Stanley Milgram Experiment

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?

Obedience is the requirement of all mutual living and is the basic element of the structure of social life. Conservative philosophers argue that society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the priority of the individuals' conscience. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, designed an experiment that forced participants to either violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands. Milgram's study, reported in "The Perils of Obedience" suggested that under a special set of circumstances the obedience we naturally show authority figures can transform us into agents of terror or monsters towards humanity.

Stanley MIlgram is a Yale University social psychologist who wrote “Behavioral Study of Obedience”, an article which granted him many awards and is now considered a landmark. In this piece, he evaluates the extent to which a participant is willing to conform to an authority figure who commands him to execute acts that conflict with his moral beliefs. Milgram discovers that the majority of participants do obey to authority. In this research, the subjects are misled because they are part of a learning experience that is not about what they are told. This experiment was appropriate despite this. Throughout the process, subjects are exposed to various signs that show them

In 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram began his quest of human behavioral observation as he conducted an experiment of obedience. The Stanley Milgram experiment was essentially performed to confirm if authority and power overrule empathy and sympathy. The experiment placed some individuals in a position of power to figure out how one would respond. This experiment allowed for great questions. If given an order you that one may find unethical, will that individual obey the demands? Or would one stand for what they believe to be morally and ethically right.

The "Perils of Obedience" by Stanley Milgram details about the classic studies relating to obedience. The main study in focus is the Milgram’s Obedience study, conducted in the 1963 by the Yale University scientist Stanley Milgram. The experiment was designed by Milgram in such a way that participants are forced to obey the instructions of authority figure, even if they are immoral and also when such instructions cause pain/harm to another person. The participants selected for the experiment are ordinary people (Milgram, 630). The participants were willing to administer electric shocks to remaining people when ordered by authority figure. The Milgram experiment does not address the ethical concerns of testing and Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University, upon modifying the Milgram's setup found that situational factors result increased obedience in participants (Milgram, 631). The studies conducted by Burger and Milgram showed under a specific set of circumstances, the

Milgrams obedience experiment is a series of famous social psychology experiments. The experiments sought to elucidate and measure the subjects' willingness to obey an authority who instructs the subject to perform acts that a person would not normally like to perform for reasons of conscience (Zimbardo, 2007). One of the Milgram experiment aims was to investigate obedience and authority, in the impact on a subject's ability to harm another person (Zimbardo, 2007). The experiment involved three participants. A facilitator and an actor who played a volunteer, then a subject, who voluntarily agreed to participate. The actor and the subject were then assigned different roles in the experiment trough a draw, one as a teacher and one as a learner. The draw was arranged so that the subject always came to be the teacher, and so the subject always had the impression that he and the actor had the same voluntary status. Milgram then separated the teacher and the learner using a wall. Then the teacher was told to give the student questions, and with each wrong answer the teacher would administer a shock which strength would increase for every wrong answer. As the voltage of the shocks was increased, the learner complained more vociferously and eventually became silent. The longer the test went on more of the subjects requested to abort and see how the learner was doing, but was then persuaded by the facilitator to continue. The majority of the subjects came to the stage of distributing

Stanley Milgram (1963), who was a psychologist at Yale University carried out a study to establish whether ordinary people are likely to be obedient to their authority. He concentrated on the compliance between a person's moral sense and authority. The subject of his experiment were people who were held responsible for Germany war crimes claimed in their defence they stated that they acted on the orders by the authorities.

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.

Milgram’s Obedience Experiment has influenced and inspired many experiments in the decades following the original study done in 1962. Moral psychologists, social psychologists, and sociologists have considered how different characteristics affect how the individual responds to authority: Does a group setting make a difference? Are certain personality traits an indicator of rebellion? Will the type of authority influence the willingness of a participant to obey? These questions have been explored through various studies. However, many experimenters are trying to uncover the circumstances under which a participant will perform immoral

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.”

The manners in which people tend to respond to and obey authority were explored by Milgram; in order to study the effects of authority on the levels of obedience observed wherein subjects were instructed to direct an electroshock with varying degrees, only to find the majority of subjects continued to obey the authority even at high levels of voltage shocks. From his tests, Milgram extracted some factors that could increase or decrease the levels of obedience observed. Some of which include, the physical proximity of the authority to the participant, the proximity of the victim from the participant and whether the co-participants are willing to obey.

Milgram wanted to test if it were as easy for ordinary people to succumb to blind-obedience such as it was between Nazi soldiers and Adolf Hitler. Participants of the experiment included 40 males from the New Haven area. They ranged between 20 and 50 in age and all had different levels of skills. In the Yale Interaction Laboratory, where Milgram was employed, all of the experiments involved a confederate of the experimenter, the experimenter, and the participant. The author clarifies that the confederate was actually Milgram

In response, Milgram states that “there was every reason to expect, prior to actual experimentation, that subjects would refuse to follow the experimenter’s instruction beyond the point where the victim protested; many colleagues and psychiatrist were questioned on this point, and they virtually all felt this would be the case” (849). Milgram is saying that the subject had the choice to continue with the experiment when they heard the victim protested. Baumrind argues that the tension during the experiment reached extremes” (422). The subjects would feel extremely uncomfortable during the experiment, that in many cases the subject would have seizures, nervous laughing and lip biting. This would be the rise of tension during the experiment.

Obedience is a basic part in the structure of society, and its belligerence has often been taken into question throughout time. Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, tested the conflict between obedience to authority and one's own conscience and documented the surprising results in "Peril's of Obedience”. Throughout the experiment, Milgram discovered that most people would go against their own personal morals of what is right from wrong in order to comply to the orders of authority.

Before he conducted the experiment, Milgram asked ‘ordinary members of the public, college students, psychologists and psychiatrists’ (Banyard, 2014) to predict what his findings would be. Hofling did something similar by asking a group of student nurses whether they’d do what a doctor said without question. With Milgram’s study, most agreed that no one would go all the way. In Hofling et al.’s, ‘21 out of 22 said they would not comply with the order’ (McLeod, 2008). Given what the final results of the experiments showed, these predictions suggested that people believed themselves and others to be far less obedient than they actually are.