Milgram's Theory Of Following Orders

In the wake of Adolf Eichmann’s prosecution for commanding the slaying of over 1 million Jews, Psychologist Stanley Milgram called the role of authority into question. What would propel such evil acts from a seemingly normal man? In spite of what top psychologists assumed the outcome would be, the results were astounding. Despite the deep rooted convictions of the subjects opposed to causing physical harm to others, obedience to authority overcame the majority of the time (The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram)

In 1961, Stanley Milgram (1963) carried out one of the most famous experiments in social psychology. He wanted to examine the conflict between a person’s obedience to authority and their personal conscience. This experiment was conducted one year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann, along with most of those accused at the Nuremberg War Criminal trials, often based their defense on ”obedience”. The justification for their atrocious actions was that they were simply following orders from their superiors.

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.

Deception from a moral viewpoint would be something that is seen as wrong, but in a study or experiment for research I think deception is something that is necessary to gain certain knowledge that we wouldn 't be able to gain using regular methods. Usually, the ends justify the means to a deceptive experiments and they usually have good intentions behind them. Many people may be angry after the experiment is over but it is shown that people enjoy an experiment with deception more than an experiment without deception; and people also benefit from them more, educationally. I believe deception is a necessary tool for learning about human behavior and human reaction.

The groupthink, or group mentality theory occurs when the majority of the group follows a certain ideal or idea, and causes individuals who might have thought otherwise to support the majority’s conclusions. This has never been more prevalent then in one of the most horrifying events in history: the Holocaust. The events of the Holocaust baffled the world – no one could understand how Hitler convinced thousands of German soldiers to murder millions of innocent Jewish citizens. The world could not understand how a sophisticated and refined European country could follow a mindset that systematically eradicated generations of people for the sole reason that they practiced a certain religion (Tindale, Munler, Wasserman & Smith, 2002). The largest contributor to the events that took place during the Holocaust are the effects of conformity.

Every time he spoke in defense of himself, he claimed that he just simply followed the order from his superiors. Obedience is the vocation of a solider, but it does not mean solider must carry out unethically inhuman order without any thinking. Blind obedience in this case caused a huge massacre to

Numerous bystanders claimed to have no other options when faced with a moral dilemma, and in doing so, they gave the perpetrators permission to hurt others. Bystanders enable perpetrators to commit atrocities; therefore, they are just as guilty of the crimes that the Nazis committed during the Holocaust. Bystanders do not know how to stop following the perpetrators’

In “The Next Genocide,” Snyder begins with, “Before he fired the shot, the Einsatzgruppe commander lifted the Jewish child in the air and said, ‘You must die so that we can live.’ As the killing proceeded, other Germans rationalized the murder of Jewish children in the same way: them or us” (Snyder par. 1). The austere illustration of German soldiers massacring innocent Jewish children emphasizes the stark horror and terror of a twisted ideology in the readers’ minds. Such an emotional appeal strengthens Snyder’s argument that pointless bloodshed occurs whenever empiricism is disregarded in favor of fanaticism, creating desperate countries that are willing to commit genocide to sustain themselves. While the horrors of the Holocaust seem a distant memory, the greater terror is that those same factors are still viable reasons for alarm.

The explanation of why upright people execute wrongful actions can be interpreted in multiple ways. In "The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience," Herbert C. Kelman, a professor of social ethics, and V. Lee Hamilton, a sociologist, discuss how the use of authorization, routinization, and dehumanization can be used to carry out unethical actions like in the My Lai Massacre. The American Law assumes that subordinates should be obeying orders, and when linked to obeying superiors, moral principles become inoperative. Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst and the author of "Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem," explains how the different types of mind set and authority can be noticeably effective in whether one is obedient. Humanistic

These individuals had to follow their orders and ignore their own moral laws to prevent disobeying the law. This shows how people need to focus more on following their

Undoubtedly, militaries around the world train individuals to do extremely violent things to other humans. Often times transitioning away from a high tempo, hyper violent environment back to civilian life is a difficult process. William C. Gentry, a San Diego County prosecutor was once quoted saying “You are unleashing certain things in a human being we don’t allow in civic society, and getting it all back in the box can be difficult for some people.” Andrew Chambers is a veteran who had such problems adjusting. During a night out with some friends, Chambers severely beat someone who had pulled out a knife during an argument.

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.

The Holocaust is still a heavily reviewed subject and is debatably one of the worst if not the worst atrocity that has happened on this Planet up to date. To think that the Nazi’s were able to kill millions of people it has made us question what kind of people they were and if they were anything similar to us. It is hard to think of a perpetrator to be a normal human being. The Holocaust has made us question if the Nazi’s had any sense of moral sensibility when killing innocent and defenseless Jewish men and women. In the book Ordinary Men, Author Christopher Browning argues that these Nazi’s especially referring to the Reserve Police Battalion 101 were normal people who had instructions given by Hitler and their government to follow through with by devaluing all Jewish life.

How does an ordinary group of people turn into bloodless killers? The author of Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning offers the most captivating argument towards how it is possible for ordinary men to commit extraordinary atrocities. This paper will analyze the different viewpoints of what caused ordinary men to commit murder. To better understand this issue one must understand the sides of argument.

Introduction Human history is abundant in examples of individuals who have amassed such power with themselves that have allowed them to control entire populations, and often unleash tyranny and oppression upon millions of people. Throughout history there have been individuals who have held an iron grip over entire nations, concentrating totalitarian power with themselves, denying any freedom to people, crushing any form of dissent, and often unleashing mass violence, terror, and in some cases genocide. These people have shaped the future of peoples, regions and continents, starting wars and conflicts, and determining the course of millions of lives. And because of this very fact, that a single person could such a huge impact over the lives of so many people, it is very important to study the very factors that caused these individuals to make the decisions that they did, specifically, the factors and that shaped up the personality of these