Stanley Milgram's Shock Experiment

The Milgram Experiment on Obedience to Authority Figures Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience is one of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology. Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority figures focuses on the morally ambiguous line between obedience to authority and personal conscience. The Milgram Experiment is involved in many different aspects of history and what it means to be human, which this paper will attempt to describe.

Some suggested after this experiment many people could feel hurt, embarrassed, and not willing to trust those in authority in the future (Hock, 2012). Dr. Burger wanted to replicate Milgram’s experiment in a more ethical approach. He only allowed the teacher to go up to 150 volts of shock because that was the point where he decided, if passed, they would continue to go up the shock scale. The participators were told explicitly and repeatedly that they could leave the study at any time and still keep their $50 (Burger, 2009). However, Dr. Burger observed some people continued to go up the

The Milgram experiment was conducted in 1963 by Stanley Milgram in order to focus on the conflict between obedience to authority and to personal conscience. The experiment consisted of 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, and who’s jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. The roles of this experiment included a learner, teacher, and researcher. The participant was deemed the teacher and was in the same room as the researcher. The learner, who was also a paid actor, was put into the next room and strapped into an electric chair. The teacher administered a test to the learner, and for each question that was incorrect, the learner was to receive an electric shock by the teacher, increasing the level of shock each time. The shock generator ranged from

For each experiment there was one teacher (participant); one learner (an accomplice called Mr. Wallace pretending to be a participant); and one experimenter (an actor called Mr. Williams who wore a grey lab coat). The participant and accomplice were asked to draw slips of paper from a hat, which was rigged, therefore, allowing the accomplice to always be the learner and the participant to be the teacher. The learner was taken into a room in Yale Interaction Laboratory, where he was strapped to an electric chair with electrodes attached to his arms. The teacher and experimenter were taken into another room where there was a shock generator with 30 labelled voltage levels ranging from 15 to 450 volts. 15 volts was verbally designated to be Slight Shock, and 450 volts was verbally designated to be a danger-severe shock (XXX).

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.

Stanley Milgram is a famous psychologist who focused his studies on authority and peoples reaction and obedience to it. His famous experiment and it's results were groundbreaking in psychology, surprising both psychologists and regular people alike. First I will discuss the reason for Milgrims study of obedience to authority. Then I will explain the experiment, its formulation, and its results. Finally I will cover the influence of the experiment on psychology and society.

Stanley Milgram writes about his shocking experiment in “Perils of Obedience.” Milgram writes on the behaviors that the people had during the experiment. Milgram had an experiment that involves two people. One person was a student and the other a teacher. The student was strapped into an electric chair and was required to answer certain questions. The teacher asked a certain word, and the student must know the pair that goes with it. If the student answered the question incorrectly, the teacher must shock the student. Each time the student answered a question incorrectly, the volts increase. Milgram was expecting the teachers to back out of the experiment once they saw the student in pain for the first time, but surprisingly enough, more than sixty percent of the teachers obeyed the experimenter and continued on with the experiment, reaching up to four-hundred-fifty volts. After three times of the four-hundred-fifty volt shock, the experiment was called to halt.

In the chapter "The Dilemma of Obedience" of the book Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View, Stanley Milgram explores the concept of obedience to authority, and why people cannot defy authority even the situation is totally conflicting with morality. He introduces his ideas by giving the definition of obedience, and mentions Nazi extermination as an instance of obedience, which contradicts with moral values. According to Milgram, obedience idiosyncratically binds humankind to systems of authority, and links the individual action to political purpose. In terms of observations, obedience accepted as an inveterate behavior inclination, and obeying a system of authority has been comprehended as

Milgram experiment focused on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In this experiment, three sets of people, the “teacher”, the “learner”, and

Throughout thousands of years, anti-semitic propaganda has increased hatred for Jews through influential figures like Martin Luther, Wilhelm Marr, and Adolf Hitler. It has been proven that the average person will most likely do something wrong if an authority figure tells them to do it or tells them that it is the right thing to do. The Milgram Shock Experiment was an experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1961. The experiment tested the average person’s ability to do harm to a stranger if an authority figure told them to do so. It proved that “The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation-...

Stanley Milgram, in his essay, “The Perils of Obedience,” argues that ordinary humans can be destructive instruments when they obey authority. For example, the Nazis guards were following orders when they were committing genocidal acts. “Obedience,” written by Ian Parker, leads one to believe that people have different degrees of obedience under different situational factors. Parker partially agrees with Milgram on human obedience and how it can cause problems.

The study was conducted by Stanley Milgram and aimed to examine how people “reacted to instructions from authorized individuals when the actions conflicted with their personal safety and conscience” (De Vos, 2009, p.226). The participants were instructed to work in pairs and play different roles. In each pair, one of the participants played a role of a “learner,” and was presented with different questions from the “teacher,” the second person in the pair. Experimenters observed the questioning process and asked “teachers” to apply an electric shock to “learners” when they gave wrong answers to questions. The main problem in the research was ethical, as the more than a half of “teachers” were instructed to apply electric shocks up to the level of 450 volts, which could be very harmful. However, the “learners” were asked to provide mainly wrong questions, and the “teachers” were not aware of this intention (Milgram, 2010). At the end of the study, the experimenters revealed the deception. The research concluded that “teachers” were likely to obey instructions from authorized individuals, even when the health of “learners” supposedly was in serious

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 purpose of Milgram’s experiment was to see how far people would go to obey authority. His scientific methods followed the scientific procedure and produced external validity. There were 20 variations of Stanley Milgram’s experiment some factors remained consistent throughout all variations, while some remained the same, while some changed. The four experimental conditions grew in intensity. In the first condition, also known as remote feedback, the learner was isolated from the subject and could not be seen or heard except at three hundred volts when he pounded on the wall. At three hundred and fifteen volts he was no longer heard from until the end of the experiment. The naive subject was required to keep administering shocks with an unresponsive human at the other end. Put yourself in the teacher’s shoes. In the second condition (voice feedback) the learner was placed in an adjacent room, when he started to shout and protest at lower shock levels he could be heard through the crack in the door. In the third

The results showed that those not in the control group inflicted higher shocks to the learner subject (Milgram, 1965 as cited in Macaulay. J. and Berkowitz. L. 1970). This suggests that those who thought the experiment was being run by a highly prestigious research organisation, using moral reasoning, took less responsibility for their actions.