Obedience In Opening Skinner's Box By Lauren Slater

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

The study was observing how far a person would go inflicting pain onto another person. According to Milgram’s study, the subjects would rather please the experimenter and show him or her they can do the job rather than take on the responsibility that they are harming another human being. “The essence of obedience” as Milgram says is when the person follows orders for another person and is not held responsible for his or her own actions. It is much easier to do a task even if it means harming someone as in the experiment if the subject is not held liable for anyone. “The experimenter did not threaten the subjects with punishment-such as loss of income, community ostracism, or jail-for failure to obey” (Milgram 181). The subject did not really have a choice in the experiment, they were compliant, and when they expressed signs of tension or anxiety or even voiced their concerns, they were told to “continue” and that “the experiment must go on.” Obedience to authority is generally, what most people, as proven in Milgram’s experiment, tend to follow. Nevertheless, is obeying authority always the “right” thing to do?

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

Those subjects either played the role of a student or a teacher. The Teachers were told to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to the learner when questions were answered incorrectly. The shock levels were from 15 to 450 volts. In the Milgram Obedience Study Video, it states that” Many if not most subjects were troubled by it and found it a highly conflicted experience... Some were laughing hysterically after inflicting damage upon them,” meaning that this quote not only presents how the experiment gave too much power to the experimenters but also shows the misuse in power (Milgram, 6:40-7:00).

If a person of authority ordered you inflict a 15 to 400 volt electrical shock on another innocent human being, would you follow your direct orders? That is the question that Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University tested in the 1960’s. Most people would answer “no,” to imposing pain on innocent human beings but Milgram wanted to go further with his study. Writing and Reading across the Curriculum holds a shortened edition of Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” where he displays an eye-opening experiment that tests the true obedience of people under authority figures. He observes that most people go against their natural instinct to never harm innocent humans and obey the extreme and dangerous instructions of authority

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 the article, “The Perils of Obedience,” Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, published the findings of his infamous human authority experiment. During this trial, human subjects were tested to discern how far one will go in order to obey the commands of an authority figure. The test subjects were fooled into believing someone was actually being shocked; however, the reality was the other person was simply an actor and never received any shocks. The results were astounding: sixty-five percent of the subjects continued the entire 450 volts, while the rest lasted until at least 300 volts. In response to the experiment, Diana Baumrind, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkley, examined the actions and moral issues executed by

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

Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment has definitely set the basis to explain the pain inflicted by a human being on another human only if she is ordered to. He asserted that a normal human being can become an element of destructive agents of even when the destructive effects of their work becomes patently clear as they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with basic moral standards.

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 1974 Stanley Milgram conducted the classic study of obedience to authority. The study looked into how far individuals would be willing to go, and were asked could they deliver increasingly devastating electric shocks to a fellow human being, as they were requested to do so by the professor in charge of the experiment.

In 1963 Milgram had his assistant show authority. Milgram at random choose people to act as teachers. These teachers were to administer electric shock to learners (Milgram’s colleagues). The learners had to memorize parts of words, if a mistake was made, the teachers would administer electric shock with the flip of a switch. More mistakes, led to higher voltage. As the experiment progressed, and voltage was increased, the learners began to scream and cry out. Even though the teachers faced moral dilemmas, when Milgram’s assistant told them to continue electric shock, over half of the teachers continued until the learners were presumably dead. (1)

Milgram conducts an experiment to examine the act of obeying, and shows concrete instances. He pressures the subjects to behave in a way conflicting with morality. In the experiment, the experimenter orders the subject to give increasing electro shocks to an accomplice, when he makes an error in a learning session. The situation makes the subject

Stanley Milgram, a famous social psychologist, and student of Solomon Asch, conducted a controversial experiment in 1961, investigating obedience to authority (1974). The experiment was held to see if a subject would do something an authority figure tells them, even if it conflicts with their personal beliefs and morals. He even once said, "The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act (Cherry).” This essay will go over what Milgram’s intent was in this experiment and what it really did for society.

The Milgram experiment was conducted in 1963 by Stanley Milgram in order to focus on the conflict between obedience to authority and to personal conscience. The experiment consisted of 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, and who’s jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. The roles of this experiment included a learner, teacher, and researcher. The participant was deemed the teacher and was in the same room as the researcher. The learner, who was also a paid actor, was put into the next room and strapped into an electric chair. The teacher administered a test to the learner, and for each question that was incorrect, the learner was to receive an electric shock by the teacher, increasing the level of shock each time. The shock generator ranged from