In the book “Opening Skinner’s Box”, Lauren Slater discusses many complicated ideas relating to certain experiments of recent times. In every chapter, she focuses on one specific experiment and poses many controversial thoughts. One of the chapters I found most interesting was the second chapter titled “Obscura”. In it she walks readers through the experiments of Stanley Milgram and questions the purpose, results, usefulness, and morality of the experiments. To begin, the purpose of the experiments seem to be off to me.
In the article, “The Perils of Obedience,” by Stanley Milgram,
This Milgram research on respect to authority figures was a series of cultural science experiments conducted by Yale University scientist Stanley Milgram in 1961. They assessed the willingness of survey participants, men from a different variety of jobs with varying degrees of training, to obey the authority figure who taught them to do acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to think that they were helping an unrelated research, in which they had to distribute electrical shocks to the individual. These fake electrical shocks gradually increased to grades that could have been deadly had they been true. McLeod's article about the Milgram experiment exposed the fact that a high percentage of ordinary people will
Title (psychology #7) In the Abu Ghraib Torture and the Milgram experiment even though they had different reasoning behind it, the same concept is behind it. The obedience to authority people tend to have is either to obey or disobey authority and do what they think is right. In both this situation many people decided to obey authority and break their morals.
Society and government require people to be obedient towards authority, but is it always the best thing to do? During the aftermath of World War II many of the major leaders of the Nazi regime were put on trial for crimes against humanity (History.com). These trials were known as the Nuremburg war trials, were most of the convicted proclaimed that they were “just following orders” (McLeod 584). Being an accomplice to a crime is also against the law. In the Nuremburg trials, those accused were not breaking the law that their government had created, they were actually following it.
Observed during the Holocaust and studied later at Yale University, authority can be used to manipulate people into doing just about anything. In a study of obedience, the Milgram Experiment tested how individuals would respond to being forced to administer high voltage shocks to a person behind a wall. Even when the unseen person would scream and beg for the shocks to end, the experiment overseer would tell the test subject to continue giving shocks. The results of the study showed that people were willing to bypass their morals in attempts to follow orders from an authoritative figure. Unfortunately, many outsiders would assess this situation and fail to realize that the terror does not lie within the people who submitted to the viscous instructions, but within the person who commanded them and watched the ordeal unfold from the
In 1963 Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment that used subjects to deliver "electric shocks" under the observation of an experiment in experimenter, authoritative figure. The purpose of the study was to observed the connection between obedience to authority and personal conscious. The experiment proceeded with the subject asking a member of Milgram's Team (whom they did not know was a member or Milgram's team) questions, and every time they got it wrong the subject would send an electric shock to the member of Milgram's team. Although the study did not harm the member of Milgram's team. The experiment is still debated on whether it was ethical or unethical.
Milgram himself concluded how easily ordinary people ‘can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority". (Milgram 1974) As this report has highlighted the research is not without controversy with many questioning to what extent Milgram’s experiment is true to real life and has been criticized for not highlighting further situational variables in determining obedience to authority. Regardless of this, there is no doubt Milgram highlighted a rather troubling phenomenon.
David’s claim that the Holocaust occurred because the Germans became unusually cruel is false based on the fundamental attribution error and Milgram’s experiments. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to attribute other people’s behavior to internal factors, instead of accounting for situational factors. David committed this error when stating that Germans, as a whole, were “sadistic people with abnormal and twisted personalities”. David did not account for the immense pressure that the German public felt from Hitler during World War II. Although many atrocities were being committed, the Germans feared for their lives if they stood up for the Jews and disobeyed Hitler’s rule.
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.
Arguably, one of the most well-known experiments regarding the tendency of humans to inflict harm upon strangers under orders from perceived authority figures is Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiments in 1963 (Smith, Aquino, Koleva & Graham, 2014). The experiment was based on the Nuremberg Trials, wherein the Nazi soldiers on trial claimed that they were only following orders, and as such implied a lesser role in their crimes during the Holocaust. While there are many factors that influence injustice against a people, in this paper, the role of moral exclusion will be examined in detail in order to ascertain how those excluded from powerful groups by virtue of their lineage and race could then be subjected to significant harm, and perhaps
Zimbardo offered $15 per day for two weeks to take part in the experiment. The experiment was held in the basement of Stanford University Psychology building; they turned it into a mock prison. To begin the experiment Zimbardo interviewed over 70 applicants and done testing on each to eliminate candidates with psychological issues. Only 24 males were chosen to participate 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.
In “The Perils of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram describes the situation of obedience to the authority through the series of experiments of testing people and determine if they submit themselves to the authority’s orders or not. Milgram believes that obedience in many people come from their training, attitude and ethical background. This dilemma is inherited in human beings from the beginning of human race e.g. the story of Abraham, Plato’s argument. According to some conservative philosophers, society’s base or strength is being threatened by disobedience. On the other hand, Humanists think that individual’s conscience is very important for society.
It showed how normal civilians acted when they were given authority over others. Even the most cordial, intelligent people can take on an evil, machiavellianistic nature when introduced to a dominant role in an individualized setting. This experiment taught psychologists so many things about human behavior and the prison system. It is an event that is taught in classrooms all over the world. While some people question the ethics of the experiment, it paved the way for more understanding as well as the reform of psychological practices
