Zimbardo Vs. Milgram's Experiments

This experiment fits into Kidder’s ethical dilemma paradigms of short-term vs long-term. In fact, Zimbardo choose the long term effects of his experiment over the short term effects of it. The Stanford prison experiment had a short-term effect on the university students that could not bear the prison life for long and the prison was ended after 6 days only. The long hours of imprisonment revealed that the students had become depressed while the guards had already become cruel at their maximum. The prisoners were humiliated and embarrassed by the guards. The guards were cruel and even made the prisoners do menial tasks. The prisoners also broke and could no longer control their emotions, some prisoners also went into depression. For example, one prisoner had to be released after 36 hours because of uncontrollable bursts of screaming, crying and anger. But, the experiment had long term effects that Zimbardo thought to be superior to the short-term effects, hence he decided to continue the experiment. Zimbardo chose to get the long-term effects instead of worrying about the short-term effects. The long-term effects of the Stanford Prison Guard experiment are that it has showed that social roles are a dominant strength in human nature. The guards and prisoners lived as though they were actually guards and prisoners.

At Yale University, Stanley Milgram a psychologist carried out the most famous study of obedience in psychology. The experiment was focused on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal ethics. In 1963, Milgram was interested in researching how far a person would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. Milgram was interested to see how an individual could be influenced by committing murders, for instance the Germans in World War II. Milgram wanted to investigate whether Germans were obedient to their superiors as that was the common explanation for assassinations in the Nazi in World War II. At Yale University, Milgram selected participants by placing an announcement that was printed in the newspaper highlighting the male participants to take part in the study of learning.

As this report has highlighted the research is not without controversy with many questioning to what extent Milgram’s experiment is true to real life and has been criticized for not highlighting further situational variables in determining obedience to authority.

The Monitor on Psychology article “What makes good people do bad things?” by Melissa Dittmann analyzes the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Stanford psychology professor Phillip Zimbardo in 1971 and discusses what the experiment can tell us about human nature and what causes humans to be evil. In the novel “Lord of the Flies” the author William Golding discusses the effects of the theories mentioned in the article by creating his own fictional experiment with children stranded on an island during a nuclear war. Throughout his novel Golding explores the focus of Dittmann’s article; that environments and situations can bring out the evil that is inside all of us. People can act good or bad depending on their environment, and these actions are not entirely their fault because when people are not held accountable for their actions their more violent natures are revealed.

This experiment was conducted in Stanford University by Dr. Zimbardo. During this two week long session, Dr. Zimbardo had several volunteers agree to act as prisoners and as prison guards. The prisoners were told to wait in their houses while the guards were to set up the mock prison, a tactic used by Dr. Zimbardo to make them fit into their roles more. The official police apprehended the students assigned to the role of prisoner from their homes, took mug shots, fingerprinted them, and gave them dirty prison uniforms. The guards were given clean guard uniforms, sunglasses, and billy clubs borrowed from the police. The guards were instructed to maintain order anyway they wanted without using physical violence. Zimbardo wanted the guards to seem intimidating while the prisoners were made to look inferior and were to be referred to with their ID number only. After the prisoners were assigned their roles and the guards took their post was the effect of the experiment finally setting in. On the morning of the second day the prisoners began to rebel against the guards by ripping off their ID numbers and barring the doors while taunting the guards. This event was the first step down the slippery slope that would follow. The guards took matters into their own hands and drove the prisoners out of their cells. The guards began to take on cruel and sadistic behaviors by humiliating the prisoners with menial tasks such as cleaning their latrines with their bare hands. After the sixth day the experiment was terminated because it was immoral to the prisoner group, of which lost three members due to mental breakdowns. It was concluded that many people tend to fit into social norms and don’t consider personal responsibility even for acts that are

In Stanley Milgram’s “The perils of obedience” and Philip G. Zimbardo's “The Stanford Prison Experiment” the influence that authority holds is analyzed and tested in a variety of social experiments. Milgram asserts that any individual can excuse themselves from the responsibility of their role, regardless of how evil, on the grounds that there is someone ordering them to do so. However, Zimbardo claims that authority doesn’t have to be an individual, stating that anyone, be it a prison guard or a prisoner, will ultimately fill and perpetuate their assigned role as a result of authoritative factors and environments. However, the way in which both of the authors go to reaching these conclusions differs greatly.

Anyway, this research will focus only on three aspects - conscience crisis, violence, and fate and destiny. These aspects will be discussed in three separate chapters under the umbrella of the selected novels of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men(1937) , The Grapes of Wrath(1939) , and The Pearl (1947) and Cormac McCarthy ’s Blood Meridian (1985) , No country for old men( 2005) , and The Road (2006) . The investigator has adopted the sociological methodology throughout the thesis. Furthermore , the second chapter - conscience crisis, will be divided into two parts ( man’s inhumanity to man and greed ).

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.

How does an ordinary group of people turn into bloodless killers? The author of Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning offers the most captivating argument towards how it is possible for ordinary men to commit extraordinary atrocities. This paper will analyze the different viewpoints of what caused ordinary men to commit murder.

Stanley Milgram’s electroshock study presents another possible explanation for the men’s behavior: following orders and obeying authority are ingrained within most individuals. If an individual in an authority position orders some to complete a task, it is difficult not to comply, especially when all or most your peers take part. Social factors strongly impact many aspects of a person’s behavior and affected the men’s decisions to murder the

The Stanford Prison Experiment reveals the powerful role that the situation can play in human behavior. After the experiment, the students who played the guards were interviewed and found to still be shocked by their behavior within the fake prison environment, unrecognising that side of them or that they were even capable of doing such evil and abusive

By providing the officers with almost unlimited authority to establish their own rules and do what they desired, except for being physically aggressive with the prisoners, the guards felt entitled to their power and believed that none of the participants, especially the prisoners, could intervene with their new status. Not only did the uniform and rules allow the officers to genuinely believe the high authority and influence they had, but the prisoners as well. By providing the guards with a similar uniform as an officer including a whistle, a club, and sunglasses, it allowed both groups to match their descriptions of their representative heuristics, or the idea of categorizing an individual based on our mental representations of that group, permitting both groups of participants to fulfill their roles more correspondingly. If the officers had not been provided with this drastic change of mannerism, it would have been harder for both groups to take the experiment as seriously. Additionally, cohesiveness allowed the officers to come together and form a larger force compared to working independently. In union, the officers were able to achieve their goal: demand obedience from the prisoners and further the power they had over them. This effect even caused a misperception of numerous officer’s height as many of the prisoners perceived them as being taller than them even though they were very similar in height. This mistaken perspective showed the prisoners illusory correlation, the idea that a relationship between two variables exist when in reality there is none, as the prisoners correlated two items that cannot be associated accurately: height and personality. In other words, the prisoners believed because the officers were more aggressive and a had a

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.

Over the years, scientists, psychologists, and doctors have used social experiments to further their understanding of our surroundings. Social experiments are studies of the human mind and psyche through various environments. In this case, a social experiment called the Stanford Prison Experiment is what opened new doors for the comprehension of human behavior, how we act when we are in power, as well as offered a glimpse into the flaws in our legal system. This experiment was conducted in 1971 in Palo Alto, California. As stated in the name of the actual experiment, it was a simulation of how it was like to be imprisoned. The participants were 24 college students. The