Summary Of Milgram's Study Of Obedience

The piece of research that I have decided to study is Milgram’s study of obedience, the initial purpose of this research was to find out whether ordinary American’s would obey an unjust order from a person in authority to inflict pain on another person. This was being tested as Milgram was looking to prove that German’s were more susceptible to be obedient to authority than American’s. Obedience is what binds men to their authorities and what essentially gives leaders their superiority over others, Milgram was focussing his study of obedience in relation to how German soldiers obeyed their authorities, when gassing millions of innocent people to death and how these orders could only be carried out on a massive scale if a large number of people

The experimenter was played by a 31 year old high school biology teacher and the ‘other participant’ was a 41 year old accountant, trained for the role of being the learner. After meeting the experimenter, the subject then met the other ‘participant’ and both subjects then drew a piece of paper from a hat stating whether they were the ‘learner’ or the ‘teacher’. However, the drawing was rigged so that the naive participant would always be the teacher and the accomplice participant would always be the learner. After drawing the papers, the experimenter then led both the teacher and the learner into a small adjacent room that had and “electric chair” apparatus, which the learner was then strapped into the chair by the experimenter, with the ‘teacher’ watching on. The learners wrist were then strapped to an electrode, which the experimenter said was connected to the shock generator in the next room, the learners wrists were strapped, effectively making it impossible for the him to move during the shocking process. The experimenter told the learner, with the teacher listening on that, “Although

The teacher was shown the shock panel which had 30 lever switches, that ‘administered’ the shock to the learner in the next room. The shocks started at 15 volts and increased in 15 volt increments, all the way to 450 volts, with the labels ranging from slight shock to very strong shock to danger: intensity shock to the last two shocks labelled simply as XXX. The teacher was told that he were to administer shocks to leaner if he got the answer wrong, every time after the learner got shocked, it then went up in intervals of 15 volts. During the experiment if the teacher became hesitant, the experimenter would then encourage him to keep going using the following commands, “Please continue”, “The experiment requires that you continue”, “It is absolutely essential that you continue”, and “You have no other choice, you must go