Dangerously Compliant: Yale University's Experiments on Compliance Behavior

He conducted 18 different variations of the original experiment. When changing different variables the obedience percentage dropped significantly. These variations showed that when the “authority” figure was wearing some sort of uniform the obedience levels would rise but when the participants question their authority they percentage decreased. In other variations the learner and the teacher were placed in the same room so the teacher can experience the pain the learner was going through. In this variation the obedience fell too. Throughout all of the variations the percentage of participants administering the maximum 450 volts decreased significantly when different variables were added to the

This essay will look at an important key psychological experiment carried out by the renowned social psychologist Stanley Milgram which was carried out in the early 1960’s (Banyard 2012) to determine how far ordinary people would go to inflict pain to a fellow human based on instruction from an authority figure, and that of the replication of the experiment which was carried out by Burger in 2009 (Byford 2014) to determine if the same level of obedience was still applicable in the 21st Century, as was observed in the original study some 40 years earlier. The

​For a long time, people have been trying to figure out why American troops acted the way they did during the My Lai Massacre and a lot of these soldiers answered what anyone would have to defend themselves: “I was just following orders,” also known as the Nuremburg Defense. A psychological study done by Stanley Milgram in 1963 tests the obedience in different types of people, but these people were told that the test was for a different scientific use. Results show that two-thirds of the participants went all the way by shocking the “learner” with the full 450-voltage after being told that “it [was] absolutely essential that [they] go on”

The Excerpt “The Peril of Obedience by Stanley Milgram discusses an experiment testing on individuals through cruel and unmoral experiments. After reading Milgram’s text about the experiments conducted to see if individuals would compile with authority even if the command was unmoral. Stanley Milgram, an excerpt From “The Perils of obedience”, states that Milgram is making the following statement concerning the condition of the experiment: “This condition of the experiment undermines another commonly offered explanation of the subjects’ behavior- that those who shocked the victim at the most severe levels came only from sadistic fringe of society” (Milgram 699). By stating this Milgram explains that even if it means harming other human beings

Stanley Milgram's "The Perils of Obedience" and Philip G. Zimbardo's "The Stanford Prison Experiment" both effectively use experiments to discuss factors that effect one's obedience to authority. Milgram's experiment involves a test subject, also called the teacher, who is asked by an authority figure, or the "experimenter" to give out question to a learner. If the learner answers incorrectly, the teacher is asked to deliver shocks to the student that increase in voltage each time. Conflict arises when the learner begins to cry out in pain, and the teacher must decide to stop and listen to the learner's pleas, or obey the experimenter. Both the experimenter and the learner are actors, while the teacher remains oblivious to the experiment. The results show twenty-five out of forty learners obeying the authority to the end, administrating 450 volts (Milgram 80). Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment consists of twenty-one college aged males, ten of which are assigned as prisoners, and eleven of which are assigned as guards. The subjects are placed in a mock prison, where they acted in ways they did not know was possible, even though they are aware of being in an experiment: the guards frequently harass and torment the prisoners in various manners due to being deindividualized. Though Milgram explains the power of the situation causing obedience more fairly, Zimbardo more effectively explains the impact of wanting to please others. Though Milgram and Zimbardo both logical

In Stanley Milgram’s article “The Perils of Obedience,” several people volunteer to participate in Milgram’s experiment. It consists of a learner and a teacher. When the learner fails to memorize a word pair, the teacher applies a shock to the learner. The shocks increase in severity with each wrong answer, attaining a maximum voltage of 450 volts. Milgram states many psychiatrists he interviewed before the experiment predicted most subjects would not go past 150 volts, or the point at which the learner starts to ask to leave (Milgram 80). In his first experiment, twenty-five out of forty subjects continued the experiment until the end (Milgram 80). After several more experiments at different locations, Milgram obtained the same results. Milgram

“The Perils of Obedience” was written by Stanley Milgram in 1974. In the essay he describes his experiments on obedience to authority. I feel as though this is a great psychology essay and will be used in psychology 101 classes for generations to come. The essay describes how people are willing to do almost anything that they are told no matter how immoral the action is or how much pain it may cause.

1. The researcher in this experiment was psychologist, Stanley Milgram. The study took place at Yale University in the year 1963. The researcher’s hypothesis was that if there is a demanding authoritive figure, then the other person will obey that authoritive figure just because of their position, even if it violates their morality and their ethical beliefs. He based this of his theory that people who would never hurt someone purposely, would if told to do so by a figure of authority.

A classic experiment on the natural obedience of individuals was designed and tested by a Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram. The test forced participants to either go against their morals or violate authority. For the experiment, two people would come into the lab after being told they were testing memory loss, though only one of them was actually being tested. The unaware individual, called the “teacher” would sit in a separate room, administering memory related questions. If the individual in the other room, the “learner,” gave a wrong answer, the teacher would administer a shock in a series of increasingly painful shocks correlating with the more answers given incorrectly. Milgram set up a recorder

In "The Perils of Obedience," Stanley Milgram conducted a study that tests the conflict between obedience to authority and one's own conscience. Through the experiments, Milgram discovered that the majority of people would go against their own decisions of right and wrong to appease the requests of an authority figure.

These findings were stunning to those involved in the experiment. Nobody predicted these results prior to the research being done. In fact Milgram believed he most people wouldn’t go past 150 volts. He predicted that only 4% of participants would go past 150 volts of punishment. (Milgram, 1974) The results later led to Milgram’s theory of obedience. 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. (Milgram, 1974)

In Stanley Milgram’s ‘The Perils of Obedience’, Milgram reports from his studies of how far an individual can go in obedience to instructions and he pointed out that individuals can go as far as causing serious harm to the other people. Basically, the experiments are meant to test the choice that an individual would make when faced with the conflict of choosing between obedience to authority and obedience to one’s conscience. From the tests, it was found out that a number of people would go against their own conscience of choosing between what is wrong and what is right so as to please the individual in authority (Milgram 317). However, the experiments conducted by Milgram caused a wide range of controversy for instance; according to Diana Baumrind, the experiments were immoral. Baumrind notes in ‘Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience’ that Milgram did not only entrap his subjects, but he also potentially caused harm to his subjects (Baumrind 329). Based on the arguments that have been presented by the two authors, it is apparent that the two authors are concerned with real life situations, authority and ethics but the difference is that they both view these perspectives from different points of view as indicated by their writings. By and large, they also tend to show the importance or the insignificance of the experiments.

How far will people go to be obedient? While some people are defiant, most people will go beyond imaginable measures to obey authority. Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment that tested human relations and authority. The experiment was scientifically sound and followed procedures but was very flawed. Milgram’s experiment consisted of an experimenter, a naïve subject, and an actor. The naïve subject is a volunteer who saw a public announcement stating that they would get paid four dollars (plus fifty cent carfare) for an hour of their time. Upon arriving the willing participants were told about the experiment’s process which included shocking a person when they gave wrong answers to a set of memory

Obedience and Disobedience has been a part of key moments in history. Many have studied forms of obedience to learn how it affects people and situations. For example, Stanley Milgram conducted a well-known experiment in which the subject, named the “teacher” must shock the “learner” every time he doesn’t remember a word pair from a memory test. The focus of this study is on the teacher, and whether they will administer killing shocks when told to by an authority figure. Another well-known experiment is the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo. A group of college boys were separated into two groups, prison guards and prisoners, and were put

You are taking part in an experiment and you are asked by an authority figure to harm someone. Do you view the authority as someone to be respected? Are you afraid of the consequences? Do you feel obligated to carry out the experiment? Are your morals strong enough to be disobedient to the authority? People have often been put into the place of having to choose whether to be destructively obedient or to disobey and face the consequences. This has happened in Nazi Germany, and in both the Milgram and the Stanford Prisoner experiments. How do those who are obedient and disobedient differ? Many different kinds of factors can play a part in a person’s decision to be obedient to an authority or to be completely disobedient.