The Milgram Experiment : Obedience To Authority

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

This essay will look at an important key psychological experiment carried out by the renowned social psychologist Stanley Milgram which was carried out in the early 1960’s (Banyard 2012) to determine how far ordinary people would go to inflict pain to a fellow human based on instruction from an authority figure, and that of the replication of the experiment which was carried out by Burger in 2009 (Byford 2014) to determine if the same level of obedience was still applicable in the 21st Century, as was observed in the original study some 40 years earlier. The

The shockers were told they could walk out at and time and still get paid for their time. The viewer can see that the effect of orders from authority can control what people do. It is also shown that even if the test subjects can walk away from the experiment at any time, the influence of authority draws them away from doing so. In a nutshell, The Milgram Experiment Revisited delineates that authoritative figures can manipulate people to do things that they wouldn’t generally do, such as inflict pain on

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.

The complexities of a human’s willingness to submit to another person’s will have intrigued mankind since the formation of societal groups. Only in recent history has there been any studies conducted which so completely capture the layman’s imagination as the obedience experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram. As one of the few psychological experiments to have such an attention grabbing significance, Milgram discovered a hidden trait of the human psyche that seemed to show a hidden psychotic in even the most demure person. Milgram presents his startling findings in “The Perils of Obedience”. Publication created a great deal of discussion, with one of the more vocal critics being Diana Baumrind, who details her points of contention in the

Stanley Milgram and Philip G. Zimbardo both address instances in which the hierarchy between authorities and subjects is clearly defined in an experimental setting. In Stanley Milgram’s article, “The Perils of Obedience,” the experimenter researched the effect of authority on obedience. The experiment involved a teacher and a learner, in which the learner would receive shocks if he/she failed to memorize a series of words (Milgram 78). However, the learner was an actor that did not truly receive shocks (Milgram 78). Moreover, the author concludes that individuals obey out of fear or a desire to please others even when performing against their own better judgement. Comparatively, the article “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” was both written and conducted by Philip G. Zimbardo. Initiating a mock arrest, Zimbardo attempted to produce, but not enforce, elements of imprisonment among volunteers to study the relationship between authority and prisoners (Zimbardo 106). Similar to the first experiment, the study proved that any person possesses notions of sadism that require tense situations to reveal these feelings. Although Zimbardo displays the power of situations more logically than Milgram, both authors effectively acknowledge the relationship between authorization and obedience by focusing on the test subjects that were selected for the experiments.

Stanley MIlgram is a Yale University social psychologist who wrote “Behavioral Study of Obedience”, an article which granted him many awards and is now considered a landmark. In this piece, he evaluates the extent to which a participant is willing to conform to an authority figure who commands him to execute acts that conflict with his moral beliefs. Milgram discovers that the majority of participants do obey to authority. In this research, the subjects are misled because they are part of a learning experience that is not about what they are told. This experiment was appropriate despite this. Throughout the process, subjects are exposed to various signs that show them

In his article "The Perils of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to determine if the innate desire to obey an authority figure overrides the morality and consciousness that had been already established in a person. After Milgram conducted his experiments he concluded that 60% of the subjects complied to an authority figure rather than their own sympathy. There was additional testing outside the US which showed an even higher compliance rate. Milgram reasoned that the subjects enjoyed the gratification from the experimenter, who was the authority figure in the experiment. He noted that most of the subjects are "proud" to carry out the demands of the experimenter. Milgram believed for that reason, why the

Stanley Milgram, an American social psychologist, writes in his article “The Perils of Obedience” about an experiment he designed which forced participants to either obey the demands of an authority figure, in this case the experimenter, or to turn against obedience and refuse to proceed in the experiment (Milgram 78). He found from this experiment that a minority of the participants refused to obey orders by the experimenter; therefore, most of the participants followed the orders given by the experimenter knowing it would result in the learner’s pain (Milgram 80). Milgram believes his results did not prove that these participants were sadists or mass murderers; however, his results did prove that ordinary people simply obeying orders can

The Milgram Obedience Study was an experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1963 to observe how far people would obey instructions that resulted in harming another individual. The experiment consisted of a “learner” engaging in a memory task and a “teacher” testing the “learner” on the task, administering electrical shocks to the “learner” each time an incorrect answer was given; the electric shocks started out small from 15 volts, labeled as “SLIGHT SHOCK”, all the way to 450 volts, labeled as “X X X”—of course, that was what the participant was told. The true purpose of the experiment was not disclosed until after the experiment and the “random selection” of who would be the “teacher” or “learner” was rigged so that the participant was always the “teacher” and the “learner” was always an actor. The shocks, naturally, were never given to the “learner”, and the “learner” gave responses that were scripted, both in answers to the questions and in responses to the shocks.

One of the most known study of obedience was conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram (“Milgram”). This experiment was focusing on the effects of people’s obedience to authority and their own conscious thoughts and beliefs when it came to harming another person (“Milgram”). Milgram advertised for male participants of varying ages and jobs to be in a Yale University study (“Milgram”). The participant was paired with another person who each had to draw straws to see who would be the “teacher” and who would be the “learner” (“Milgram”). However, this draw was fixed that so the teacher would always be the participant and the learner would

In pursuit of information, he traveled to Paris, France and Oslo, Norway to study differing conformity rates between countries(Rogers 2016, p 3). Milgram found Norway and the US had similar conformity rates and the French conformed the least(Rogers 2016, p 3). After his graduation from Harvard in 1960, Milgram became an assistant professor at Yale, where he was able to further develop his interest in obedience (Rogers 2016, p 4). Living through WWII and the Holocaust with his Jewish heritage made Milgram more curious about obedience to authority and how it applied in this particular scenario (Blass 1998 page 3). This led Milgram to a question specific to the Holocaust;” Just how far would a person go under the experimenter's orders?” (Milgram 1977). This question became the basis for Milgram’s famous “shock experiments” . He was curious about what made these people commit lethal acts and what factors had influenced them in the process (Blass 1998 page 1). Although his question was specific to the Holocaust, his findings reveal general information and cannot be attributed to particular instances . He wanted to test how far people under the influence of an authority figure would go if they believed they were harming someone to the point of death (Slater 2004 page

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

Pioneering Psychologist Stanley Milgram once said, “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.” Obedience is like a narcotic; under its influence, even a strong willed person can do horrible things to others without a second thought. The only way a member of society submitting to powerful authority can escape being obedient is to live completely isolated. Subjects usually follow the orders given by a leader without a second thought, with many going the extra mile despite the mental and physical harm they could cause others. In order to satisfy an authority figure, people are willing to hurt mentally, abuse physically, or even murder others in cold blood because humans are born with the urge to comply an authoritarian figure.