Stanley Milgram's Shock Experiment

With each wrong answer came an electric shock that the teacher, a random male participant, had to physically cause. The teacher could hear the learner after a while begging to stop. At this point the teachers causing the pain are obviously uncomfortable. Some start by laughing nervously and other just immediately beg to stop the experiment. At this point the experimenter gives a series of orders to push the teacher to continue. As a result, two-thirds of participants carried on shocking the learner to the highest level of four hundred and fifty volts. All the participants involved continued up to three hundred

Moreover, once participants had reached 450 volts, they obeyed the experimenter’s instruction to deliver 450-volt shocks when the subject continued to fail to respond.” This reveals that the participants during the experiment kept following through with the instructions from the experimenter and didn’t even think about wanting to stop and that if they kept going on the person receiving the electric shocks would die. The participants went so far as to an extent where the person getting shocked didn’t respond to the 330 volt level. This showed how the influence of an authority figure can alter someone's behavior and make them act in an immoral way, maybe out of fear or being pressured. In closing, the Milgram experiment and the Holocaust are very similar.

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.

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-...

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).

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

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.”

Milgram conducts an experiment to examine the act of obeying, and shows concrete instances. He pressures the subjects to behave in a way conflicting with morality. In the experiment, the experimenter orders the subject to give increasing electro shocks to an accomplice, when he makes an error in a learning session. The situation makes the subject

Then, the teacher would say a word and the learner was expected to recall and voice the correct pair. If the learner makes a mistake, the teacher is ordered to administer an electric shock, and increase the shock level each time. The learner mainly gave wrong answers on purpose, since he was in on the experiment, and for each wrong answer the learner was given a shock. If the teacher refused to administer a shock, the experimenter, Mr Williams, gave a series of orders to ensure the teacher would continue. The first order was “please continue”, the second “the experimenter requires you to continue”, the third “it is absolutely essential that you continue”, and “the last you have no other choice but no continue”.

One might think that this experiment will stimulate the new research in the area of human obedience, but this did not occur. Despite the difficulties and the courage of Burger to conduct a partial replication of the original study, it did not produce any different outcomes and did not spark any new ideas in psychology (Burger, 2009). Instead, the researcher had to deal with an enormous amount of different commentaries and controversy. My main rationale for disapproving the Burger’s study is ethical characteristics of the Milgram paradigm. More specifically, now we have the Ethical Rules of the APA, which tell us that researchers should honor rights of participants to privacy, confidentiality and the right to withdraw the experiment. However, Milgram’s paradigm clearly challenges these fundamental rights and creates even more ethical dilemmas. Another rationale that I can include is the infliction of increasing pain on an unwilling participant, a characteristic that is unacceptable in modern psychological studies. Therefore, I would disapprove such experiment, because of ethical non-compliance and little contribution to the field. As for me, I view following ethical practices in my dissertation project work as a crucial element for success. It will allow me to produce reliable, meaningful and relevant scholarly data that would not be a subject to ethical

He had the experimenter come in dressed in a lab coat and explained that they were to ask a series of word associations to the learner and administer shocks for incorrect answers. As the number of incorrect answers increased so did the intensity of the shocks given. Voltage of the shocks ranged from 15/ slight shock to 300/danger to 450/xxx. The shocks were a form of punishment. The naïve subject was unaware that the shocks dispensed were simulated.

There has been many variations of this experiment also. For example, the teacher was free to choose the shock level and thirty-eight of the forty subjects did not go above 150 volts. Another example would be when the experimenter gave the instructions by telephone. Only one third of the subjects were obedient in this version of the experiment. The subjects found it easier to disobey when they were not face to face with the experimenter.

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 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.