The Milgram Experiment of Obedience

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Milgram’s experiment of obedience was done in 1961 soon after WW2 and the trials for war crimes against the Nazi’s were being done. An ad was placed in the newspaper for a Memory and Learning Experiment at $4.50 an hour, but the experiment was ultimately on Obedience. The experiment was conducted on behalf of Adolph Eichmann who was convicted of war crimes, and crimes against humanity, but he was only following orders. Eichmann filled out death warrants but never carried out the killings. The objective of the experiment was to find out if people would obey higher authority even though what they were doing was morally wrong. There would be the experimenter who recorded the teacher’s reactions and answered questions of the teacher. The learner, an actor not actually harmed, was supposedly shocked every time he had given a wrong answer and each time he was wrong he would be shocked with more voltage than the one before. The teacher administered questions to the learner along with the shocks for the wrong answer. What the teacher thought he was doing was giving a painful shock, not deadly shock to the learner to test of punishment leads to better memory.

During the experiment very few actually went against authority, even though all shocked the learner at 300W and on. Over 50% went to the full amount of electricity. In fact a prediction from other psychologist suggested that not even 1% of the subjects would follow up to the last switch on the generator. During the experiment, teachers, the actual subjects, became nervous. The teachers began questioning the experimenter, who told them to go on and that he was the one talking all the responsibility of the teachers’ actions. This persuaded many teachers to go on feeling obligated to follow authority even though the teachers knew they were doing something morally wrong. The teachers fidgeted a lot, moved the hands, pulled out cigarettes and looking around, talking fast, etc. which are all signs of nervousness. Despite their nervousness and morality they listened to authority to continue long after the learner was not responding.

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