Stanley Milgram Experiment

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.

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.

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, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment, which later wrote about it in “The Perils of Obedience” in 1963 to research how people obey authoritative figures and what extent a person would go inflicting pain onto an innocent person. The study involved a teacher (subject), learner (actor), and an experimenter (authoritative figure). The teacher was placed in front of a control panel labeled with electrical shocks ranging from 15 to 450 volts and instructed to shock the learner incrementally if they gave a wrong answer when asked questions with word associations. Switches corresponded with the voltage ranging from “Slight Shock” to “Danger: Severe Shock” followed by

In his experiment, Milgram tested several variations to achieve the aim of his experiment. Several situational factors, one at a time, to see their effect on the obedience of the subjects. In one of the variations, the teacher was instructed to hold the learner 's hand on a metal plate and deliver the electric shock when he refuses to cooperate. This showed a decrease in the obedience of subjects. This suggests that the physical presence of the learner and the physical contact between the teacher and the learner trigger empathizes from the teacher 's side since they are more aware of the suffering and pain inflicted upon the learners. This empathy and sympathy with a human being may have been a motive for the participants to disobey.

Stanley Milgram had a reasonable idea when thinking about the idea of how obedient people are to authority. I feel the way he went about the experiment was a little cruel. It was a well thought out experiment, but the one problem with it was that it was messing with the mental state of people's’ minds.

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.

The results and conclusion of Milgram’s experiment demonstrated an obedience to authority and “do as you are told” mentality. Many subjects showed signs of tension and were uncomfortable delivering the shocks, yet all 40 subjects obeyed up to 300 volts. Sixty three percent of the subjects continued give shocks until the maximum level of 450 volts was reached. Experts predicted that only one to three percent of the participants would continue to deliver shocks, and that these individuals would have to be psychopaths. However, footage of Milgram’s experiment shows 65% of the subjects continued giving shocks, and none stopped when the learner said he had heart trouble (1962). Milgram carried out eighteen variations of his study, altering the situation

Milgram thought at first it would have been easiest for the subjects to administer the shocks because the person the actor was receiving seemingly no pain from the shocks. As the actor started to show signs of distress and pain the subjects only had slight hesitation, but as the authority continuously told the subject the same instructions, the subject would willingly obey. Most of the subjects surprised Milgram and continued the experiment to the end. Milgram believed this was because the subject was routinely following the orders of their seeming authority. The change in reaction of the actor most of the way up the scale was minute enough in each step that each step seemed easier as the subject had just used the level below. According to Milgram, the subject would have thought that if the authority was okay with the next shock and the next shock was not a large jump in voltage, then it would be okay to just go up one more switch. By the time the subjects would have administered deadly shocks, the subject would have been firmly in the process of continuing to follow the original orders that had been repeated multiple times by the authority figure. All the routinization in play would have taken the subjects’ moral compasses and thrown them by the wayside. Only some people with strong morals would have been capable of breaking away from the routinization process and actually following their

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.