Stanley Milgram was a psychology professor at Yale University, a prestigious school in Connecticut. He was interested in why so many German people in the 1930s and 1940s had followed instructions which involved causing pain or killing innocent human beings. His experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments that measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.
The experiments began in July 1961, in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall at Yale University,[3] three months after
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Do as you’re told
Many war-criminals claimed they were merely following orders and could not be held responsible for their actions, in the trials following the World War 2. Were the Germans in fact evil and cold-hearted, or is this a group phenomenon which could happen to anyone, given the right conditions
Preparation of the Stanley Milgram Experiment The psychologist Stanley Milgram created an electric ‘shock generator’ with 30 switches. The switch was marked clearly in 15 volt increments, ranging from 15 to 450 volts. He also placed labels indicating the shock level, such as ‘Moderate’ (75-120 Volts) and ‘Strong’ (135-180 Volts). The switches 375-420 Volts were marked ‘Danger: Severe Shock’ and the two highest levels 435-450, was marked ‘XXX’. The ‘shock generator’ was in fact phony and would only produce sound when the switches were pressed. 40 subjects (males) were recruited via mail and a newspaper ad. They thought they were going to participate in an experiment about ‘memory and learning’. In the test, each subject was informed clearly that their payment was for showing up, and they could keep the payment “no matter what happens after they
Milgram was interested on learning if people would hurt someone if given instructions to do so, Stanley Milgram recruited 40 males, ages ranging between 20 and 50 with jobs varying from unemployed to professionals. The participants drew straws to determine their positions (Learner or Teacher) although this was rigged so an actor was chosen as the learner every time and the volunteer as the teacher. As the learner got a question wrong the teacher would administer a shock, each wrong question the intensity of
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
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.
Milgram first tested his experiments on Yale students. Milgram's hypothesis stated that most of the teachers would not go beyond 150 volts (only 4%), as their consciousness would intervene. The results of Milgram's first experiment was far from his prediction. When Milgram performs his first test on Yale students, many argued that the students were too competitive and aggressive the results wouldn't be accurate for the majority. Milgram further expanded his subject pool to middle-class adults, white collar, and industrial workers. He found that all of the groups held identical results with the Yale students, with 60% of the subjects complying all the way to 450 volts.
In the milgram experiment there were many considerations to be examined. In all the variations of the experiment none of the participants were female. When the location of the experiment was moved to a run down office building instead of Yale University the percentage willing to use deadly electrical shocks dropped significantly to 47.5% (Mcleod par. 37). Many other conditions also lowered the obedience of the participants meaning it is difficult to draw a conclusion based on such a variety of results. The final reason the milgram experiment is flawed is that only six-hundred thirty people were tested, all being from Pennsylvania.
Stanley Milgram conducted one of the most notorious experiments on behaviors regarding obedience. His experiment focused on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. The purpose was to determine how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. Within the research experiment, Stanley Milgram refers to similar events in history that had similar aspects, such as the Nazi Holocaust and Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist plots.
In 1961 The NSF, National Science Foundation, approved his proposal for his experiment. In the same year Milgram met his future wife Alexandra Menkin, who was both a social worker and a dancer. After being approved Milgram started his experiment in May of 1962, which was called the Milgram Experiment or the Milgram Obedience Experiment. The background of this experiment was inspired by the Jewish men, women and children who were victimized during the Holocaust. His overall question was would people do harm to others if they were told by someone of higher power or intellect to do it. The experiment included 40 male participants as the teachers. The experiment was set up in which there would be a teacher, normally the participant, and a learner, which was shown to be somebody but really was someone working with Milgram. Both participants were told that they were doing research to prove recent psychologist theories that a person learns things correctly when they are punished for making a mistake. Both the teacher and the learner are given a list of terms and words to associate with the terms. The teacher
In July 1961, Stanley Milgram began to conduct an experiment to test human obedience at Yale University. He wanted to see how German Nazis could inflict the extermination of the Jewish population, and to see how much pain they would inflict on another person just by giving instructions. Milgram put an ad in the newspaper and he got forty males volunteers between the ages of twenty and fifty. He would choose one of the volunteers and an actor who went by the name Mr. Wallace. They would draw a slip of paper which both said “Teacher”. The actor would say he got “Learner,” and the experiment would begin.
"Obedience", Stanley Milgram stated, "was more of a function of the situation than of the personalities of the participants." (Wade, Pg. 259). A football player from a local university died after the coach made him go through hours of a grueling weight lifting routine. He was given very little water or rest, the player wanted to stop but continued because the coach told him to. His fellow team mates also wanted to help but kept going with the workout because the coach said to.
Yale University Psychologist, Stanley Milgram (1963) demonstrated an experiment called the Milgram's experiment. It was meant to be about the study of obedience and what people would do when others were in pain, demand to stop the experiment or continue following orders. It took place in 1961 a year after world war II, Milgram wanted to make inquires about obedience and if that was the reason for the nazi killings, due to the Germans listening to their orders no matter what the situation was. "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (Milgram, 1974). Milgram chose 2 participants at a time one was a teacher and the other would be the learner the teacher would
From 1933 to 1945, millions of people were exterminated under Adolf Hitler’s, quest to exterminate non-Germans according to his perception. Historically known as the Holocaust, and even today, mind boggles professionals in the fields of psychology and ethics, on how one man, convinced 13 million German Soldiers to commit such atrocities. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist, set out to try and solve this century old mystery.
The Milgram experiment was performed by the sociologist Stanley Milgram to discover the power of authority. In this experiment, Stanley was trying to demonstrate the willingness people have to follow orders from an authority figure. Even thought the results of this experiment were very surprising, I think that this kind of experiments would allows us to study and understand better the human’s nature. This experiment showed a side of human’s nature that was unknown by the scientistic community, and this is the reason why we need to perform more experiment like this one.
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.
Milgram’s experiment was an experiment that tested whether people would people would administer shock to another person even though the person receiving the shock would refuse to participate. During the experiment, Milgram would have the subject be the teacher and the other person people the student. While Milgram believed the experiment produced great results, a lady named Diana Baumrind believed the experiment should have not been conducted at all. Baumrind believed that Milgram’s experiment was not the best experiment because it still needed somethings to be worked out before conducting. There were many things in Milgram’s experiment that raised some red flags. In discussion of Milgram’s experiment, many of