Introduction
Obedience means follow the commands given by an authority figure. The level of obedience by individuals becomes nowadays’ concern. Between 1941 to 1945, 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz which is known as “Nazi Holocaust”. The organizer Adolf Eichmann (1962) stated in his letter that “he was just following orders”. This defence allows most of the Americans believed the evil capacity of Nazi Germany. But Stanley Milgram (1963), a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment to examine whether individuals would obey the instructions even individuals might realize it is unethical. The volunteers were informed that they were undertaking a scientific research to improve memory. There were three roles in the experiment,
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In Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65% of participants continued the experiments till 450-volt shock. All participants administered shocks of at least 300V. The result of Milgram’s experiment evokes the whole world and the experiment has been replicated in many different countries over the world.
As the experiment was unethical, the original Milgram’s experiment was forbidden. But after 50 years, Burger (2009) proposed the similar experiment with ethical considerations to examine the level of obedience of participants. The experiment decreasing the times of pressing the button from 30 times (450V) to 10 times (150V) which reducing the level of distress. However, the results do not show many differences from 45 years ago – 90% of the participants pressed the 10th button. Another point of concern in the article by Dolinski et al (2017) is the level of disobedience might change because of the learner’s sex. The result has shown the refusal to continue the experiment is three times greater if the learner is female. Still, the sample of only 10% of participants failed to complete the whole experiment, the hypothesis could not be confirmed