Dr. Stanley Milgram's The My Lai Massacre

Dr. Stanley Milgram's 1963 Social Psychology obedience study, influenced by the atrocities the Nazis committed towards the Jews during the events of World War II, aimed to understand how ordinary people could commit horrific acts under the command of authority. The study simulated a scenario where participants had to choose between obeying authority or their morals. Participants were unaware the shocks were fake and were instructed to administer electric shocks to a learner who was acting. The shocks ranged from 15V to 450V, with labels from "Slight Shock" to "Danger: Severe Shock." Despite the learner’s begging and apparent distress, the authority figure urged the teacher to continue, emphasizing the importance of the experiment. Throughout this …show more content…

How Milgram's study highlighted the power of authority to override individual morality, the My Lai Massacre serves as a real-world example of the devastating consequences of blind obedience to authority. Milgram’s study on obedience holds a massive reach across psychology as a whole which can and has been demonstrated both within the studies of Mohammad Ghaderi’s research into religious authority figures all the way to Kristina Murphy’s study into the obedience of tax payers in relation to how the trust worthiness of tax authorities play a role in the likelihood of people paying or avoiding taxes as they have demonstrated to be more likely to pay authority figures they consider trustworthy. Milgram’s study has also been demonstrated in real-world examples, as shown by the horrible atrocities committed by ordinary people during the events of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in 2004 within secluded environments away from the public eye all the way out in the open, examples such as the My Lai