Summary Of Obedience To Authority By Stanley Milgram

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One of the most well known studies of obedience in Psychology was produced by Stanley Milgram. Milgram started experimenting shortly after World War II, in 1969. Milgram was fascinated by the fact that thousands of people simply listened to Adolf Hitler when he demanded them to murder millions of innocent Jews. In Milgram’s book Obedience to Authority, he asked, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”(Milgram, 1974) This question constructed Milgrams hypothesis for his obedience study: People will obey others who seem to have a position of power over them, even if obeying means that they violate their moral code. This hypothesis lead to Milgrams obedience experiment. …show more content…

Each member of the study was to receive four dollars and fifty cents for their involvement. Milgram constructed a sinister looking shock generator, with many different shock levels starting at thirty volts, the volts escalated in fifteen-volt increments. The switches were labeled "slight shock," "moderate shock" and "danger: severe shock." The last two switches were labeled “XXX.” The shock generator went all the way up to four hundred and fifty volts. Each of the recruited men took the role of "teacher" who was then told to give an electric shock every time the student gave an incorrect answer, increasing the shock each time. The teacher believed that he was actually supplying real electric shocks to the student, but in reality the “student” was a hired actor pretending to be in pain when