A Shocking Surprise: Dr. Stanley Milgram

Obedience is described as a compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another’s authority. The majority of the world would say when pushed to a certain extreme that would lead to the harming of other people, humans would be not obedient to such a request because of our morals. Dr. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, set up an experiment to prove this theory wrong. Dr. Milgram devised this experiment to focus on the conflict between obedience of the every day normal guy to the authority and personal conscience of their superiors.
Milgram arranged this experiment to find any justification of the acts of genocide by those accused at the Nuremberg War Criminal trials. He was intrigued because most of the defenses against the court was based on that they were simply just following the orders of their superiors. A year after Adolf Eichmann’s, a German Nazi SS officer that organized much of the holocaust, trial in 1960, Milgram constructed this examination to answer his question “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (McLeod 1). His main focus point was to see how easily people were influenced during WWII to commit such atrocities.
Milgram started the experiment in 1963 by recruiting males through a newspaper article promising them $4.50. The article read:
We will pay five hundred New Haven men to help us complete a scientific study of memory and learning. The study is being done at Yale University. “Each person who participates will be paid $4.00 (plus 50¢ carfare) for approximately 1 hour’s time. We need you for only one hour: there are no further obligations. You may choose the time you would like to co...

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...xposed to extremely stressful situations that may have the potential to cause psychological harm. Many of the participants were visibly distressed” (McLeod 7). These stressful situations produced many signs of tension such as stuttering, sweating, trembling and biting lips. Three of the participants had severe seizures that forced the experiment to stop.

Works Cited

Blass, Thomas. "The Man Who Shocked the World." Psychology Today. March/April 2002: 68-74. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 15 May. 2014.

Carey, Benedict. "Decades Later, Still Asking: Would I Pull That Switch?." New York Times (New York, NY). 01 Jul. 2008: F1+. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 15 May. 2014.

Cherry, Kendra. "The Milgram Obedience Experiment." About.com Psychology. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 May 2014.

McLeod, Saul. "The Milgram Experiment." Milgram Experiment. N.p., 1 Jan. 2007. Web. 15 May 2014.