motivation, some of the interviewes claimed, was to have control of the situation. Whether control meant psychological harassment or not eating, everyone had an excuse that they were playing roles in an experiment to justify the drastic measures of manipulation taken

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Like Psychologist Diana Baumrind did so in her article “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments”. Where she makes it very clear that she disagrees with causing individuals stress and discomfort. In her article, Baumrind states “It is potentially harmful to a subject to commit, on the course of an experiment, acts which he himself considers unworthy, particularly when he has been entrapped into committing such acts by an individual he has reason to trust” which in this case the trustworthy individual would be Stanley Milgram. Baumrind also worried about the dangers of the serious aftereffects that may ensure because of the stress and discomfort Stanley Milgram’s experiment has caused. Even though Stanley Milgram states that “After the interview, procedures were undertaken to assure that the subject would leave the laboratory in a state of well-being.”

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On day six Zimbardo and Milgram decided to conclude the experiment. Zimbardo originally intended to explore how prisoners adapt to powerlessness, but he has contended that the experiment demonstrates how swiftly arbitrary assignment of power can lead to abuse. (Maher, The anatomy of obedience. P. 408) Once the experiment was completed Zimbardo and Milgram concluded that generally people will conform to the roles they are told to play.

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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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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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Name : Muhammed Irshad Madonna ID : 250509 Subject : Medical Ethics Due Date : 8/01/2018 Paper : 1-The Milgram Experiment The Stanley Milgram Experiment is a famous study about obedience in psychology which has been carried out by a Psychologist at the Yale University named, Stanley Milgram. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In July 1961 the experiment was started for researching that how long a person can harm another person by obeying an instructor.

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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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