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Essay on milgram's obedience experiment
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Evaluation of milgram's obedience experiment
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"The Education of a Torturer" is an account of experiments that has similar results to that of Milgram's obedience experimentsthat were performed in 1963. Though both experiments vary drastically, both have one grim outcome, that is that, "it is ordinary people, not psychopaths, who become the Eichmanns of history."
The Stanford experiment was performed by psychologists Craig Haney, W. Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo. Their goal was to find out if ordinary people could become abusive if given the power to do so. The results of the six day experiment are chilling.
The experiment took ordinary college students and had some agree to be prisoners and the rest would be guards for the prisoners. Both groups received no training on what to do or act like. They had to get all of their knowledge of what to do from outside sources, such as television and movies. The guards were given uniforms and night sticks and told to act like an ordinary guard would. The prisoners were treated like normal criminals. They were finger printed and booked, after that they were told to put on prison uniforms and then they were thrown into the slammer (in this case a simulated cellblock in the basement was used). All of the participants in this experiment at first were thought to be similar in behavior but after one week, all of that changed. The prisoners became "passive, dependent, and helpless." The guards on the other hand were the exact opposite. They became "aggressive and abusive within the prison, insulting and bullying the prisoners."
After the experiment was finished, many of the mock guards said that they enjoyed the power. Others said that they had no idea that they were capable of being so corrupt.
The experimenter was shocked at the results as well saying, "It was degrading....To me, those things are sick. But they (the prisoners) did everything I said. They abused each other because I requested them to. No one questioned my authority at all."
I have a hard time believing the statement that they experimenter said. He had reviewed the work of Stanley Milgram's experiment and how individuals became so violent. Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo had to of known that if they gave the power to take control of a situation the guards that the power would be abused. The experiment took place in 1986 and though there had been many years passed since Milgram's experiment was conducted in 1963, people then and still today try to get to the top of every situation.
In Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” Milgram explains his own study on the effects authority has on levels of obedience. Milgram designed the experiment in order to recognize the subjects as “teachers,” and actors as “learners,” with another actor posing as an "experimenter.” (Milgram 78). Milgram required the teacher to read a list of word pairs to a learner and to test their remembrance afterward (78). As Milgram explains in his essay, each time the learner answers incorrectly, the teacher is required by the experimenter to flip a switch on an electric shock generator. The author illustrates that the experimenter implies that the teacher is electrically shocking the learner; however, no shocks are actually inflicted. Diana Baumrind
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...
Stanley Milgram conducted the experiment to put participants into immoral situations to obey an authority figure of some measure, and he tested their performance and willingness, to participate in acts that strayed away from their belief of right and wrong. Zimbardo conducted an experiment in some ways similar. He conducted an experiment to see if people would assume the expected normal roles of what a prisoner is expected to do and what an authority figure like a prisoner guard is supposed to do. So both Zimbardo and Milgram at this point are trying to prove that authority and the social norm of how authorities should act generates psychological effects on their performance, as well as people who are expected to be below and obey an upper hand.
The Stanford Prison Experiment commenced in 1973 in pursuit of Zimbardo needed to study how if a person are given a certain role, will they change their whole personality in order to fit into that specific role that they were given to. Zambrano significantly believed that personality change was due to either dispositional, things that affect personal life and make them act differently. Or situational, when surrounded by prisoners, they can have the authority to do whatever they want without having to worry about the consequences. Furthermore, it created a group of twenty-four male participants, provided them their own social role. Twelve of them being a prisoners and the other twelve prison guards, all of which were in an examination to see if they will be able to handle the stress that can be caused based upon the experiment, as well as being analysis if their personality change due to the environment or their personal problems.
Cherry, K. (n.d.). The stanford prison experiment an experiment in the psychology of imprisonment. Retrieved from http://psychology.about.com/od/classicpsychologystudies/a/stanford-prison-experiment.htm
However, all of the participants continued to administer up to three-hundred volts. These were everyday “normal” people that functioned successfully in society. Slater had the opportunity to interview one of the participants of Milgram’s experiment, one which happened to follow through with the shocks all the way to the very last one. During the interview the participant stated, “You thought you were really giving shocks, and nothing can take away from you the knowledge of how you acted” (Slater, 59). These words came from the mouth of an “average joe” that never knew what he was capable of before the experiment. With these words, we are reminded that we are not as “nice” as we’d like to think we
The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted in 1971 by psychologist Philip Zimbardo explored the moral impact of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. Zimbardo, a former classmate of Stanley Milgram who conducted his own obedience experiment (The Milgram Obedience Study), looked to expand upon Milgram's research. He sought to further investigate the impact of situational variables on human behavior. The main question the researchers asked was, how the participants would react when placed in a simulated prison environment. The participants that were chosen were undergraduate students who were physically healthy with no history of mental illness or a criminal record. They would be selected to fill either the role of prisoner or prison guard. The main question was “Would those good people,
After only six days the Stanford Prison Experiment was stopped, after they originally planned it to last for two weeks. This was not because Zimbardo thought it should be, of the guards out of line behavior, or because outsiders thought so. The experiment finally stopped because of a graduate student was helping Zimbardo told him that it was out of control. I am very surprised from the results of the experiment. The power of situations was shown to be much more powerful than I ever would have thought. Because of the way the prisoners were treated, I do not think there will ever be another experiment like this ever again, even though a lot of valuable information was attained for conducting it.
The book Obedience to authority by Stanley Milgram is about a series of experiments performed by Milgram himself, on unsuspecting participants. The experiments were performed to answer the question if people had a tendency to comply with authority figures. Milgram drew inspiration from Adolf Eichmann’s trial, to create a study to explain the actions of the Nazis. As quoted “The point of the experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measurable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim.” (pg. 5.
In finding that people are not naturally aggressive. Milgram now alters the experiment to find out why do people act the way they do. He compiled the experiment to answer, why do people obey authority, even when the actions are against their own morals.
We know that people react differently than others, like the man who left early compared to all of the other men. Though the experiment only lasted less than a weeks’ time, it showed us that we cannot perform these kind of studies without someone on the outside looking in. It was a tough environment for all of the people involved. From Zimbardo right down to the prisoners, it was a tough time. They hadn’t even started to see the changes in themselves being so wrapped up in the study. People will react to certain situations how they seem fit, even when they don’t realize that they are hurting the people around them at the time. I don’t think that any of the guards made it their intention to hurt anyone, they just hadn’t realized it at the time that what they were doing was wrong. We cannot treat each other as less than human beings. Thanks to Christina Maslach, the project was ended early. Without her having seen what she had, who knows how much worse it would have been for everyone involved. We are all human, and no one deserves to be treated as anything less than so; prisoner or
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a study put together by Phillip Zambardo to test the psychological effects of a prisoner and guard scenario in a mock prison setting. The experiment lasted approximately fourteen days and was comprised of twenty-four male students, all of whom were picked at random to take part in the experiment. Each individual was also randomly given the role of either guard or prisoner. The mock prisoners were subjugated to psychological abuse, harsh authoritarian rule by the guards, and intense living conditions to ensure maximum results were met. Due to the intense amount of stress brought on from the ordeal, a few prisoners were unable to continue and the experiment concluded prematurely. Everything about this observation
For example, in both events the guards would strip their inmates of their clothes, and take their beds out of their cells because of their rebellious behavior. Also, they both had laws that were established by the prison directors and enforced by the guards. Conversely, both these events went through a period of psychoanalysis where they were presented a problem and had to use free association and resistance to get info out of the prisoners. For example, in both these events the prison had people to come and talk to the prisoners about what was taking place. They also did this to prove their theory that different environments influence the behavior of people, whether you are mentally sane or not. Similarly, the attitudes towards between the guards versus the prisoners in both cases were the same. The guards attitudes were as if they were untouchable only because they knew that the prisoners couldn’t do anything about what was taking place inside the prisons. Moreover, in both the Sanford Prison Experiment and the Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal the prisoners experienced the bystander effect. This is because a higher authority inside the prison just sat there and watched the prisoners get tortured, beaten, humiliated, raped, and abused without trying to interfere to try to stop or calm the reckless behavior. Nevertheless, the motivation levels in both the experiment and the
...g factors such as fear of consequences for not obeying, human nature’s willingness to conform, perceived stature of authority and geographical locations. I also believe that due to most individual’s upbringings they will trust and obey anyone in an authoritative position even at the expense of their own moral judgment. I strongly believe that Stanley Milgram’s experiments were a turning point for the field of social psychology and they remind us that “ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process”. Despite these findings it is important to point out it is human nature to be empathetic, kind and good to our fellow human beings. The shock experiments reveal not blind obedience but rather contradictory ethical inclinations that lie deep inside human beings.
The prison experiment was meant to function in much the same way, the prevailing idea being that with no direction, the guards would become the teachers and begin to wield their inherent authority and power over the prisoners, or learners. To essentially prepare both sides for the roles they would play in the prison, Zimbardo instructed the guards to strip the prisoners naked on arrival to the prison before being fitted with chains and given a simple one piece prison gown to wear, with no underwear provided. This humiliation perpetrated by the guards and accepted by the prisoners set the tone for the experiment. The guards wore khaki pants and official looking uniforms, were geared with night sticks and whistles and as a finishing touch wore mirrored sunglasses to hide their eyes from prisoners. (Konnikova, 1) The guards worked in shifts of 8 hours and maintained constant watch on the prisoners. All of this created a sense of authority for the guards both in the eyes of the prisoners as well as their