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Morality theory research paper
Essay on moral behavior
Stanley milgram experiment analysis
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The Obedience to Authority: Milgram Experiment Starting in 1961, Stanley Milgram, a professor of psychology at Yale University began conducting one of the most “infamous” psychology experiments in history. The tests are “infamous” because of not only the results they revealed, but also because the manner in which the tests were performed is considered unethical by today’s standards of testing. The experiment, which was mentioned in the New Haven Register newspaper as a “scientific study of memory and learning,” was actually an effort to investigate obedience to authority. In order to attract participants Milgram offered $4 for one hour of a person’s time. In the ensuing two years, hundreds of people would be a part of the experiment at Milgram’s …show more content…
Mr. Milgram wanted to see how long a person would inflict pain on another person simply because they were told to do so. The results of his experiment are still applied to this day when explaining why people are so willing to follow the instructions of authority, no matter how inhumane, malicious, and egregious the instructions may be (Romm, 2015). The experiment had three main roles: The “proctor,” the “teacher,” and the “learner.” In every experiment the proctor was played by an actor, not Milgram himself. The teacher was the participant, who would be administering shocks to the learner for each wrong answer. In every experiment the learner was a confederate man, Mr. Wallace, acting as a participant. The experiment was set up as shown by the diagram …show more content…
Wallace, and that they were going to draw in order to figure out who would be the learner, and who would be the teacher. The draw was rigged so that Mr. Wallace would always be the student, and the participant, the unknowing true subject of the experiment, would always be the teacher (McLeod, 2007). Mr. Wallace would ask the proctor if he should be concerned about his previous heart condition, and the proctor would say that the shocks might inflict pain, but will not be detrimental to his overall well-being. This would come to be decisively influential in the latter parts of the experiment when the “learner” would complain about his heart bothering him (Billikopf Encina, 2004). To begin the experiment, the teacher and the proctor would take Mr. Wallace into a room adjacent to where they would sit and strap him to a chair with electrodes attached (Explorable.com, 2008). One real shock at 45 volts was given to the teacher to prove the legitimacy of the machine. The shock machine as shown below, went from 15-450 volts increasing at 15 volt increments, labeled with warnings such as, “moderate” and “strong” shocks, as well as “Danger: Severe Shock,” and finally at the end a “simple but ghastly XXX” (Billikopf Encina,
In her excerpt, Baumrind discusses the potential dangers of the aftereffects on the participants of the experiment. On many occasions she suggests that these people are subjects of a cruel and unethical experiment, and suffer from harm to their self-image and emotional disruption (227). She also calls Milgram’s experiment a “game” (Baumrind 225); this illustrates her negative outtake on the experiment which is seen throughout the article. On the contrary, Parker discusses the aftereffects on Milgram himself. He expresses how the experiment, although it shows light to what extent of obedience a person may travel, ruined Milgram’s reputation. Parker also cites many notable authors and psychologists and their reactions to Milgram’s experiment. Despite their differences, Baumrind and Parker are able to find common ground on a few issues concerning the Milgr...
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 real world examples 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.
With the different style and voice of tone, Parker explained the effects of the experiment from almost everyone’s involved in the experiment point of view. He also showed how the experiment affected Milgram not the just the subjects like Baumrind. However, Both of the writers had a same point, which is that people do what they think in it right this is why they are obedient and that makes Milgram’s experiment not quite accurate because the teacher was constantly worried about the
Dr. Stanley Milgram conducted a study at Yale University in 1962, in an attempt to understand how individuals will obey directions or commands. This study become known as the Milgram Obedience Study. Stanley Milgram wanted to understand how normal people could become inhumane, cruel, and severely hurt other people when told to carry out an order, in a blind obedience to authority. This curiosity stemmed from the Nazi soldiers in Germany, and how their soldiers could do horrible acts to the Jews. To carry out his study, Dr. Milgram created a machine with an ascending row of switches that were marked with an increasing level of voltage that could be inflicted on another person. Then, he gathered forty random males between the ages of 20 and 50 that lived in the local area. He then told them that this experiment was to see how people learned through pain or punishment rather than without. The teacher volunteer would see the other volunteer or victim put on electronic straps and would not be able to see the person being shocked but could hear them. This setup was fake and the person being shocked had pre-recorded answers and reactions to the ascending row of buttons. The teacher volunteer would ask questions through a headset to the victim volunteer, and whenever a question was answered incorrectly, the teacher would increase the level of
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.
He did not fully disclose the fact that the “learner” was not receiving any electric shocks, as well as the true purpose behind the experiment. To make the experiment more of a reality to the “teachers” he gave them a real electric shock on one of the lower voltages, to give them an idea of what pain the “learner” would be experiencing. Diana Baumrind in her article “Is Milgram’s Deception Research Ethically Acceptable?” she writes, “Lying to subjects when obtaining ‘informed’ consent violates the right of prospective subjects” (Baumrind, para.3). On the contrary, Saul McLeod, who has a “degree in psychology and have a masters degree in research,” (simplypsychology,org), writes in his article, The Milgram Experiment “[h]owever, Milgram argued that ‘illusion is used when necessary in order to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at-truths’. [(Milgram, para. 43-44)]” (McLeod, para. 1, Ethical Issues). In the 1960s there was no mandatory ethical rules of conduct, there was only suggestions that did not have to be taken. Taking this into account, I believe that the way that Milgram went about the proposition of the experiment was deceitful. Especially given the fact that Milgram shocked the “teacher,” and the “learner” was an actor that was never
At first Milgram believed that the idea of obedience under Hitler during the Third Reich was appalling. He was not satisfied believing that all humans were like this. Instead, he sought to prove that the obedience was in the German gene pool, not the human one. To test this, Milgram staged an artificial laboratory "dungeon" in which ordinary citizens, whom he hired at $4.50 for the experiment, would come down and be required to deliver an electric shock of increasing intensity to another individual for failing to answer a preset list of questions. Meyer describes the object of the experiment "is to find the shock level at which you disobey the experimenter and refuse to pull the switch" (Meyer 241). Here, the author is paving the way into your mind by introducing the idea of reluctance and doubt within the reader. By this point in the essay, one is probably thinking to themselves, "Not me. I wouldn't pull the switch even once." In actuality, the results of the experiment contradict this forerunning belief.
(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.
Milgram's study lacked experimental realism because the participants could not have believed in the setup. Orme and Holland said that surely Milgram should have been the confederate receiving the shocks, since this would have made it far easier to believe in the setup. However Rosenhan said that 70% of the participants did believe in the whole setup, but there is 30% who did not. Orme and Holland also said that, obedience is a demand characteristic since the participants are required to obey experimental orders. Therefore it made it difficult for the participants to believe in the setup of the experiment.
All the men who participated were between the ages of 20 and 50 and were from various backgrounds in terms of education level as well as employment. There was also someone who played the role of the experimenter during the experiment. Milgram had the participants assume the role of a teacher (participants being those who were being deceived as to the true nature of the experiment and not those who were already in the loop), asking questions of a “learner” and administering electric shocks of increasing voltage for every wrong answer. Shockingly, the voltage eventually surpassed survivable levels. In the end, Milgram found that the majority of people complied to what was being asked of them by the authority figure, despite the fact that the command went against his or her personal values and could objectively be regarded as immoral. Even more surprising was the fact that he found that the subjects complied even though no harm would come to them if they disobeyed. This led him to conclude that humans are very likely to obey the commands given by an authority figure, and this result is further enforced by the setting the situation occurs
Testing obedience is a difficult task, and psychologists disagree on the ethical boundaries of testing the human psyche. Stanley Milgram and Diana Baumrind are two psychologists that disagree on the effectiveness of several obedience experiments conducted by Milgram. The experiments were conducted in 1963 to test the obedience of a variety on individuals from different social classes and genders. The subjects volunteered to enter a laboratory and assume the role of a teacher, where they read word pairs to a learner and test his knowledge by shocking the learner when he answers incorrectly (Milgram 78). An experimenter provokes the teacher to administer shocks of increasing voltage to the learner, causing more than half of the subjects to deliver
The question Stanley Milgram’s experiment seeks to address is an understanding obedience as a psychological mechanism for carrying out acts considered unethical. Milgram’s inspiration behind the experiment was the Holocaust. Certainly, Milgram sought to observe how far an obedient subject would go to hurt another human being. However, based on design no human being would be actually hurt. Furthermore, the study was designed to “systematically vary the factors believed to alter the degree of obedience” (Milgram, p 372).
Milgram’s experiment did not meet all the ethical guidelines despite no real physical harm to the participant nor the confederate, the experiment broke the code of conduct in regard to what constitutes an ethical study in a number of ways. The first issue was that Milgram used deception; he thought this to be necessary to help meet his aims in a valid way, and although some levels of deception are at times
The Milgram experiment is a very well-known and talked about experiment that looks that people’s obedience to authority. I found the Milgram experiment to be very interesting and fascinating even though there are some ethical issues with the experiment. I believe this experiment tells us a lot about ourselves and our society and can give us very important information about ourselves, like why we do what we do in certain situations. And I believe if psychologists and sociologists were allowed to do these type experiments we would know a lot more about people and our society. Jerry M. Burger tried to replicate the Milgram experiment in his own study and was able to come up with results similar to Milgram’s. Burger tried
To set up the experiment Milgram began with two people; one “teacher” and one “learner”. The learner is placed in room, strapped to a chair, and an electrode is placed on their wrist. The leaner is told to memorize a list of word pairs and repeat them back to the teacher. Every time in the learner makes an error while repeating the word pairs they will receive an electric shock; increasing with each error. The main focus of the experiment is the teacher. The teacher watches the leaner while they are strapped to the chair and hooked up to the electrode. They are then taken to a separate room where they are