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How far would you go to be obedient? At Yale University, Stanley Milgram set up an experiment testing how much pain a person would cause to an ordinary citizen, only with the reason of being told to do so by an experimental scientist. The subject is told that they are helping with an experiment on punishment-based learning and believe they are conducting this test on someone other than themself. What the subjects do not know is that the true experiment is testing them, not another person. The subjects send an increasing amount of pain to another person. If the subject wishes to discontinue, he must complete the experiment or clearly resist authority. What Milgram found in this study was that adults would go to severe lengths to obey their authority’s commands.
This experiment is ultimately testing the adult obedience to authority. Only a select few are defiant towards authority because obedience is required for all life. For this test, the subject is told there will be one “teacher,” the one giving the punishment, and one “learner,” the one receiving the punishment. The subject thin...
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
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
If a person of authority ordered you inflict a 15 to 400 volt electrical shock on another innocent human being, would you follow your direct orders? That is the question that Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University tested in the 1960’s. Most people would answer “no,” to imposing pain on innocent human beings but Milgram wanted to go further with his study. Writing and Reading across the Curriculum holds a shortened edition of Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” where he displays an eye-opening experiment that tests the true obedience of people under authority figures. He observes that most people go against their natural instinct to never harm innocent humans and obey the extreme and dangerous instructions of authority figures. Milgram is well aware of his audience and organization throughout his article, uses quotes directly from his experiment and connects his research with a real world example to make his article as effective as possible.
“The Perils of Obedience” was written by Stanley Milgram in 1974. In the essay he describes his experiments on obedience to authority. I feel as though this is a great psychology essay and will be used in psychology 101 classes for generations to come. The essay describes how people are willing to do almost anything that they are told no matter how immoral the action is or how much pain it may cause.
“Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments of Obedience” was written by Diane Baumrind. Baumrind is a psychologist at the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkley. Throughout her article, Baumrind attacks multiple aspects of Milgram’s experiment. She immediately states that the location of the experiment played a factor in the produced results (Baumrind 225). She continues in saying the lack of emotion and concern from the teacher caused heavy stress on the subjects. Baumrind also calls into question the supposed attempts of Milgram to allow the subjects to leave in a clear, whole state of mind (Baumrind 227). The affects the experiment would have on the subjects afterwards is also a point of concern for Baumrind. Lastly, Baumrind pleads for the subjects to be fully informed of the experiment they would be partaking in (Baumrind 229). However, Baumrind is not the only author who reviews the experiment. Ian Parker, “Obedience”, writes about the consequences Milgram himself experienced after the results of hi...
Obedience to authority and willingness to obey an authority against one’s morals has been a topic of debate for decades. Stanley Milgrim, a Yale psychologist, conducted a study in which his subjects were commanded by a person in authority to initiate lethal shocks to a learner; his experiment is discussed in detail in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgrim 77). Milgrim’s studies are said to be the most “influential and controversial studies of modern psychology” (Levine).While the leaner did not actually receive fatal shocks, an actor pretended to be in extreme pain, and 60 percent of the subjects were fully obedient, despite evidence displaying they believed what they were doing was harming another human being (Milgrim 80). Likewise, in Dr. Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, conducted an experiment, explained in his article “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” in which ten guards were required to keep the prisoners from
The experiment was to see if people would follow the orders of an authority figure, even if the orders that were given proved to cause pain to the person taking the test. In the “Milgram Experiment” by Saul McLeod, he goes into detail about six variations that changed the percentage of obedience from the test subject, for example, one variable was that the experiment was moved to set of run down offices rather than at Yale University. Variables like these changed the results dramatically. In four of these variations, the obedience percentage was under 50 percent (588). This is great evidence that it is the situation that changes the actions of the individual, not he or she’s morals.
In "The Perils of Obedience," Stanley Milgram conducted a study that tests the conflict between obedience to authority and one's own conscience. Through the experiments, Milgram discovered that the majority of people would go against their own decisions of right and wrong to appease the requests of an authority figure.
Most people would like to think that they would never do anything to intentionally hurt another human being. However history has shown that human nature does not always prevail with the best outcomes. The following experiments and real life events all reflect that human beings succumb to obedience even when common sense tells them that what they are doing is wrong. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment, Milgram’s electric shock study, and the scandal surrounding Abu Ghraib are reflections on the outcome of obeying a command regardless of the results and why someone would do so.
In the early 1960’s Stanley Milgram (1963) performed an experiment titled Behavioral Study of Obedience to measure compliance levels of test subjects prompted to administer punishment to learners. The experiment had surprising results.
In Milgram’s article, he discusses the basic principle of obedience and the necessity of such behavior in the structure of society and all social life. For many people, obedience is a deeply engraved behavior pattern, and very well a strong impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct (Milgram 579). Milgram set up an experiment at Yale University to see how much pain one would inflict on another simply because of being commanded to do so. Authority won more than not.
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...
In Stanley Milgram’s ‘The Perils of Obedience’, Milgram conducted experiments with the objective of knowing “how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist" (Milgram 317). In the experiments, two participants would go into a warehouse where the experiments were being conducted and inside the warehouse, the subjects would be marked as either a teacher or a learner. A learner would be hooked up to a kind of electric chair and would be expected to do as he is being told by the teacher and do it right because; whenever the learner said the wrong word, the intensity of the electric shocks were increased. Similar procedure was undertaken on t...
In the 1960’s the Milgram obedience experiment tested whether a person would obey an order from authority even if there were deadly consequences. If a person gave a wrong answer, or didn’t give an answer then the participant would have to give the other an electric shock. The electric current could be set off at a deadly electricity level if they had given a wrong answer too many times. It may seem as if the participants would object to such an act but “65% of the participants in Milgram’s study delivered the maximum shocks” (Cherry, pg. 2). This shows that people have been reinforced from a young age to obey orders from authority even if there are horrible consequences to such actions. Adolph “Eichmann’s defense that he was merely following instructions when he ordered the deaths of millions of Jews” (Cherry, pg. 1). He
The general goal of the experiment was to see how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict another person just because he or she was ordered to do so by an experimental scientist. In his article, "The Perils of Obedeince", Milgram concluded his analysis of the experiment by saying "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority," (Milgram, 1974, p76). Milgram summarized that obedience is a basic behavior element in social life that is deeply ingrained that it override people from acting according to the ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct (Milgram, 1973, p62). The way obedience is set in the modern society leads to the loss of personal responsibility from ordinary citizens. In the society, people are taught to behave legally and morally. However, Milgram argued that learning ethics does not necessarily determine what people will actually do in their real-life situations (Milgram, 1973, p76). To check the experiment 's accuracy, similar experiments were held in different countries such as South Africa,