Experiment: A Comparison Of The Milgram Experiment

The infamous Milgram experiment is one of the few experiments throughout the psychological community well known for being both extremely unethical and absolutely necessary. This well crafted experiment answered one basic question that in some ways spans across ethnic groups, class, gender, and ages: How could one person or group of people harm another person or group of people? It seems to be out of human nature, but from the aggression expressed from children fighting over a toy to the bitter hatred displayed by Nazi Germany towards several groups of people, humans harm other humans. This fact draws the retort that societies would devolve into neanderthals if human beings were mindlessly aggressive towards one another; there is an obvious

The most significant difference is that while the Milgram experiment was setup as an experiment, the Zimbardo experiment was setup as a prison. This one addition creates a perfect segue from simple experiment with shocking results to the potential life events for some unfortunate individuals. The absence of an authority figure strictly acting in the best interest of the guards as well as the inmates, within reason, in a brutal prison where guards often are not screened for any signs of anger or temper problems can cause the guards to fulfill the relentlessly brutal role demonstrated in Zimbardo’s experiment perhaps to even greater extremes due to the fact that there would not necessarily be cameras documenting every moment of damning evidence (Haslam, 2014). Prisons, American prisons specifically, are already psychological anomalies when one thinks about the close quarters of dangerous criminals, the entrapped innocent with nothing more to lose being degraded like rapists and serial killers, and countless other obstacles that most people choose to overlook; these prisons do not need unbalanced, hyper-aggressive guards, for lack of a better word, playing God with the prisoners as subjects. Even this example leads people to the notion that humans are just animals will a natural savage

Authority is a powerful force, and it can and has lead to deaths in history and in the current day. From the Trail of Tears to the much more infamous Holocaust, all instances of mass deaths and genocides have had a face or group in a place of authority. For a broad example, the events of the Holocaust were horrendous, and they were all orchestrated by Adolf Hitler. In the Milgram experiment, he made sure that the subject and confederate had a sensory separation and connection, the wall hindering vision of the confederate and the auditory screaming respectively, but the connection was for the sake of the tests being run; Hitler made his minions harm and kill people, but one of his most well known methods for killing in mass was a gas chamber, a room that could kill without a soldier being anywhere near it to be swayed by the sight or the sounds accompanied with a genocide. Once the senses are taken out of a murder, even in mass, it becomes more difficult to make the most basic empathetic connection that stops most humans from killing in general while also making it much easier for the person/people in charge to make groups of normal, rational people elect to such a simple procedure