Stanley Milgram's The Experiment Of Autonomy

In his article “The Experiment of Autonomy,” Stanley Milgram describes the findings of his famous ‘Milgram’s Experiment.’ In the experiment, Milgram hired actors to act as students and asked random people to take the role teacher. The teacher would administer a word memory test to the student and would shock the student when they answered the question incorrectly. The actors, although not actually being shocked, would scream with more and more each shock and eventually refused to answer, during which time they were shocked again. Meanwhile, the ‘scientist’ encouraged the teacher to continue by simply saying “The experiment requires you to go on…” (582). From this experiment, Milgram found that 60-85% of the people were completely obedient and followed along with the experiment, despite the fact that to their knowledge they were actually hurting other people. From this, he concluded that not everyone has the resources needed to resist authority.

Even though these were ordinary people, they still went against

One factor that made the people more likely to disobey authority is conflicting authority. When two teachers were present, they no longer administered shocks after a disagreement occurred. Another factor that seemed to make people disobey authority, as mentioned earlier is the lack of a physical presence of an authority. So when the scientist called in to make commands, people were more likely to disobey. A third factor that allowed people to disobey authority was the rebellious action of others. When an actor was placed in as a teacher when another random person, the subject of the experiment was more likely to rebel when the actor rebelled. Overall, these factors show that while, more than half of the people were completely obedient to the scientist there is still hope that serious evil can be