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Stanley Milgram Experiment Essay

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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 …show more content…

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

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