Evaluation of Milgram's Obedience Study
Stanley Milgram was from a Jewish background and conducted the
experiment to see how people can obey to an apparent authority figure
e.g. Germans in World War II. He advertised for participants in a
newspaper offering payment of $4.50. Volunteers were told that the
experiment was looking at the effects of punishment on learning. The
participant played the role of the ‘teacher’ and the ‘learner’ was a
stooge, Mr Wallace. The teacher would ask the learner questions, when
answered incorrectly they administered electric shocks of increasing
voltage up to 450V. When the teacher began to worry the experimenter
would use several prompts to encourage their continuation. 65% of the
participants continued up to 450V, no one stopped before 300V. The
results were much higher than anyone had expected. However Milgram’s
work has been highly criticised on ethical and methodological grounds
and is highly controversial due to the stress caused to the
participants.
Milgram’s main critic on Ethical grounds is Diane Baumrind. She
criticised Milgram on 5 ethical issues; informed consent, deception,
the right to withdraw, protection of the participant and debriefing.
The British Psychological Society (BPS) guidelines state that
participants should be given all the information they need to make an
informed decision on whether or not to take part in the experiment.
Baumrind believed that due to the nature of the experiment there was
no opportunity for the participants to be fully informed about the
experiment. Therefore they could not give their informed consent.
Milgram responded to this argument by saying tha...
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... in which they believe the experimenter
wants them to. Milgram suggested that the participants acted the way
they did because they were acting as an agent for the experimenter,
removing responsibility. This meant that the participants believed
they would not be responsible if the learner was harmed. In Hofling et
al’s experiment nurses were given orders by an unknown doctor by
telephone to administer a high dosage of medication to a patient,
without the necessary paperwork. 21 out of 22 obeyed the doctor’s
command. This was a field experiment and showed high ecological
validity. The nurses were not aware that they were in an experiment
and therefore could not have shown demand characteristics, and the
obedience rate was still extremely high.
Milgram’s experiment is also criticised under grounds of
generalisation.
The study was set up as a "blind experiment" to capture if and when a person will stop inflicting pain on another as they are explicitly commanded to continue. The participants of this experiment included two willing individuals: a teacher and a learner. The teacher being the real subject and the learner is merely an actor. Both were told that they would be involved in a study that tests the effects of punishment on learning. The learner was strapped into a chair that resembles a miniature electric chair, and was told he would have to learn a small list of word pairs. For each incorrect answer he would be given electric shocks of increasing intensity ranging from 15 to 450 volts. The experimenter informed the teacher's job was to administer the shocks. The...
The learner is actually an actor who is strapped to a harmless electric chair. He is told several pairs of words, and must remember and repeat these pairings with the make-believe fear of being electrocuted for incorrect answers. The foretold outcome or this experiment was expressed by several people who are familiar with behavioral sciences. They predicted that the majority of subjects would not pass 150 volts, and that a few crazed lunatics would reach the maximum voltage.
“Ethical Issues of the Milgram Experiment.” Associated Content. Yahoo, 8 November 2008. Web. 12 October 2011.
A former Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram, administered an experiment to test the obedience of "ordinary" people as explained in his article, "The Perils of Obedience". An unexpected outcome came from this experiment by watching the teacher administer shocks to the learner for not remembering sets of words. By executing greater shocks for every wrong answer created tremendous stress and a low comfort levels within the "teacher", the one being observed unknowingly, uncomfortable and feel the need to stop. However, with Milgram having the experimenter insisting that they must continue for the experiments purpose, many continued to shock the learner with much higher voltages.The participants were unaware of many objects of the experiment until
The learners were a part of Milgram’s study and were taken into a room with electrodes attached to their arms. The teachers were to ask questions to the learners and if they answered incorrectly, they were to receive a 15-450 voltage electrical shock. Although the learners were not actually shocked, the teachers believed they were inflicting real harm on these innocent people.... ... middle of paper ...
Regression is a defense mechanism resulting in an individual returning to a childlike state to cope with unpleasant thoughts or stress. Regression occurs when an individual faces a particularly stressful or tense situation, and instead of handling said scenario in a mature and adult manner, an immature, childlike technique is employed to handle the anxiety. While a psychoanalytic analysis is more difficult given the subconscious nature of the tensions and resulting anxiety, there are several scenes through the movie that indicate Clark Griswold regresses to handle unpleasant and anxiety-inducing situations. In one example, Clark has been stringing lights on his house for hours, and upon attempting to light them comes to find that none of
In a series of experiments conducted from 1960 to 1963, American psychologist Stanley Milgram, sought to examine the relationship between obedience and authority in order to understand how Nazi doctors were able to carry out experiments on prisoners during WWII. While there are several theories about Milgram’s results, philosopher Ruwen Ogien uses the experiment as grounds for criticizing virtue ethics as a moral theory. In chapter 9 of Human Kindness and The Smell of Warm Croissant, Ogien claims that “what determines behavior is not character but other factors tied to situation” (Ogien 120). The purpose of this essay is not to interpret the results of the Milgram experiments. Instead this essay serves to argue why I am not persuaded by Ogien’s
However, all of the participants continued to administer up to three-hundred volts. These were everyday “normal” people that functioned successfully in society. Slater had the opportunity to interview one of the participants of Milgram’s experiment, one which happened to follow through with the shocks all the way to the very last one. During the interview the participant stated, “You thought you were really giving shocks, and nothing can take away from you the knowledge of how you acted” (Slater, 59). These words came from the mouth of an “average joe” that never knew what he was capable of before the experiment. With these words, we are reminded that we are not as “nice” as we’d like to think we
In finding that people are not naturally aggressive. Milgram now alters the experiment to find out why do people act the way they do. He compiled the experiment to answer, why do people obey authority, even when the actions are against their own morals.
At first Milgram believed that the idea of obedience under Hitler during the Third Reich was appalling. He was not satisfied believing that all humans were like this. Instead, he sought to prove that the obedience was in the German gene pool, not the human one. To test this, Milgram staged an artificial laboratory "dungeon" in which ordinary citizens, whom he hired at $4.50 for the experiment, would come down and be required to deliver an electric shock of increasing intensity to another individual for failing to answer a preset list of questions. Meyer describes the object of the experiment "is to find the shock level at which you disobey the experimenter and refuse to pull the switch" (Meyer 241). Here, the author is paving the way into your mind by introducing the idea of reluctance and doubt within the reader. By this point in the essay, one is probably thinking to themselves, "Not me. I wouldn't pull the switch even once." In actuality, the results of the experiment contradict this forerunning belief.
Obedience is when you do something you have been asked or ordered to do by someone in authority. As little kids we are taught to follow the rules of authority, weather it is a positive or negative effect. Stanley Milgram, the author of “The perils of Obedience” writes his experiment about how people follow the direction of an authority figure, and how it could be a threat. On the other hand Diana Baumrind article “Review of Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience,” is about how Milgram’s experiment was inhumane and how it is not valid. While both authors address how people obey an authority figure, Milgram focuses more on how his experiment was successful while Baumrind seems more concerned more with how Milgram’s experiment was flawed and
Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience are the focus of Theodore Dalrymple and Ian Parker. Theodore Dalrymple is a British physician that composed his views of the Milgram experiment with “Just Do What the Pilot Tells You” in the New Statesman in July 1999 (254). He distinguishes between blind obedience and blind disobedience stating that an extreme of either is not good, and that a healthy balance between the two is needed. On the other hand, Ian Parker is a British writer who wrote “Obedience” for an issue of Granta in the fall of 2000. He discusses the location of the experiment as a major factor and how the experiment progresses to prevent more outcomes. Dalrymple uses real-life events to convey his argument while Parker exemplifies logic from professors to state his point.
In 1961, Stanley Milgram, a Yale University Psychologist conducted a variety of social psychology experiments on obedience to authority figures. His experiments involved three individuals, one of them was a volunteer who played the role of the teacher, one was an actor who played the role of the student, and one was the experimenter who played the role of the authority. The teacher was instructed by the authority to administrate shocks to the student (who claimed to have a heart condition) whenever they answered a question incorrectly. The voltage of the shock would go up after every wrong answer. The experimenter would then instruct the teacher to administrate higher voltages even though pain was being imposed. The teacher would then have to make a choice between his morals and values or the choice of the authority figure. The point of the experiment was to try to comprehend just how far an individual would continue when being ordered by an individual in a trench coat to electrically shock another human being for getting questions incorrect. The experiment consisted of administrating pain to different people and proved that ordinary people will obey people with authority. Some of the various reasons are that the experimenter was wearing a trench coat, fear of the consequences for not cooperating, the experiments were conducted in Yale University a place of prestige, and the authority f...
He believes the scientific advancements from Milgram’s experiment outweigh the temporary emotional harm to the volunteers of Milgram’s experiment. Also Herrnstein points out that Milgram’s experiment was created to show how easily humans are deceived and manipulated even when they do not realize the pain they are causing. We live in a society and culture where disobedience is more popular than obedience; however, he believed the experiment was very important and more experiments should be done like it, to gain more useful information. The experiment simply would not have been successful if they subjects knew what was actually going to happen, Herrnstein claims. He believes the subject had to be manipulated for the experiment to be successful. “A small temporary loss of a few peoples privacy seems a bearable price for a large reduction in
Obedience is a widely debated topic today with many different standpoints from various brilliant psychologists. Studying obedience is still important today to attempt to understand why atrocities like the Holocaust or the My Lai Massacre happened so society can learn from them and not repeat history. There are many factors that contribute to obedience including situation and authority. The film A Few Good Men, through a military court case, shows how anyone can fall under the influence of authority and become completely obedient to conform to the roles that they have been assigned. A Few Good Men demonstrates how authority figures can control others and influence them into persuading them to perform a task considered immoral or unethical.