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Stanley Milgram Experiment Essay

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Stanley Milgram’s (1963) experiment is one of the most widely recognised psychological experiments of all time, aiming to explain obedience in the Holocaust, focussing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Milgram’s obedience experiments suggest that in the face of authority people can’t help but obey orders. This essay will critically discuss this statement in relation to recent reappraisals of MIlgram’s experiments. Milgram’s famous experiments involved a teacher who would in fact be the participant within the experiment, administering shocks to the learner, who was in fact one of Milgram’s confederates, when they did not recall information correctly. Ultimately the learner would answer incorrectly in order …show more content…

As it is argues ( ) that the study is based purely on deception, therefore impacting the validity of the findings. Also the study only involved male participants suggesting that the findings cannot be generalised to both genders. Nevertheless many researchers have found similar findings to Milgram. As a similar experiment conducted by Derren Brown (2006) involving both male and female participants found over 50% of participants to continue to administer the full 450 volt shock, with no variation between the two genders, suggesting that in the face of authority, people can’t help but obey orders. On the other hand research has suggested (Haslam and Reicher ) that people do not always obey orders in the face of authority. As Haslam and Reicher ( ) studied the prods used in Milgram’s experiments and found that participants objected strongly to prod 4 given by the experimenter stating that ‘’you have no other choice ‘’ by insisting that they do by discontinuing. In addition to this identification was found to be a strong predictor of the maximum level of shock administered. As the participants identification with the learner was a strong negative predictor of the maximum level of shock delivered, whereas identification with the experimenter was a moderate yet non-significant predictor of the maximum level of shock delivered, this closely resembled the behaviour observed

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