Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, sought out the reasoning behind Nazi soldiers and their orders, especially after the Nuremberg War Criminal trials in World War II. Some of the Nazis knew killing Jews was immoral, but they proceeded to do it anyway. Why did they do it? Stanley Milgram jumped on the case and conducted an experiment to see to what extent people will go to obey higher authority (McLeod, 2007).
The experiments began in July of 1961 at Yale University. Milgram put an ad in the paper for male participants to help with an educational study. The participants that had been selected were paid just for showing up. The experiment involved three people: the scientist (actor), the learner (actor), and the teacher (participant). The learner and teacher would randomly draw to find out who would receive which role, but it was fixed so the participant would receive the teacher every time (McLeod, 2007).
…show more content…
The shock started from 15 volts and increased by 15 per wrong answer up a maximum shock of 450 volts (Milgram Experiment-Obedience to Authority, 2015). In Milgram’s first experiment, fifteen out of the forty participants refused to continue at some point in the experiment, while 25 participants continued all the way to 450 volts, “shocking” the learner three times before the acting scientist ended the experiment. The teachers, however, did not know that there were no shocks and the procedure was perfectly safe. To sell the fact that the learners were hurt, the scientist would bring out the acting learner whose face was “covered in tears and looked haggard” to meet one of the participants, Joseph Dimow. The actor “thanked” him for stopping the experiment and noted the anticipation was worse than the shock
It’s not a question that many historians try and explain the motives behind perpetrator actions in violent events. History has recurred throughout time, especially in the 20th c. when it comes to genocide, where massive groups are involved in mobilizing the same type of destruction. Why then, is it so easy for many ordinary people to commit such horrible violence? This is the question that both James Waller and Daniel Goldhagen try to answer in their books about the perpetrators in the Holocaust. Waller provides a general model, which can be applied to genocide and mass killing events, that explains the sequence of events which lead an ordinary person to perpetrate evil.
The student and teacher were placed in separate rooms and an instructor was placed in the same room as the teacher. He would then attempt to convince the teacher to continue the experiment even if the student starts crying out or wanting to leave. The teacher was required to “shock” the student if they said an incorrect answer. However, the ‘shocks’ became more intense and came with each incorrect answer. They eventually started getting very dangerous and potentially life threatening.
Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, shares his results from an experiment he conducted in 1963 regarding the obedience to authority in “The Perils of Obedience.” His experiment illustrates that when placed under peculiar circumstances, ordinary citizens are capable of performing terrible and unexpected actions (Milgram 85). Milgram rationalizes these proceedings by concluding that the average individual will decide to please the experimenter rather than resist his authority to protect the well-being of the learner (Milgram 86). Herbert C. Kelman, a Harvard University Social Ethics professor, and V. Lee Hamilton, a former University of Maryland Sociology chair, share of a U.S. military massacre in “The My Lai Massacre: A Military
In the experiment, Milgram uses purposeful deception as the teacher is the naive subject and is told they are participating in a memory and learner psychology experiment and are in charge of delivering shocks to the learner, who, in fact, is an actor. The majority of the participants in the study were obedient to the experimenter even though the experimenter "did not threaten the subjects with punishments such as loss of income, community ostracism or jail for failure to obey. Neither could he offer incentives" (Milgram 651). Despite having nothing to gain, the subjects continued participating in the experiment. The participants continued to administer shocks to the student because they were instructed to
(What does the study add to our understanding of the phenomenon?) People are much more likely to obey someone of authority than expected, even if it is against their beliefs or morals. Something such as Hitler’s rise to power could have been just as possible in the United States because Americans are just as likely as the Germans to continue to do something that they know is
Cults are groups usually started by a very charismatic leader. Many cults begin because of they do not want to have to conform to the standards of society. The members of the cults remain obedient to the leader of the cult and do anything that is demanded of them by their leader. The Manson Family was a cult ran by the infamous Charles Manson. Charles Manson led the followers of his cult onto a bloody path that ended with a jail sentence.
To Milgram’s surprise, the pilot study showed a 60 percent fully obedient rate, far different than what most had predicated. However, this pilot was dismissed as “irrelevant” by one of his colleagues on the basis that Yale students are highly aggressive and competitive by nature. Milgram then moved on to regular experiments drawing his subjects from regular New Haven society by way of newspaper advertisements. Subjects ranged from white collar professionals to the unemployed, although all were male, and the results were the same as the experiment with the Yale students.
The Milgram Experiment was a test done originally in the 1960s. It involved bringing people in to be a “teacher” and having the “teacher” give a test to another person who is hooked up to a generator. Whenever the “learner” gets a question wrong the “teacher” issues a shock. These shocks go all the way to 450 volts. The point of the experiment was to see how far people would go with the shocks.
He saw that the more personal, or close, the real participant had to be to the fake one, while they were being shocked, affected the obedience as well. He also noticed that if there were two other fake participants teaching that refused to shock their learners that the real participant would not comply. Finally, he tested the experimenter telling the real patient to shock the learner by telephone, instead of actually being there in person, reduced obedience as well (McLead). The Milgram experiment and the Nuremburg trials can relate extensively to explain how the Holocaust happened the way it did.
Stanley Milgram’s All I can say to these experiments is “Wow” to me I saw it as inhumane. The interviews confirmed that an everyday normal person can cause pain and suffering to another. Milgram also noticed that the inclination toward a particular characteristic or type of behavior of the teacher was to devalue or demean the learner, to help to internally justify the teacher’s behavior of continuing to conduct the shocks in which it helped to continue the process of the experiment. The experiment gave an enormous amount of insight into the human behavior and the human obedience.
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. Ethically, a significant critique of the experiment is that the participants actually believed they were administering serious harm to a real person, completely unaware that the learner was in fact acting. Although Milgram argued that the illusion was a necessary part of the experiment to study the participants’ reaction, they were exposed to a highly stressful situation. Many were visibly distraught throughout the duration of the test
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.
This essay will describe Phillip Zimbardo’s conforming to social roles experiment and its contribution to our understanding of human behavior. It will start by talking about how the experiment started and how Phillip Zimbardo chose who became prisoner and who became prison guard it will then go on to discuss how the social roles started and began to change the students morals and ethics when the prisoner was stripped away from their identity and completely controlled and how power took control of the situation it will then lead on to the understanding of human behavior and how this changed the experiment that was supposed to last two weeks end just after six intense days. It will then end with the conclusion as a result of the experiment psychologists
Switches were clearly labelled with voltage 15-450 volts. The teacher was actually naïve subject but Learner was an actor who didn’t even get a single shock. The purpose of this experiment was to see how far Teacher can go in the critical situation when shocks volts rise and Learner’s pain increased. Screaming and pain of the Learner made Teacher hesitating in proceeding far. To get freedom from this situation, Teacher must disobey to the
The "teachers" continued, at the 180 volts mark the "learner" cried out that he cannot take it any longer. Once reaching 300 volts, the fifty-year-old "learner" yelled about his heart condition and begged to be released. At these points, a decent amount of "teachers" halted the experiment while a large percent continued until the final 450 volt question even though the "learner" had stopped responding. At the 150 volt mark those who were going to stop, did so. If I were in this position I would stop at the first sign of discomfort from the "learner."