Milgram's Obedience Experiments

In 1963, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, carried out an experiment into the obedience of seemingly normal Germans to Nazi authority during the Holocaust. He hoped to examine whether Americans would obey the instructions of authority, even if doing so contradicted their moral beliefs. A newspaper advertisement billed the experiment as a study into memory, calling for ordinary males from various professions. At the start of the experiment, each participant was introduced to, what they believed to be, another participant (he was in fact a confederate of Milgram).

In Stanley Milgram’s “The perils of obedience” and Philip G. Zimbardo's “The Stanford Prison Experiment” the influence that authority holds is analyzed and tested in a variety of social experiments. Milgram asserts that any individual can excuse themselves from the responsibility of their role, regardless of how evil, on the grounds that there is someone ordering them to do so. However, Zimbardo claims that authority doesn’t have to be an individual, stating that anyone, be it a prison guard or a prisoner, will ultimately fill and perpetuate their assigned role as a result of authoritative factors and environments. However, the way in which both of the authors go to reaching these conclusions differs greatly.

The Milgram Experiment Usually, people follow given orders from authority. Authority can be a work boss, parents, teachers, etc. We are taught to follow orders at a young age so we won’t have issues with obedience in the future. The Milgram Experiment was basically testing how far someone could commit to their obedience before it became too much.

Obedience can be defined as complying to an order given by an authority figure. It involves changing an individual’s behaviour because an authority figure has told them to do so, not due to their own beliefs and so can be seen as a form of social influence. Stanley Milgram was motivated by his background as his family were Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis. He was interested in whether the Nazis were following orders from authority figures or were carrying out these acts on their own behalf. In 1963, Stanley Milgram conducted one of the most famous studies on obedience and authority figures (McLeod, 2018).

The Milgram experiment and the society Speaking of one of the most renowned psychological experiment, which even replications on TV are done, is the Milgram experiment, on obedience to authority figures. It involves the measurement of how much participants will to obey the authority, in order to explain the reason why soldiers obeyed to allow the Holocaust, the homicides of millions of Jews, happened. With the participants’ roles as a teacher to punish a learner by incrementing degrees of electric shocks, though they didn’t know it’s staged, 65% of them did it to the last under the horrendous moans and the commands of the experimenters, which surpassed the expectation of 1.2%. Milgram himself elaborated two theories, encompassing theory of

Stanley Milgram: The Perils of Obedience Stanley Milgram experiment is concerning peoples’ willingness to conform to an authority figure. The question Milgram was trying to answer was would a subject kill with electrical shock, due to an authority figure instructing them too. One individual was the learner being hooked up to electrodes, however, not literally.

The event I have chosen to discuss in this assignment is becoming a young mother. The first term to be discussed is stereotyping. Stereotyping is a set of presumptions about the identity attributes or physical traits of a segment of society. I had a stereotype about young mothers.

There are many ways to find out how individuals would react in certain situations, for example, by putting individuals in a simulation. Causing stress and discomfort to individuals in order to gain knowledge is at times necessary. For example, Stanley Milgram’s experiments which focus on obedience to authority and the extent a person is willing to ignore their own ethical beliefs and cause pain to another individual, just because he is ordered to do so. Stanley Milgram writes about his experiments and results in his article “The Perils of Obedience”. In his experiments Stanley Milgram causes subjects who have volunteered to be a part of them some stress and discomfort in order to receive relevant results.

An infamous experiment on obedience to authority by Stanley Milgram’s (1963) has brought a lot of speculations and arguments in both fields of psychology and ethics. Even after decades, the experiment remains controversial to me. It is one of those fascinating studies that has caught my interest. Although it was quite unethical and very deceptive in nature, its findings had brought “disturbing” awareness to us, people. It was disturbing in a sense that most us did not expect to obtain such results but nevertheless, it certainly gave us something to ponder upon.

The experiments that have been are under study this week have proven that under certain circumstances ordinary or "good" people are able to change their behavior or commit extremely heinous acts. In Stanley Milgram’s experiments he found that obedience was higher when an individual is receiving orders from a person who is close and /or when this person is perceived as an authority figure supported by a prestigious organization. However, Milgram noticed that when experiments were conducted outside the Yale campus, obedience diminished. It has further been found that high levels of obedience also require that the victim be depersonalized or at a distance. Moreover, high levels of obedience are most likely to occur when there are no other figures that challenge the wrongdoings, (Cordon, 2005; Alic, 2001).

Similarities between the Stanley Milgram, and Stanford prison experiment extend beyond the conventional commonalities of psychological experiments. The approach of setup were at extremes with one having a student teacher relationship, compared to that of a prisoner and a guard, but the results of human responses were unnervingly relatable with both teacher and guard, being in the superior position and allowing themselves to degrade the inferior to extremes of death. Psychologist Zimbardo may have compromised the legitimacy of his experiment with the inability to remove himself, as he admitted in his conclusion, to remain objective and from influencing the results, but the authenticity of the reactions were not compromised. The motivation, some of the interviewes claimed, was to have control of the situation. Whether control meant psychological harassment or not eating, everyone had an excuse that they were playing roles in an experiment to justify the drastic measures of manipulation taken

Milgram says that obedience is caused by the shift of responsibility. A person will say that they were just following orders. The consequences should then not apply to them because it was not their fault. Could it be possible, that a person decides to hurt another person because of evil nature? Freud believed a person acts out aggression, because of a human’s animalistic instinct.

The definition of obedient is, “complying or willing to comply with orders or requests; submissive to another's will.” Whose “will” must people be submissive to? Is it ever okay to not comply with a request? In many situations, people are forced to comply with others request, making them obedient. From childhood to adulthood obeying authority is a trait every person is taught to have.