Summary of the Dilemma of Obedience Essay

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

The purpose of Stanley Milgram writing his “The Perils of Obedience,” is to show to what extent an individual would contradict his/her moral convictions because of the orders of an authority figure (Milgram 78). He constructed an experiment wherein an experimenter instructs a naïve subject to inflict a series of shocks of increasing voltage on a protesting actor. Contrary to Milgram’s expectations, about sixty percent of the subjects administered the highest voltage shock. (Milgram 80). According to Milgram, experiment variations disproved the theory that the subjects were sadists. (Milgram 85). Milgram states that although the subjects are against their actions, they desire to please the experimenter, and they often

Stanley Milgram’s psychological experiment described in “The Perils of Obedience” demonstrates an example of individuals following orders from authority, even if they don’t necessarily want to. In this experiment, subjects are told by the experimenter to shock the other test subjects when they answer questions incorrectly. As Milgram describes his experiment further, the reader learns that the majority of the subjects followed orders, even though it was obvious that they did not want to. After the experiment was over, many of the participants were surprised at their willingness to comply with the experimenter and do exactly as they were instructed, despite being fearful of hurting the other subjects. At the end of “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram concludes that many individuals can get themselves in bad situations, where they are hurting others or themselves, not because they are bad people, but because someone they see as authority told them to.

Stanley Milgram experiment bought forth the ultimate question in social psychology. How far away is someone go to confirm with society and be obedient to an authority to figure? It has been discovered though such experiments that people will obey orders, even if it inflicts harm on another individual. However, the same individuals were unwilling to inflict harm if it involved personal contact with the individual being harmed or even the sounds of pain and please from the individual being harmed.

Obedience is the requirement of all mutual living and is the basic element of the structure of social life. Conservative philosophers argue that society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the priority of the individuals' conscience. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, designed an experiment that forced participants to either violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands. Milgram's study, reported in "The Perils of Obedience" suggested that under a special set of circumstances the obedience we naturally show authority figures can transform us into agents of terror or monsters towards humanity.

Before Milgram’s findings, the fact that people were inclined to obey to authority figures was already realized. He just confirmed this belief. Milgram followed effective steps by using precise procedures. He made sure that the experiment reflected features of an actual situation in which a person would obey to an authority figure: offering compensation (monetary reward in this experiment), being under pressure (Prods 1 to 4 in this case), and mentioning that the person who obeys can withdraw. These features can also be seen in a situation where a soldier is commanded to fire, for instance. A soldier will get a monetary compensation, is under pressure to obey because he chose to be part of the military, and he knows that he can resign at any time. Milgram created an experiment so precise and detailed that more than enough evidence was demonstrated.

The Milgram study was considered to be one of the most famous studies, on obedience in the history of psychology. The Milgram study was done by Stanley Milgram a Yale University psychologist, whose study was to focus on two things one being obedience to authority, and a persons personal conscience. The results of the study were remarkable, as according to (McLeod, 2007) 65 percent of two-thirds of the participants or teachers continued administering shocks to the highest voltage level of 450 volts. The rest of the teachers continued to at least 300 volts. Milgram did this experiment in 18 different ways and altered the independent variables in each trail to see how it affects the outcome or dependent variable. Milgram’s experiment was directly influenced by World war 2 and the holocaust, and while Milgram wanted to test how far people would go in obeying instructions even at the risk of hurting someone. Following Milgram’s experiment he came up with two types of theories, one being the autonomous state, which says that people tend to direct their own actions, and take responsibility for the results of those actions.

Baumrind accuses Milgram of mistreating his subjects during the experiment. She states that, “It has become more commonplace in sociopsychological laboratory studies to manipulate, embarrass, and discomfort subjects” (Baumrind 225). She does not condone such studies that cause a person to feel that way. The teacher in the experiment is the only one feeling discomfort. In a way, Milgram is the one who is actually administering the

While the results of Milgram’s experiment are concrete, their application to real life is questioned because of the deception throughout the procedure. The results of the experiment prove that people are likely to obey in a laboratory setting, but Baumrind exposes the difference between a lab and real life. Because the subject is in an unfamiliar setting he has a certain amount of trust in the authority figure (Baumrind

In the experiment there were two people selected one a “teacher’ who is the actual subject of the experiment and the other a “learner” who is an actor and in on the experiment. They were both then told that the teacher was to go into one room and read off a series of questions and administer electric shocks for every incorrect answer while the learner was to go into the other room and receive them however the learner wouldn’t really receive these painful electric shocks. The experiment has been reconducted over time to see if the outcome remains the same and since its initial inception the results have remained more or less the same with the outcome of many of the teachers doing what they are told and continuing the experiment. The Milgram experiment proves a powerful point in that we are taught to listen to commands and many of us do not question the person giving them even if it can result in displeasure for

To Milgram, obedience occurs when the subject complies with the entire series of commands, if he rejects one command then the subject is disobedient. Milgram discovered that the proximity of the authority figure to the subject, greatly effected their willingness to obey. He concluded that obedience sharply increases, as the experimenter is physically in the room with the subject. The results from his study also demonstrate that “physical presence of an authority is an important force contributing to the subject’s obedience or defiance…manipulation of the experimenter’s position yielded more powerful results” (Milgram, 1965). This is in contrast to the proximity to the subject to the victim. Finally, in order to test the importance of background authority, he conducted the same experiment in a commercial building in Bridgeport, instead of at Yale University. By doing this, he discovered that the location of the experiment did not matter much because, “subjects may consider one laboratory to be as competent as another, so long as it is a scientific lab” (Milgram, 1965). As previously mentioned, a reoccurring

Although no such experiment can be 100% conclusive, the Milgram experiments do shed considerable (and disturbing) light on the behavior of ordinary people in obedience of authority. They also explain, to a large extent, the seemingly perplexing behavior of many ordinary Germans during World War II and some American soldiers in Vietnam. (“Milgram,” Obedience to Authority..).

In Stanley Milgram’s ‘The Perils of Obedience’, Milgram reports from his studies of how far an individual can go in obedience to instructions and he pointed out that individuals can go as far as causing serious harm to the other people. Basically, the experiments are meant to test the choice that an individual would make when faced with the conflict of choosing between obedience to authority and obedience to one’s conscience. From the tests, it was found out that a number of people would go against their own conscience of choosing between what is wrong and what is right so as to please the individual in authority (Milgram 317). However, the experiments conducted by Milgram caused a wide range of controversy for instance; according to Diana Baumrind, the experiments were immoral. Baumrind notes in ‘Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience’ that Milgram did not only entrap his subjects, but he also potentially caused harm to his subjects (Baumrind 329). Based on the arguments that have been presented by the two authors, it is apparent that the two authors are concerned with real life situations, authority and ethics but the difference is that they both view these perspectives from different points of view as indicated by their writings. By and large, they also tend to show the importance or the insignificance of the experiments.

Stanley Milgram, a famous social psychologist, and student of Solomon Asch, conducted a controversial experiment in 1961, investigating obedience to authority (1974). The experiment was held to see if a subject would do something an authority figure tells them, even if it conflicts with their personal beliefs and morals. He even once said, "The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act (Cherry).” This essay will go over what Milgram’s intent was in this experiment and what it really did for society.

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