I have chosen to do my reflection paper on Stanley Milgram and his experiment on Authority and Obedience. Stanley Milgram was born in 1933 to a Jewish family in New York. He earned a great reputation in school for being studious, hardworking and having good leadership skills. Milgram went on to obtain in a Bachelors degree in Political Science at Queens College in 1954. However, he realized his interests lie in psychology. He went on to obtain Ph.D in social psychology in 1960 from Harvard. Milgram spent a year working as an assistant with Solomon Asch. It was Asch’s famous conformity experiment that went on to inspire Milgram to conduct his experiments and research that were to make him famous and lead him to benefit modern psychology. In 1960 he started working at Yale and soon began his experiments on obedience and the conflict between authority and personal conscience on obedience in 1961; his experiment was one of the most famous yet controversial experiments done for obedience. Milgram was interested in studying the extent people would go to, to obey instructions for harming another person based on whom the instructions are coming from. He began his experiments a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He wondered if the many accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders against their will due to authority. He was also interested in the idea that the Germans may have just followed orders in World War II due to authority and fear of not obeying. To conduct
In conclusion, I believe the way Slater presents her evidence is very convincing. She makes it a point to explain all of the controversial points that surround Stanley Milgram and his experiments. While we might not agree on all of her points, we both share the thought that Milgram and his experiments have affected positively despite the issues of its purpose, results, usefulness, and morality shroud the experiments in
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
To Milgram’s surprise, the pilot study showed a 60 percent fully obedient rate, far different than what most had predicated. However, this pilot was dismissed as “irrelevant” by one of his colleagues on the basis that Yale students are highly aggressive and competitive by nature. Milgram then moved on to regular experiments drawing his subjects from regular New Haven society by way of newspaper advertisements. Subjects ranged from white collar professionals to the unemployed, although all were male, and the results were the same as the experiment with the Yale students.
Many of the accused got sentenced to life in prison or death. Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to explain the correlation of the environmental aspects that make people do terrible things and how far people will go to harm others. Social pressures also play a big role in how people think. Minorities can have their ideas of what is right and what is wrong swept over by majorities which was displayed in Solomon Asch’s experiments. The most important thing to learn from the Nuremburg trials, Milgram’s experiment, and Asch’s experiment is that sometimes it is better to resist authority if it means following moral
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
As stated in our textbook, “Conformity is a change in behavior or belief as the result of real or imagined group pressure.” One can believe that most people will torture an innocent person just because they are ordered to because of the conditioning received since childhood. Obedience is a type of social influence where someone acts in response to a direct order from an authoritative figure doing the influencing. The epitome experiment by Stanley Milgram concluded that most people followed orders from the authoritative figure regardless how immoral the act was. People continued to send electric shock to people knowing that it was causing pain and can possibly lead to death.
(Russell 2014) Conclusion: Despite controversy Milgram’s experiment was ground breaking. It remains relevant today and is frequently cited in demonstrating the perils of obedience.
The Milgram experiment was an experiment that tested an individual's willingness to follow the instructions of an authority figure. Subjects were told to shock a person, who they believed to also be a subject, if they answered a question wrong. The people getting shocked were actors and were not actually receiving electrical shocks. Many of the subjects continued to give high voltage shocks because they were told to. This proves that in high-stress situations people are willingly listen to authority figures despite what the say to do.
During the 1960’s Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments to test how a person reacts to authority. He started these tests in response to World War Two and the reports of the German soldiers who claimed they were “just following orders’ when asked about
One of the most infamous experiments conducted in the history of psychology was the Stanford Prison Experiment. The main objective of this experiment was to see what effects would occur when a psychological experiment into human nature was performed. As I read through the material provided, I noticed that my thoughts on the matter were similar to many; that it was a complete failure as a scientific research project. However, his findings did provide us with something much more important that is still being talked about today; insight into human psychology and social behavior.
Name : Muhammed Irshad Madonna ID : 250509 Subject : Medical Ethics Due Date : 8/01/2018 Paper : 1-The Milgram Experiment The Stanley Milgram Experiment is a famous study about obedience in psychology which has been carried out by a Psychologist at the Yale University named, Stanley Milgram. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In July 1961 the experiment was started for researching that how long a person can harm another person by obeying an instructor.
The Nazi’s dealt decisively with people who protested in Maulthaussen. In one incident a man who was a quarry employee protested and complained to the townsfolk on what was happening in the concentration camps, so he was made an example off. He was sent to a prison camp for eight months. At this point there were few who had complained so the town’s people saw it to be safe if they just conformed to their new circumstances. The Nazi’s used fear to control the populace in Maulthaussen and turned them into bystanders.
Obscura! One always has a choice as to whether obey or defy an order given be a superior. In chapter two, Obscura, of the book Opening Skinner’s Box by Lauren Slater, she discusses the controversial experiment of Milgram. In Milgram’s experiment he wanted to if people would obey or disobey orders for someone who was “superior” to them when instructed to shock someone, from low voltages ,15, all the way up to lethal voltages, 450. Stanly Milgram used ordinary people to shock them.
" The human mind is an organ for the discovery of truths rather than of falsehoods." Said Solomon Asch (Cherry). “Solomon E. Asch was a pioneer of social psychology. Born in Warsaw, Poland, on September 14, 1907, he came to the United States in 1920 and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1932 (College).”
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