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Stanley Milgram's Experiments On Obedience To Authority

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After World War II, several of the Nazi soldiers were questioned about their reasoning behind the corrupt actions they were guilty of---killing hundreds of thousands of men and women, destroying families in the process, and marking their time as a dark part of history. Who on earth would do such a thing? What could their excuse possibly be? Well, to them, they were simply following orders. It’s obvious to believe that the soldiers would find their humanity and resist their commands, but they didn't. 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, …show more content…

Yes, they all continued the experiment, but each and every one put up a fight (Milgram's Experiment on Obedience to Authority , n.d.). Each volunteer sensed that what they were doing was wrong, and after battling themselves internally as to whether or not they should continue, did they finally speak up. The teacher was constantly fighting, constantly at war with what he thought he should do over what he was being commanded to do. Disobedience takes courage, whether it’s stealing a cookie out of the cookie jar, coming home past curfew, or failing to follow through the commands of a superior. It’s not in human nature to flow upstream----it’s not natural for people to rebel against authority. This explains why the volunteers continued to follow the directions in spite of the fact that the commands ran contrary to their moral compass. That’s why it was so difficult for them to defy the experimenter. Yes, they obeyed…but they didn’t do so

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In the book “Opening Skinner’s Box”, Lauren Slater discusses many complicated ideas relating to certain experiments of recent times. In every chapter, she focuses on one specific experiment and poses many controversial thoughts. One of the chapters I found most interesting was the second chapter titled “Obscura”. In it she walks readers through the experiments of Stanley Milgram and questions the purpose, results, usefulness, and morality of the experiments. To begin, the purpose of the experiments seem to be off to me.

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Within 24 hours of the experiment, the prison guards began to humiliate and mentally abuse the prisoners. The prison guards were given little instructions about how to treat the prisoners, except that there was not to be any physical force used on the prisoners. The lack of instructions that

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The student and teacher were placed in separate rooms and an instructor was placed in the same room as the teacher. He would then attempt to convince the teacher to continue the experiment even if the student starts crying out or wanting to leave. The teacher was required to “shock” the student if they said an incorrect answer. However, the ‘shocks’ became more intense and came with each incorrect answer. They eventually started getting very dangerous and potentially life threatening.

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David’s claim that the Holocaust occurred because the Germans became unusually cruel is false based on the fundamental attribution error and Milgram’s experiments. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to attribute other people’s behavior to internal factors, instead of accounting for situational factors. David committed this error when stating that Germans, as a whole, were “sadistic people with abnormal and twisted personalities”. David did not account for the immense pressure that the German public felt from Hitler during World War II. Although many atrocities were being committed, the Germans feared for their lives if they stood up for the Jews and disobeyed Hitler’s rule.

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The change in their behavior and personality led to the prisoners having mental breakdowns eventually leading to the extermination of the experiment after six days. The experiment which was supposed to last two weeks only lasted six days because of the responses and reactions from the prisoners as a result of

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1) One real life example of the Milgram Obedience Experiment can be seen during Hitler's and the Nazi's reign in Germany from 1933 to 1945. Each Nazi was presumably paid, and if they defied Hitler's demands or higher ranking Nazi's orders they would be executed. As a result, as a fear tactic to ensure their lives. In the decades since the Milgram Experiment, the results have been held up as proof of the depths of ordinary people’s depravity in service to an authority figure. At the time, this had deep and resonant connections to the Holocaust and Nazi Germany.

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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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You said that you were going to do the study and now your going against your word. Ineffective disobedience says that there isn’t an easy way to leave the study. every time the teacher said he wanted to be done or questioned continuing the doctor made a remark about how you must continue. Giving them an easy way to leave the experiment causes them to be less likely to obey. In an experiment they gave the teachers a red button to hit when they no longer wanted to continue.

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When the experiment was being conducted in the film The Experimenter, the administrator of the experiment was very strong and resolute with his commands. This led to them believing that they had to do as they were told, else a punishment would come upon them. When they heard that the man’s screaming stop,

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The Milgram 's obedience study showed that Stanley Milgram, a professor conducted an experiment to show how people can be influence by obedience to authority. Milgram set out to prove that an individual can carry out orders given, even though he or she knows that it is a inhuman test that is being given. The people used in this experiment were deceive from the start of Milgram test and his work was identified by Roger Brown as 'the most important psychological research ' done in his generation. Milgram had murdered thousand and thousand of European Jews, he had recruited 780 subjects and wanted to prove that these New Haven citizen transformed into brutal Nazis without much difficulties, Soc. (2013)50:623).

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(Russell 2014) Conclusion: Despite controversy Milgram’s experiment was ground breaking. It remains relevant today and is frequently cited in demonstrating the perils of obedience.

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"Obedience is behavior that complies with the explicit demands of the individual in authority." (King, 448) If a store manager tells you to put a shirt on before entering the store, you're more than likely going to comply due to their request due to their authority over the store. You might fear that if you do not comply, you won't be permitted inside or even police being called. That is simple obedience, but what if an authority figure asked you to inflict pain on another person?

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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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The Nuremberg Trials began three years later after the most relevant Nazi authorities were convicted of war crimes for four judges, who took legal decisions that previewed sterilization policies and ethnic cleansing in Hitler 's Germany. Judgement at Nuremberg, based on the real Case Katzenberger, is a demonstration of the efforts of a judge at the tribunal to determine how the defendants, and even also the German themselves, could have been involved in the Holocaust’s atrocities. Judgment at Nuremberg is a representation of the first trial, that is mainly based on justice principles and international law, of the country leaders that pursued threatening battles and were involved in crimes against humanity. This film is an overview of real events that highlights the conflict between morality enclosing both the behaviour of the defendants and the process of providing them with justice (Teach With Movies, 2015). These processes offered the opportunity of enhancing the debate between positivism and natural law, highlighting that the position taken would have significant consequences

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