preview

Stanley Milgram Impact

Decent Essays

Milgram has an enduring impact. His work has influenced society, though his work was incomplete. In “What Makes a Person a Perpetrator? The Intellectual, Moral, and Methodological Arguments for Revisiting Milgram’s Research on the Influence of Authority” by S. Gibson, he discusses other factors overlooked in Milgram’s experiments and demonstrates certain points through the Adolf Eichmann.
While Eichmann was on trial for his crimes in WWII, at Yale, Milgram was leading studies. He owed a lot of his inspiration to Hannan Arendt and her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she detailed the trial. In it, she coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe how regular people commit atrocities for banal reasons, like ‘I was just doing what I …show more content…

Millard, “Revisioning Obedience: Exploring the Role of Milgram’s Skills as a Filmmaker in Bringing His Shocking Narrative to Life”, we get a different view of Stanley Milgram’s famous documentary, titled ‘Obedience’, from 1965. In the behind-the-scenes film, “Revisioning Milgram”, there is an in depth look of previously unseen ways in which Milgram was able to manipulate visual image to create a compelling drama and efficient mode of transportation for his message on obedience and the human condition. It seemed, however, that the way Milgram tailored his experiment to reach a wider audience actually made him lose the visual narrative that he, as a psychologist, should not have lost. Milgram fashioned Obedience with the purpose to create a persuasive piece of media from his studies, scripting and excluding the conversation on resistance, as he hyper-focused on …show more content…

The ‘everyman’ portrayals of the actors, the scripts, the drama of it all. There was also a conflict of interests created, because he was the maker of the documentary and the scientific investigator at the center of the experiments. It has been argued that the success of the experiment is because of how Milgram handled the stagecraft, and how that in itself popularized his theories on obedience. The documentary may be compelling at face value, but the scripted-nature of the film, and the lack of scientific process and experiment used was not acceptable. The director himself was biased from the beginning to one side of the ‘obedience to authority’ argument and it showed. And with the results of the ‘Bring A Friend’ condition not adding up to his original findings, more scrutiny was added to Obedience and it fell out of

Get Access