Milgram's Experiment

The Milgram Experiment conducted at Yale University in 1963, focused on whether a person would follow instructions from someone showing authority. Students (actors) were asked questions by the teachers (participants), if the students got the answer wrong they would receive a shock each higher than the previous. The shocks ranged from Slight shock (15v) to Danger! (300v) to XXX (450v). Stanley Milgram wanted to know if people would do things just because someone with authority told them to, even if it was hurting someone. I believe that the experiment was a good way to test the obedience of people

Personally, researching this experiment made me extremely uncomfortable just because I do not believe in causing unnecessary harm to someone who does not deserve it. In this case, harm is the unnecessary stress since the accomplice of the experiment was not actually shocked, he just acted like it. I think that the moderators of the experiment, especially Milgram, should have been upfront in the ad placed in the newspaper over what was going to actually be happening to the people who volunteered. The way the readings and the video made it sound was that it was just a surprise over what actually happened to the subjects. It is shocking to me that he thought that this was something that was morally and ethically right.

Stanley Milgram’s obedience study is known as the most famous study ever conducted. Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment that focused on the conflict between personal conscience and compliance to command. This experiment was conducted in 1961, a year following the court case of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram formulated the study to answer the question “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974). The investigation was to see whether Germans were specially obedient, under the circumstances, to dominant figures. This was a frequently said explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II.

What would you do if your boss asked you to do something that inflicts pain on another human? Would you still do it? Keep in mind, if you did not comply you would be fired. This concept was studied by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University. He composed an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Stanley Milgram conducted this experiment because of his curiosity with World War II. Adolf Hitler gave orders to kill millions, and his army completed this cruel act of killing innocent people. Was it because of this concept obedience to authority? Even though obedience is being respectful there must be a point when obedience is to much, for instance killing someone is very immoral and the worst crime. When a boss or elder is asking you to injure someone else for a job, you should know that this is not a good job or it is not one you should partake in. Stanley Milgram conducted this experiment to figure out if we as humans were weak under peer pressure. Hitler was one man that was extremely powerful, one who has that amount of power can be consumed by the power and do wrong, because of the thought of wanting more and more. Once you have hit that point in your life you may want to be the best, which inturn means you do what you must to get to the top, even if that means asking people to do dirty work for you. Hitler did that exactly, he was very

The Roles of Social Powers In the article, “The Milgram Experiment” by Saul McLeod, he suggests that testing subjects given immoral demands from an authority figure can cause them to be more obedient, even if it is wrong. In the article titled “The Power of Situations” by Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett, they can be seen to agree with situational behavior in the Mcleod Study, but go about it in a different way than Mcleod explains in his article. Ross & Nisbett present multiple studies that have found that a certain situation can alter how one dictates their conscience, making their behavior different. While McLeod and Ross & Nisbett both discuss the influence of situational factors on human behavior, Ross & Nisbett provide a much broader approach

People can change in a position of power from being normal to crazed. In the milgram experiment uses students from yale university were used to show a relation between position of power and being evil, the experiment showed that there was a relation. Saul Mcleod conveys through the article "THE MILGRAM EXPERIMENT" that people put in positions of power, are more likely to be cruel to the people they are in power of. The other experiment the stanford experiment was to see how many people would kill another person when instructed to someone of a higher stature. The article by Saul Mcleod shows how people are suseptable of murdering someone when another person is to blame. Both articles show that positions of power can make people do insane

where they had a man under cover and asked him questions. If he got the answer wrong he was

But that was a sign that they did not enjoy what they had just done. 3 of them sadly had seizures and the procedure was only stopped for one of them. The average rating on how painful the shocks were was 13.42 out of 14. At the present time, putting aside how unethical this experiment was, we got some valid information from it. Learning that people are way more obedient to destructive orders than we think.

Stanley Milgram conducted one of the most controversial psychological experiments of all time: the Milgram Experiment. Milgram was born in a New York hospital to parents that immigrated from Germany. The Holocaust sparked his interest for most of his young life because as he stated, he should have been born into a “German-speaking Jewish community” and “died in a gas chamber.” Milgram soon realized that the only way the “inhumane policies” of the Holocaust could occur, was if a large amount of people “obeyed orders” (Romm, 2015). This influenced the hypothesis of the experiment. How much pain would someone be willing to inflict on another just because an authority figure urged them to do so? The experiment involved a teacher who would ask questions to a concealed learner and a shock system. If the learner answered incorrectly, he would receive a shock. Milgram conducted the experiment many times over the course of 2 years, but the most well-known trial included 65% of participants who were willing to continue until they reached the fatal shock of 450 volts (Romm, 2015). The results of his experiment were so shocking that many people called Milgram’s experiment “unethical.”

Stanley Milgram: 'electric shock' experiments (1963) - also showed the power of the situation in influencing behaviour. 65% of people could be easily induced into giving a stranger an electric shock of 450V (enough to kill someone). 100% of people could be influenced into giving a 275V shock.

A widely-asked question is “Why did the subordinates of Adolph Hitler blindly follow his immoral orders?” Well, that is exactly why Stanley Milgram conducted experiments to test how far an ordinary person would go to inflict pain onto a stranger. The Nazi killing was brutal and inhumane, but the people conflicting death upon thousands felt no remorse or guilt so the Milgram Experiment was used to finally get answers. Milgram concluded that many will go to extreme lengths to obey authority and tend to believe what they are doing is the right thing to do since their authoritive figures believe in their orders as well.

How people will respond to an apparent authority figure giving immoral commands has been a question many psychological researchers have been interested in since Milgram's experiment on obedience but due to institutional review boards it has been difficult to conduct further research. Upon approval from the IRB Bocchiaro, Zimbardo, and Van Lange conducted an experiment very similar to Milgram's but with a focus on "the psychosocial dynamics involved in reporting wrongdoing to higher authorities which is a phenomenon known as whistle-blowing" (Bocchiaro, Zimbardo, and Van Lange, 2012). Using Milgram's paradigm as the base to their study they decided to go well beyond by giving their participants the extra option of reporting the unjust authority

Milgram deceived his participants through vaguely informing them of the study therefore they weren’t aware of the true nature of the study. He also told them that they would be administering ‘real’ electric shocks to a ‘real’ participant therefore gauging an accurate reaction to the prods. Furthermore, he didn’t stick to his statement that they could withdraw at any time, making them forget that they have the ability to be defiant. Milgram also didn’t consider the long term effects that these participants may face after the study.

Throughout the experiment, it was also discovered that “…the subjects do not derive satisfaction from inflicting pain, but they often like the feeling they get from pleasing the experimenter.” (Milgram, 86) The individuals are proud of themselves for doing a good job and obeying the experimenter, and one variation has shown that 30% of subjects were fully willing to administer 450 volts. The individual fears that he will appear rude or arrogant if he stops it, but is that really a satisfiable reason for physically harming another individual? Milgram says in response that, “although these emotions appear small in scope alongside the violence being done to the learner, they suffuse the mind and feelings of the subject.” (Milgram, 86) But that

Over the years Stanley Milgrim’s experiment has been one of the most discussed and controversial experiments in the psychology world. The experiment is the study of obedience over authority and was based on the idea on why many Germans decided to obey Hilter knowing that his actions were unjustifiable. Ethical issues were questioned after the results were published. Milgrim was interested to find out how people would respond on an authority figure given the circumstances. Since then psychologists tried to replicate the experiment to get a better understand the human behavior.