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Milgram's study of obedience 1961
Milgram's study of obedience 1961
Evaluation of Milgram's Study into Obedience
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The Holocaust was the systematic murder of six million Jews, and five million Roma Gypsies, mentally and physically disabled people, homosexuals and etc. These groups were targeted because the Nazis believed that Germans were the superior race and anyone who didn’t represent their perfect race was seen as a threat and inferior. There were many people responsible for the horrible crimes that occurred during that time, but only a few were tried for their crimes. One of those responsible was Adolf Eichmann, he was charged because he played a major part in the deportation of the Jews from Germany and other parts of Europe to death camps. "Perils of Obedience" a study that psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted to see the lengths people will go to obey authority, even if they're harming another person. (630-643). In "Group Minds" by Doris Lessing, she states people will violate common sense and moral codes in order to be an accepted …show more content…
While he taught his students about Nazi Germany during his “World History" class, Jones found it difficult to explain how the Germans could accept the actions of the Nazis, and decided to create a social movement as a demonstration of the appeal of fascism. Over the five days, Jones conducted exercises in his classroom highlighting discipline and community, to model certain characteristics of the Nazi movement. As the movement grew outside his, Jones felt that the movement had spiraled out of control. He convinced the students to attend a rally where he claimed the announcement of a Third Wave presidential candidate would be televised. Upon their arrival, the students were presented with a blank channel. Jones told his students of the true nature of the movement as an experiment in fascism, and presented to them a short film discussing the actions of Nazi
Which is depicted when the initial harmless goals are lost and new intentions arise unrecognised. In the beginning, Ben Ross, a teacher with good intentions, was just trying to teach his students about why citizens of Germany followed corrupt orders. This later on turned into The Wave, which was a school experiment created by Ben Ross, to give his students a better understanding by giving them "a sampling, a taste of what life in Nazi Germany might have been like" (Todd Strasser, 2005, The Wave, pp. 81-82). The experiment was a success, probably too much of a success, as the students who were a part of it, took it very seriously and unknowingly created a dangerous cult like following throughout their school. This power created by the students easily drove them from their main goal which they started with: equality, to fascism. They become exposed to other desired outcomes which resultantly changed their fundamental goal. This is shown in The Wave, when the original goal of equality is diminished and students who were not a part of The Wave were treated very
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
Activities in the concentration camp struck fear within the hearts of the people who witnessed them, which led to one conclusion, people denied the Holocaust. Nazis showed no mercy to anybody, including helpless babies. “The Nazis were considered men of steel, which means they show no emotion” (Langer 9). S.S. threw babies and small children into a furnace (Wiesel 28). These activities show the heartless personality of the Nazis. The people had two options, either to do what the S.S. told them to do or to die with everyone related to them. A golden rule that the Nazis followed stated if an individual lagged, the people who surrounded him would get in trouble (Langer 5). “Are you crazy? We were told to stand. Do you want us all in trouble?”(Wiesel 38). S.S guards struck fear in their hostages, which means they will obey without questioning what the Nazis told them to do due to their fear of death. Sometimes, S.S. would punish the Jews for their own sin, but would not explain their sin to the other Jews. For example, Idek punished Wiesel f...
Susan Griffin's "Our Secret" is a study in psychology. It is a look into the human mind to see what makes people do the things they do and in particular what makes people commit acts of violence. She isolates the first half of the twentieth century and in particular the era of the Second World War as a basis for her study. The essay discusses a number of people but they all tie in to Heinrich Himmler. He is the extreme case, he who can be linked directly to every single death in the concentration camps. Griffin seeks to examine Himmler because if she can discern a monster like Himmler than everyone else simply falls into place. The essay also tries to deduce why something like the Holocaust, although never mentioned directly, can take place. How can so many people be involved and yet so few people try to end it.
We live in a society where each individual has their own set of thoughts and beliefs. Occasionally one will modify their beliefs and behavior to coincide with a group. This is an example of social influence. Social influence has three main components; conformity, compliance and obedience. The concept of compliance is similar to conformity, however there is a slight difference. Compliance only requires a person to perform a task. The person does not have to agree or disagree with the assignment, just simply complete it. Conformity requires the person being influenced to change their attitudes and or beliefs. An example of this aspect of social psychology is the holocaust in World War II. Adolph Eichmann was a Nazi officer responsible for filling up death camps in Germany. After the war he went on trial in Jerusalem for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. On May 31, 1962, he was sentenced to death for the horrible crimes he committed. His defense was "Why me? Why not the local policemen, thousands of them? They would have been shot if they had refused to round up the Jews for the death camps. Why not hang them for not wanting to be shot? Why me? Everybody killed the Jews". A few months after the start of Eichmann’s trial, Stanley Milgram instituted an experiment testing ones obedience to authority. He wanted to find out if good people could do atrocious things if they were just obeying authority. Was Eichmann and millions of others in Nazi Germany decent people who were just following orders? Some other famous experiments that have taken place to test the waters of social psychology are Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment and Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments, all ...
I discovered that I had no immediate answer to this facetious dismissal of one of history's most profound tragedies. It was a sweeping and indiscriminate assertion, to be sure, but not one entirely without merit. If general stupidity were not to blame, then why had six million Jews endured such torture? Were none of them in a position to unite in any sort of cohesive resistance? What of the Catholics who were murdered in the concentration camps as well? The blacks? Political dissidents? Members of the press? In fact it seems that the Nazis, over the course of their reign, discriminated against so many professions, creeds, philosophies, and classes that for a person not to belong to at least one must have been a remarkable feat of chance. I could not begin to understand how the National Socialist Party had, with such a miserable and offensive political platform, managed to gain power in Germany, nor how, with such cruel and oppressive practices, they managed to keep it.
The holocaust was a catastrophic event that killed millions of innocent people and showed the world how inhuman mankind can be. This dark period in world history demonstrated unmatched violence and cruelty towards the Jewish race that led toward genocide. Genocide did not begin with the Holocaust; nor was it a spontaneous event. Many warning signs within world events helped provide Germany and Adolf Hitler the foundation to carry out increasing levels of human depravity (Mission Statement). These warning signs during the Holocaust include; Anti-Semitism, Hitler Youth, Racial profiling, the Ghettos, Lodz, Crystal Night, Pogroms, and Deportation. However, their exposure comes too late for the world to help prevent the horrors of the Holocaust. For example, Anti-Semitism was never put into reality until the holocaust overcame the attitudes of its’ German Citizens. It also provided the driving force behind the education of the Hitler youth. Hitler’s persuasive characteristics consumed the people into believing all of his beliefs. This is how racial profiling came about; Hitler made it so that the Germans had the mindset that Jews were horrible, filthy, people that did not deserve to live like the Germans or have the same luxuries. As a result, they moved all the Jews into one secluded area away from the German citizens; an area called the Ghettos. One of these Ghettos was the town of Lodz, who kept meticulous historical records of everything that went on in the city. However, it was not a safe for Jews; never feeling at ease not knowing the uncertainties or dangers lying ahead. For instance, in Crystal Night, they did not know that it would be the last night for some of them to be with their families. In general, Jews were just living...
For any organized genocide to take place, there must exist an organized attempt at mass dehumanization. This has been proven repeatedly, in murders, in massacres, and through actions. Through the actions of the Rwandan Army, which committed hundreds of thousands of murders in a matter of months, killing over two thirds of the Tutsi people. Through the disparaging, imperialistic beliefs held for hundreds of years under the mantra of ¨The White Man's Burden¨. Through the Nazi soldiers who, although ultimately failing in their state-sponsored pogrom against the Jewish people, are responsible for the extermination of over six million men, women, and children. Dehumanization, agreed upon by historians and sociologists alike as a vital component of war and genocide, consists of destroying a person's perception of two features: Identity and Community. This process, so mercilessly and stringently carried out by the SS, and so tragically experienced by the Jewish people left such an impact on Elie Wiesel that he could not bear to recount his struggle without distancing himself from his memories through a transformation into Eliezer.
Mein Kampf was Adolf Hitler’s life story and his ideals about the world. The first nine chapters of the book explain how he got into his current predicament. Then he goes into great detail on why he dislikes the Jews and why all Germans should dislike the Jews as well. Hitler writes about the Jewish press and how they influence the society:
This is clearly evident towards the victims of the Holocaust, whereby the ultra-nationalist mentality of the Nazi Party established a culture of immense violence against the targeted population. A major characteristic of modernisation was ethnic targeting and an underlying racial dimension which motivated perpetrators to commit wholesale massacres. A number of violent policies stemming from the notion of ethnic cleansing became conducive to repression, murder and ultimately genocide. The scope of twentieth century violence can be explained by modernity’s defining features such as the combined force of new technologies of warfare and administrative techniques that “categorised people along strict lines of nation and race”. Genocides stem from long-term obsession on the part of the perpetrators with the emphasis on religious or cultural differences of the victim group. Nationalism provided society with an opportunity to systematically categorise society based on ethnicity and race. This was certainly a modern phenomenon and was conducive in spreading violence and ultimately genocide. A defining feature of the twentieth century, and more specifically the Holocaust is the perpetrators ability to totally disregard the identity of its victims. Fear and “ubiquity of perpetrators and victims” are considered at the core of modern genocide that “encompasses society in a vicious cycle of devastation and murder”. The premeditated plan of the Nazi Regime is outlined in its ability to merely transform society’s perception of the victims into repulsive figures that threaten the prosperity of the nation. This became an effective technique that rendered mass support among the citizens of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s vision of the Final Solution was to create a Judenfrei Europe as Judaism was considered “a mortal, universal
In conclusion, the Holocaust was a time in history that was brutal, sickening, and ruthless. The Holocaust refers to, “The systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators” (ushmm.org). When Adolf Hitler came to power, he established the first concentration camp in Germany. Concentration camps were built to hold prisoners but not in a nice, friendly way. Concentration camps were developed to be brutal, unhappy, grimy places. Millions and millions of people in the 1930’s and on died in these horrific camps.
Ordinary men have the capacity to commit extraordinary crimes and on April 11, 1961, Adolf Eichmann an ordinary looking man faced trial for the murder of five million Jews. Adolf Eichmann served in the Nazi party as their expert on Jewish matters. During the Nuremberg trials that took place years before Eichmann’s trial, many witnesses testified to the control Eichmann had over the implementation of the final solution. SS Captain Wisliceny worked under Eichmann in Hungary in 1944 and he proclaimed that Eichmann said, “he would jump into his grave laughing, because of the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience, gave him extraordinary satisfaction’” (48). Also, Eichmann worked with the members of Jewish councils, and they claimed in earlier trials that he had a direct hand in the “Jewish Question” (49). With a heavy list of witness accounts and facts to proof that Eichmann committed the crimes, he did not face his day in court till many years later and that appeared to be fine with most
The person who assumes responsibility has evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society” (77). It was shown in the Obedience experiment, we see time and again that the dissipation of responsibility can lead any average human being to perform tasks that they themselves consider immoral and unethical. So long as we are told that the responsibility of the harm that we are causing will fall on someone else’s shoulders, humans as a whole are capable of unimaginable damage much like Police Battalion 101 and the hooligans of Jedwabne. The institution of authority imposed during the Stanford Prison experiment is similar to the institution of anti-semitism that was preached and instituted in Polish towns like Jedwabne where the Jews were used as a source of blame. While many members of the Police Battalion preached that they were simply following orders, other members, and the Polish hooligans of Jedwabne were up to something far more sinister, and it is truly startling to see the barbarity that humans can have towards other humans in times of crisis when they are told that the responsibility for those lives doesn’t fall on
In the pursuit of safety, acceptance, and the public good, many atrocities have been committed in places such as Abu Ghraib and My Lai, where simple, generally harmless people became the wiling torturers and murderers of innocent people. Many claim to have just been following orders, which illustrates a disturbing trend in both the modern military and modern societies as a whole; when forced into an obedient mindset, many normal and everyday people can become tools of destruction and sorrow, uncaringly inflicting pain and death upon the innocent.
Individuals often yield to conformity when they are forced to discard their individual freedom in order to benefit the larger group. Despite the fact that it is important to obey the authority, obeying the authority can sometimes be hazardous especially when morals and autonomous thought are suppressed to an extent that the other person is harmed. Obedience usually involves doing what a rule or a person tells you to but negative consequences can result from displaying obedience to authority for example; the people who obeyed the orders of Adolph Hitler ended up killing innocent people during the Holocaust. In the same way, Stanley Milgram noted in his article ‘Perils of Obedience’ of how individuals obeyed authority and neglected their conscience reflecting how this can be destructive in experiences of real life. On the contrary, Diana Baumrind pointed out in her article ‘Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience’ that the experiments were not valid hence useless.