Stanley Milgram's Experiments On Obedience

To begin, the purpose of the experiments seem to be off to me. According to Slater, the purpose of the experiments were to test the idea of “obedience to authority” (58). While I do see that the experiments appear to have started as a way to test obedience, I think they stopped too early for this to be true. If they had

Society and government require people to be obedient towards authority, but is it always the best thing to do? During the aftermath of World War II many of the major leaders of the Nazi regime were put on trial for crimes against humanity (History.com). These trials were known as the Nuremburg war trials, were most of the convicted proclaimed that they were “just following orders” (McLeod 584). Being an accomplice to a crime is also against the law. In the Nuremburg trials, those accused were not breaking the law that their government had created, they were actually following it. 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

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

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. The villagers notice the executions and torture in the camp but, fearing for their lives it is clear that they do not possess the skill or willingness to help without having the Nazi’s turn their attention to them.

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. David would be correct if he said that some Germans became systematically cruel, but the fundamental attribution error is introduced when David says that all Germans became systematically cruel.

Philip Zimbardo questioned, “What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?” (Zimbardo, 1971) In 1971 a psychologist named Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment on the effects prison has on young males with the help of his colleague Stanley Milgram. They wanted to find out if the reports of brutality from guards was due to the way guards treated prisoners or the prison environment. Zimbardo offered $15 per day for two weeks to take part in the experiment. The experiment was held in the basement of Stanford University Psychology building; they turned it into a mock prison.

    The word “Holocaust”, was a word meaning whole (“holos”) and burned (“kaustos”). In 1945, the word stood for the mass murder of about 6 million people; mainly European Jews as well as some homosexuals and Gypsies. The mass murder was committed by the German Nazi regime during the Second World War. The Holocaust occurred because the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, saw Jews as an inferior race and a threat to Germany (History.com staff, 2009).

While arguably one of the defining psychological studies of the 20th Century, the research was not without flaws. Almost immediately the study became a subject for debate amongst psychologists who argued that the research was both ethically flawed and its lack of diversity meant it could not be generalized.

For decades people have been asking how could small masses of people be able to carry out genocides against a whole race, in particular the Holocaust. In social psychology the study known as today as the Milgrams Obedience experiments are said to answer some of the questions people have regarding

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. While some individuals believe they would never turn into puppets

Trials for Nazi war criminals were taking place and making headlines. This had Stanley Milgram asking himself: "How is it possible that people who are courteous and decent in everyday life, act so callously,

The Milgram experiment was conducted to analyze obedience to authority figures. The experiment was conducted on men from varying ages and varying levels of education. The participants were told that they would be teaching other participants to memorize a pair of words. They believed that this was an experiment that was being conducted to measure the effect that punishment has on learning, because of this they were told they had to electric shock the learner every time that they answered a question wrong. The experiment then sought out to measure with what willingness the participants obeyed the authority figure, even when they were instructed to commit actions which they seemed uncomfortable with.

According to Saul McLeod, Stanley Milgram, a professor with Yale University, devised an experiment looking for justification for the acts of genocide committed by the Nazis accused of atrocities at the Nuremberg War Criminal trials. His experiment began the year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann which took place in Jerusalem. Adolf Eichmann was a lieutenant colonel who was tasked with organizing and managing the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German occupied Eastern Europe during the Second World War. During his trial, which was widely publicized, he insisted that he did not feel guilty has he had no authority and was simply following the orders of his superiors. Milgram wanted to see if the German people

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.

BACKGROUND “Obedience is an active or deliberate form of social influence, which involves someone in authority requiring us to behave in a particular was in a particular situation.” (Gross, R 2015:446) Stanley Milgram (1963) ‘behavioural study of obedience’ was “originally attempting to test the ’Germans are different’ hypothesis” (Gross, R 2012:226)