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Milgram Obedience Experiment Research Paper

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The Milgram Obedience experiment was conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1963 focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. He wanted to investigate whether people are willing to connect atrocious acts by being obedient to authority figures. In the experiment the participant was paired with one of Milgram’s confederates and they drew lots to find out who would be the “learner” and who would be the “teacher”. The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher and Milgram’s confederate the learner. The learner would be placed in a room and had electrodes attached to him, and the teacher and researcher would be in a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a …show more content…

That was the justifications at the end of World War II that Nazi Germans gave when they were at trail for the acts of genocide against the Jews. In the experiment the researcher just presented himself as an authoritative figured without the need to recur to extremes in forcing the teacher to continue on with the experiment. I can imagine someone following orders from a police officer or a drill sergeant even with the hesitation of the guilty conscious in carrying out an inhuman act to please the authorities, but a simple, average man with knowledge on how the machine works could manage to influence and pressure most of the teachers to reach up to the four hundred and fifty volts. This shows me that if anyone who can appear to be an authority has that much influence on people, than the government with its structure and power can control the population and press down on them its demands; most likely it will be carried out. I also was surprised that even though the teachers were stressed at the screams of the learner when inflicting the shocks, they would look to the researcher for guidance or approbation as if they did not have a choice to

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