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. Stanley Milgram selected 40 college participants aged 20-50 to take part in the experiment at Yale University. Milgram says, “The point of the experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measureable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim” (632). Although the 40 men or women thought that they were in a drawing to see who would be the “teacher” and the “learner,” the drawing was fixed. The learners were a part of Milgram’s study and 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 being shocked, the teachers believed t... ... middle of paper ... ...ect orders and continued shocking the learners to the very highest voltage. Stanley Milgram’s experiment shows societies that more people with abide by the rules of an authority figure under any circumstances rather than follow their own nature instinct. With the use of his well-organized article that appeals to the general public, direct quotes and real world example, Milgram’s idea is very well-supported. The results of the experiment were in Milgram’s favor and show that people are obedient to authority figures. Stanley Milgram shows the reader how big of an impact authority figures have but fails to answer the bigger question. Which is more important, obedience or morality? Works Cited Milgram, Stanley. “The Perils of Obedience.” Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Eds. Laurence Behrens and Leonard J. Rosen. Boston: Longman, 2011. 692-704.
Milgram believed that obedience was as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to (Milgram, Perils, p. 1). This is a significant factor in why people are generally reluctant to question authority. In 1974, Milgram set up an experiment at Yale University to test how much pain a person might inflict on another person simply because they were ordered to do so. The basic design of the exp...
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. 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 is the real subject and the learner is merely an actor.
In this article “The Pearls of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram asserts that obedience to authority is a common response for many people in today’s society, often diminishing an individuals beliefs or ideals. Stanley Milgram designs an experiment to understand how strong a person’s tendency to obey authority is, even though it is amoral or destructive. Stanley Milgram bases his experiment on three people: a learner, teacher, and experimenter. The experimenter is simply an overseer of the experiment, and is concerned with the outcome of punishing the learner. The teacher, who is the subject of the experiment, is made to believe the electrical shocks are real; he is responsible for obeying the experimenter and punishing the learner for incorrect answers by electrocuting him from an electric shock panel that increases from 15 to 450 volts.
Stanley Milgram, author of "The Perils of Obedience," conducted an experiment at Yale University to see if average citizens would partake in a study revolving around obedience to authority (Milgram 78). In said experiment, a professor from Yale would give an ordinary individual the authority to shock another person. If the ordinary individual asked to stop, the professor would coax them to continue and remind them they hold no responsibility (78). Not only did Milgram 's study revolve around obedience to authority, it also stressed the point of every person could be capable of torture and doing so without feeling responsible. In the article, "The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism," author Marianne Szegedy-Maszak states, anyone can
Upon analyzing his experiment, Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, concludes that people will drive to great lengths to obey orders given by a higher authority. The experiment, which included ordinary people delivering “shocks” to an unknown subject, has raised many questions in the psychological world. Diana Baumrind, a psychologist at the University of California and one of Milgram’s colleagues, attacks Milgram’s ethics after he completes his experiment in her review. She deems Milgram as being unethical towards the subjects he uses for testing and claims that his experiment is irrelevant to obedience. In contrast, Ian Parker, a writer for New Yorker and Human Sciences, asserts Milgram’s experiments hold validity in the psychological world. While Baumrind focuses on Milgram’s ethics, Parker concentrates more on the reactions, both immediate and long-term, to his experiments.
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
In 1961, professor Stanley Milgram conducted the infamous Milgram Experiment, in which he measured the willingness of participants, or “teachers,” to shock a “tester” with increasingly high (and eventually lethal) voltages of electric current. Nearly forty-five years later, the experiment was replicated in the hopes that results would change….but out of the eighteen men and twenty-two women who tested, over 70% of participants administered the highest shock. The experiment reveals a disturbing truth: human beings tend to blindly follow the command of authority figures. But does this mean anybody would proceed to killing another human being at the beckoning of a scientist? Or could a follower of a certain ethical theory be immune to such a
(Hart) Stanley Milgram’s experiment in the way people respond to obedience is one of the most important experiments ever administered. The goal of Milgram’s experiment was to find the desire of the participants to shock a learner in a controlled situation. When the volunteer would be ordered to shock the wrong answers of the victims, Milgram was truly judging and studying how people respond to authority. Milgram discovered something both troubling and awe inspiring about the human race. “Since they were first published in 1963, MIlgram’s sensational findings have been offered as an explanation for mass genocide during the Holocaust and events such as the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam and the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison”(Perry 223-224). The way Milgram was able to control the experiment shows how the human race can crack under pressure and obey orders, no matter the consequence. Although, not everything was as it seems when it came to the results of the findings. As Milgram used actors to portray the “victims” in the experiment, so no one was truly being tortured. Milgram wanted to show that pressure can get to anyone, in any situation.
In school, many teachers or instructors might influence their student by knowing their level of obedience. Some of them might use punishment if the students didn’t follow a certain instruction or disobey the rule. On the article The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram, the experiment has huge confusion if it is successful by punishing other people with electric shock if they got wrong or disobey an instruction. If you were the student in this experiment, do you think you would face harm? Although Milgram’s experiment was unethical, his studies brought attention to human behavior that is both interesting and terrifying.
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
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.
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
Over the years the question of absolute power and morality have been discussed in many articles. In the article "The Perils of Obedience" Stanley Milgram shares his experimental study where he sets out to prove that ordinary people perform unjust tasks to the public eye. Milgram reveals the negative side of blindly obeying (Milgram 77). The people in the experiment are told to say different words, and the learner has to memorize and repeat them. If the learner fails to recite the words correctly, the subjects deliver a level of shock. The learner is secretly an actor but pretends to be in pain. The subjects continue to follow the authority even when they have the chance for the experiment to end. The question of blind obedience and absolute
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...
Summary of the Experiment 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 increased. Similar procedure was undertaken on the teacher and the results of the experiments showed conclusively that a large number of people would go against their personal conscience in obedience to authority (Milgram 848).... ...