The student and teacher were placed in separate rooms and an instructor was placed in the same room as the teacher. He would then attempt to convince the teacher to continue the experiment even if the student starts crying out or wanting to leave. The teacher was required to “shock” the student if they said an incorrect answer. However, the ‘shocks’ became more intense and came with each incorrect answer. They eventually started getting very dangerous and potentially life threatening.
In the experiment, Milgram uses purposeful deception as the teacher is the naive subject and is told they are participating in a memory and learner psychology experiment and are in charge of delivering shocks to the learner, who, in fact, is an actor. The majority of the participants in the study were obedient to the experimenter even though the experimenter "did not threaten the subjects with punishments such as loss of income, community ostracism or jail for failure to obey. Neither could he offer incentives" (Milgram 651). Despite having nothing to gain, the subjects continued participating in the experiment. The participants continued to administer shocks to the student because they were instructed to
Not properly explaining what exactly the experiment is, letting people back out or end it when the shocks have been administrated could produce a fatal ending. The subjects administering the shocks could be sadists
The first run had the learner get 3 answers correct and 7 answers wrong, resulting in a shock of 105 volts. In the second run, the teacher was told to read a list of words until the learner got the correct pair which meant that the teacher would have to increase the voltage up to 450 volts which were labeled as “Danger Severe Shock”. At around 300 volts the learner would start kicking against the wall and not respond to the teacher anymore. If the teacher failed to shock the learner the experimenter would give 4 responses that urged the teacher to administer the shock. The experimenter would either say “ Please Continue”, “The experiment requires that you continue”, “It is essential that you continue”, or finally “ You have no other choice you must go on”.
His experiment was used to demonstrate how people respond to orders from people with authority no matter what the order was. He started by having participants test another “participant”, who actually was one of Milgram’s men who knew what was going on. Each time the fake participant chose the wrong answer, the real participant had to shock them with a higher voltage until they got to one that would be deadly. Milgram changed parts of the experiment to find variables that changed how far the real participant would go. He noticed that location and experimenter’s dress apparel changes how likely it is that the real participant would go to the deadly voltage.
From video footage of Milgram’s study, it appeared likely that many participants suffered psychological stress, which at times seemed to be of a very high level. Repeatedly asking reassurance that they would not be held accountable for their actions, multiple participants were visibly shaken by the learner 's cries of pain and requests to stop. Additionally, during the study three people had intense seizures. Proving that deceiving the participants resulted in them feeling extremely
While arguably one of the defining psychological studies of the 20th Century, the research was not without flaws. Almost immediately the study became a subject for debate amongst psychologists who argued that the research was both ethically flawed and its lack of diversity meant it could not be generalized. Ethically, a significant critique of the experiment is that the participants actually believed they were administering serious harm to a real person, completely unaware that the learner was in fact acting. Although Milgram argued that the illusion was a necessary part of the experiment to study the participants’ reaction, they were exposed to a highly stressful situation. Many were visibly distraught throughout the duration of the test
Since the beginning of the human existence, man has always dominated and ruled over one another be it empires, corporations, or small groups. Authority and obedience has always been a factor of who we are. This natural occurrence can be seen clearly through the psychological experiments known as The Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Both of these studies are based on how human beings react to authority figures and what their obedience is when faced with conflict.
Firstly, in order for Milgram’s experiment to work the people had to obey and do what the researchers told them to do. The definition of obedience defined in the book is, “...a compliance with higher authorities in a hierarchical structure. ”(Schaefer, 103) This is exactly what happened in the experiment.
The Milgram experiment was conducted to analyze obedience to authority figures. The experiment was conducted on men from varying ages and varying levels of education. The participants were told that they would be teaching other participants to memorize a pair of words. They believed that this was an experiment that was being conducted to measure the effect that punishment has on learning, because of this they were told they had to electric shock the learner every time that they answered a question wrong. The experiment then sought out to measure with what willingness the participants obeyed the authority figure, even when they were instructed to commit actions which they seemed uncomfortable with.
Stanley Milgram wants to know how people would go in obeying an instruction. For his experiment he stand a procedure it is different from others. His experiment taken at human beings. 40 males aged between 20 and 50 were selected for the experiment, These 40 males were professionals who is unskilled. There is a teacher and learner in his experiment.
Switches were clearly labelled with voltage 15-450 volts. The teacher was actually naïve subject but Learner was an actor who didn’t even get a single shock. The purpose of this experiment was to see how far Teacher can go in the critical situation when shocks volts rise and Learner’s pain increased. Screaming and pain of the Learner made Teacher hesitating in proceeding far. To get freedom from this situation, Teacher must disobey to the
I moved from Lawrence to Methuen in Massachusetts. It was towards the end of 2nd grade. I was about 7 or 8 years old. My parents bought their first house in Methuen. We lived in a 3 family house before.
The shock machine had increasing voltages , the third button on the machine labeled as Danger: Severe shock and the last feature three x’s. This lead the teacher to believe that they were administering high voltages of pain when in all actuality the learner was an actor. Milgram concluded that 65% of the participants continued with the experiment until the very
The "teachers" continued, at the 180 volts mark the "learner" cried out that he cannot take it any longer. Once reaching 300 volts, the fifty-year-old "learner" yelled about his heart condition and begged to be released. At these points, a decent amount of "teachers" halted the experiment while a large percent continued until the final 450 volt question even though the "learner" had stopped responding. At the 150 volt mark those who were going to stop, did so. If I were in this position I would stop at the first sign of discomfort from the "learner."
