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Review of Stanley Milgram's Experiments on Obedience
Review of Stanley Milgram's Experiments on Obedience
Review of Stanley Milgram's Experiments on Obedience
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“The Perils of Obedience” was written by Stanley Milgram in 1974. In the essay he describes his experiments on obedience to authority. I feel as though this is a great psychology essay and will be used in psychology 101 classes for generations to come. The essay describes how people are willing to do almost anything that they are told no matter how immoral the action is or how much pain it may cause.
This essay even though it was written in 1974 is still used today because of its historical importance. The experiment attempts to figure out why the Nazi’s followed Hitler. Even though what he told them to do was morally wrong and they did it anyway. If this essay can help figure out why Hitler was able to do what he was then able to do, then maybe psychologists can figure out how to prevent something like that from happening again.
“The Perils of Obedience” is about an experiment that was made to test the obedience of ordinary people. There are two people who come and perform in the lab, one is the subject or the teacher and the other is an actor or the learner. The teacher doesn’t know that the learner is an actor. They are there to see how far someone would go on causing someone pain just because they were told to do so the authority figure. The learner is given a list of word pairs and has to memorize them. Then he has to remember the second word of the pair when he hears the first word. If he is incorrect the “teacher” will shock him until he gets it rig...
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...
A former Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram, administered an experiment to test the obedience of "ordinary" people as explained in his article, "The Perils of Obedience". An unexpected outcome came from this experiment by watching the teacher administer shocks to the learner for not remembering sets of words. By executing greater shocks for every wrong answer created tremendous stress and a low comfort levels within the "teacher", the one being observed unknowingly, uncomfortable and feel the need to stop. However, with Milgram having the experimenter insisting that they must continue for the experiments purpose, many continued to shock the learner with much higher voltages.The participants were unaware of many objects of the experiment until
Obedience is the requirement of all mutual living and is the basic element of the structure of social life. Conservative philosophers argue that society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the priority of the individuals' conscience. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, designed an experiment that forced participants to either violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands. Milgram's study, reported in "The Perils of Obedience" suggested that under a special set of circumstances the obedience we naturally show authority figures can transform us into agents of terror or monsters towards humanity.
In Lauren Slater’s book Opening Skinner’s Box, the second chapter “Obscura” discusses Stanley Milgram, one of the most influential social psychologists. Milgram created an experiment which would show just how far one would go when obeying instructions from an authoritative figure, even if it meant harming another person while doing so. The purpose of this experiment was to find justifications for what the Nazi’s did during the Holocaust. However, the experiment showed much more than the sociological reasoning behind the acts of genocide. It showed just how much we humans are capable of.
It stays on track with relevant information from introduction to conclusion, and with practice reading experimental research articles, the reader should have little to no difficulty understanding the language and terminology of the article. The author does an exceptional job explaining how the predicted results and the actual results of the experiment are so different from each other; he offers this concept to the reader through use of numerical data and by discussing how the experimenters believed morals affected obedience prior to and following the experiment. Results are communicated though the use of a table that is easy for any reader, experienced or unexperienced, to understand. The ethical soundness of the study is questionable, however Milgram does highlight some of the precautions taken by the experimenters to assure the well-being of their participants. At the end of the article, he lists multiple possibilities for why the observed amounts of obedience could have been so extreme, however, the article still leaves many questions unanswered. Regardless of the ability of this article to be generalized for an entire population or answer many difficult questions, it still offers insight into an experiment that provided evidence that actions that violate personal moral can be influenced to occur if ordered by some form of authoritative
The theme that has been attached to this story is directly relevant to it as depicted by the anonymous letters which the main character is busy writing secretly based on gossip and distributing them to the different houses. Considering that people have an impression of her being a good woman who is quiet and peaceful, it becomes completely unbecoming that she instead engages in very abnormal behavior. What makes it even more terrible is the fact that she uses gossip as the premise for her to propagate her hate messages not only in a single household but across the many different households in the estate where she stays.
Human behaviorist’s have long studied changes in people’s behavior as it relates to obedience in authoritative relationships. Two of the most renowned obedience studies were conducted by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, in which they each tested reactions to authority using important variables that were manipulated throughout their experiments. However, some psychologists, like Dina Baumrind, a psychologist for the Institute of Human Development, believe experiments that test humans impetuous reactions should not be conducted unless the subject is well-informed of the purpose. Baumrinds, “Review of Stanley Milgrams Experiments on Obedience” criticizes the accuracy of Milgrams study and further explores the emotional response those submitted to testing inadvertently experience. While other psychologists, like Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University, believe even experimentation with known factors can produce the same psychological effect, as seen in Milgrams experiment. As Zimbardo notes in “The Stanford Prison Experiment”, even the voluntary role-playing of his study on obedience had a large impact on the subject’s mental-health, proving that Baumrind remains bias with her argument. While both Baumrind and Zimbardo care for the well-being of the subject during and after the experiment, Baumrind argues that all research, like Milgrams, must be conducted with consent of the subject, whereas Zimbardo views all types of experiments are crucial for developing human insight toward obedience to authority.
This experiment is ultimately testing the adult obedience to authority. Only a select few are defiant towards authority because obedience is required for all life. For this test, the subject is told there will be one “teacher,” the one giving the punishment, and one “learner,” the one receiving the punishment. The subject thin...
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.
One cannot be obedient to one’s power without being disobedient to another. In his article, “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem,” Erich Fromm argues people obey authority to feel safe. When one obeys, they become an ambiguous part of a whole, no longer accountable for actions or left on their own. In Ian Parker’s article, “Obedience,” analyzing Milgram's experiment, he claims people obey orders when there is no second option. According to Parker, if someone obeys an order, but there is no alternative, their accountability is lessoned. The two articles can speak to the tomfoolery that takes place in the motion picture, Mean Girls, which highlights a typical high school under the regime of the queen bee, Regina George, with her followers Gretchen Weiners and Karen Smith; the regime is usurped by a new girl, Cady Heron. Under the scope of Parker and Fromm, it can be argued that Gretchen was not disobeying Regina when she realigned with Cady, but actually remaining obedient to the social order of high school.
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
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).... ...
According to the section The Etiquette of Submission, if one person allowed to take full control over another person without any certain rules, he would hurt that person as much as he wanted and thus caused by the ingrained aggressive character living inside of him. In a variation of the experiment, an experimenter asked a subject named Bruno Batta to take part in the test. While watching the subject doing the test on the learner with indifferent expression, the experimenter said that the reason that the subject obeyed was because he thinks of himself as an instrument which carries out someone else’s order. Therefore, the subjects in the experiment only feel responsible for their authority, but not the content of the order. The obedience and personal conscience had been conflicted in the experiment.
“Without Conscience" by Robert D. Hare is one aimed towards making the general public aware of the many psychopaths that inhabit the world we live in. Throughout the book Hare exposes the reader to a number of short stories; all with an emphasis on a characteristic of psychopaths. Hare makes the claim that close monitoring of psychopathy are vital if we ever hope to gain a hold over Psychopathy- A disorder that affects not only the individual but also society itself. He also indicates one of the reasons for this book is order to correctly treat these individuals we have to be able to correctly identify who meets the criteria. His ultimate goal with the text is to alleviate some of the confusion in the increase in criminal activity by determining how my of this is a result of Psychopathy.
Sammy, a young cashier at the local A & P Store in John Updike’s short story is a character that we see as someone who is ever changing and has deep level of subconscious thoughts and feelings. Sammy is well aware of his surroundings and the process of human nature, seeing as people watching is the thing he spend the most of his time doing. Throughout the story we start to see that Sammy has a subconscious disrespect for authority and hypocrisy.