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Stanley Milgram's Experiments On Obedience To Authority

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After World War II, several of the Nazi soldiers were questioned about their reasoning behind the corrupt actions they were guilty of---killing hundreds of thousands of men and women, destroying families in the process, and marking their time as a dark part of history. Who on earth would do such a thing? What could their excuse possibly be? Well, to them, they were simply following orders. It’s obvious to believe that the soldiers would find their humanity and resist their commands, but they didn't. This concept sparked a curiosity in psychologist Stanley Milgram to discover how authoritative figures influence a person's decision making---which soon led him to conduct his most famous experiments known today. After watching Nazi generals, one after the other, plead they were only following orders during the Nuremberg trials he took away one main concept; people can, and will blindly follow authority. To test this idea, …show more content…

Yes, they all continued the experiment, but each and every one put up a fight (Milgram's Experiment on Obedience to Authority , n.d.). Each volunteer sensed that what they were doing was wrong, and after battling themselves internally as to whether or not they should continue, did they finally speak up. The teacher was constantly fighting, constantly at war with what he thought he should do over what he was being commanded to do. Disobedience takes courage, whether it’s stealing a cookie out of the cookie jar, coming home past curfew, or failing to follow through the commands of a superior. It’s not in human nature to flow upstream----it’s not natural for people to rebel against authority. This explains why the volunteers continued to follow the directions in spite of the fact that the commands ran contrary to their moral compass. That’s why it was so difficult for them to defy the experimenter. Yes, they obeyed…but they didn’t do so

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