Compare and Contrast Paper The Milgrim and Zimbardo experiments have both similarities and differences. Milgrim’s experiment looked at authorities effect on obedience. He gathered 40 male students from Yale and had them individually be “teachers” for a student (who was really a confederate). If the student answered a question incorrectly, the participant was instructed to shock them with increased doses of electricity. As the doses of electricity increased, the student voiced more and more pain and requested that the teacher stop. The experimenter who was right next to the teacher demanded, “Please continue,”, “The experiment requires that you continue.”, It is absolutely essential that you continue,”, and “You have no other choice; you …show more content…
must go on.”. Results showed that 65% of the participants obeyed and delivered the maximum amount of shocks, regardless of how the student was reacting. In Phillip Zimbardo’s experiment, he was investigating how a group of healthy, normal, middle class men would conform to the roles of prison guard and prisoner. The experiment was set up in the basement of the psychology department of Stanford to resemble a true prison setting.
All participants had an equal chance of becoming either prisoner or prison guard. Within a few hours of the experiment beginning, both prisoners and prison guards began enacting into their specific roles. Prison guards took away all of the prisoners individuality and harassed them. They felt a true sense of power over the prisoners. As the prisoners became more and more obedient to their authority figures, the prison guards became more and more harsh. It was unfortunate to see how contempt the prison guards truly were watching the prisoners act so subordinate. After a couple days, a few prisoners had to be released as they were expressing unhealthy amounts of stress and anger. Zimbardo ended the experiment early for this reason. Milgrim and Zimbardo had similar goals in terms of what they were researching. While Milgrim was solely researching levels of obedience of an authority figure, Zimbardo was seeing how prisoners would obey the prison guards as well as how the prison guards would intern treat the prisoners. In terms of scientific method, both experiments asked a question, did necessary background research, constructed a hypothesis, tested their hypothesis by executing an experiment, analyzed data and came to a …show more content…
conclusion, and communicated results. Ethics was an issue for these two experiments, especially Zimbardo’s experiment. While Milgrims experiment had an unethical approach of saying they were going to shock the students, no one was actually receiving a painful shock.
Zimbardo’s experiment was truly unethical. The prisoners were dealing with much anger, stress, and suffered heavily from it. They were treated like true criminals, even though they were completely innocent individuals. This experiment had an extremely detrimental affect on many of the participants. Both of these experiments showed how strong the power of the situation is on the individual. In Milgrims experiment, they weren’t expecting the teachers to be as obedient as they were. Even when many of the students were crying out for help, the experimenter continued to voice how important it is to continue, and as a result many of them obeyed that authority figure. In the Zimbardo experiment, the participants took their roles so seriously. It was interesting to see how similar it resembled a true prison environment in terms of how people were acting/ treating each other. A flaw in Zimbardo’s experiment was that he took on an active role within the experiment. As a head guard, he got caught up in the experiment himself and had a hard time monitoring properly. If he hadn’t taken this position, his experiment might not have been conducted so unethically. Another difference between the two experiments was the in Milgrims, there was only one
designated role for the participants. In Zimbardo’s experiment, participants could either be a prisoner or a prison guard. This could result in the other factors such as being jealous of not being assigned an authoritative figure (prison guard) and having less power than other participants.
The Asch and Milgram’s experiment were not unethical in their methods of not informing the participant of the details surrounding the experiment and the unwarranted stress; their experiment portrayed the circumstances of real life situation surrounding the issues of obedience to authority and social influence. In life, we are not given the courtesy of knowledge when we are being manipulated or influenced to act or think a certain way, let us be honest here because if we did know people were watching and judging us most of us would do exactly as society sees moral, while that may sound good in ensuring that we always do the right thing that would not be true to the ways of our reality. Therefore, by not telling the participants the detail of the experiment and inflicting unwarranted stress Asch and Milgram’s were
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
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.
In this study Zimbardo chose 21 participants from a pool of 75, all male college students, screened prior for mental illness, and paid $15 per day. He then gave roles. One being a prisoner and the other being a prison guard, there were 3 guards per 8 hour shift, and 9 total prisoners. Shortly after the prisoners were arrested from their homes they were taken to the local police station, booked, processed, given proper prison attire and issued numbers for identification. Before the study, Zimbardo concocted a prison setting in the basement of a Stanford building. It was as authentic as possible to the barred doors and plain white walls. The guards were also given proper guard attire minus guns. Shortly after starting the experiment the guards and prisoners starting naturally assuming their roles, Zimbardo had intended on the experiment lasting a fortnight. Within 36 hours one prisoner had to be released due to erratic behavior. This may have stemmed from the sadistic nature the guards had adopted rather quickly, dehumanizing the prisoners through verbal, physical, and mental abuse. The prisoners also assumed their own roles rather efficiently as well. They started to rat on the other prisoners, told stories to each other about the guards, and placated the orders from the guards. After deindividuaiton occurred from the prisoners it was not long the experiment completely broke down ethically. Zimbardo, who watched through cameras in an observation type room (warden), had to put an end to the experiment long before then he intended
Now sure, the Stanford prison guards didn’t go that far as the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib but the torture and abuse towards the prisoners became worse by the day indicating they could have gone as far as Abu Ghraib. However, in both cases there are unusual punishments and cruelty. This was due to the authority allowing it, ordering it, just didn’t care or didn’t know. Like the Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo didn’t do anything to stop the abuses at the mock prison but allowed it.
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.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. The purpose of the experiment was a landmark study of the human response to captivity, in particular, to the real world circumstances of prison life. In social psychology, this idea is known as “mundane realism”. Mundane realism refers to the ability to mirror the real world as much as possible, which is just what this study did. Twenty-four subjects were randomly assigned to play the role of "prisoner" or "guard" and they were made to conform to these roles.
The Milgram experiment of the 1960s was designed to ascertain why so many Germans decided to support the Nazi cause. It sought to determine if people would be willing to contradict their conscience if they were commanded to do so by someone in authority. This was done with a psychologist commanding a teacher to administer an electric shock to a student each time a question was answered incorrectly. The results of the Milgram experiment help to explain why so many men in Nazi Germany were recruited to support the Nazi cause and serve as a warning against the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques by the United States government.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. The experiment was a landmark study of the human response to captivity, in particular, to the real world circumstances of prison life. In social psychology, this idea is known as “mundane realism”. Mundane realism refers to the ability to mirror the real world as much as possible, which is just what this study did. Twenty-four subjects were randomly assigned to play the role of "prisoner" or "guard" and they were made to conform to these roles.
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.
Milgram was curious if the some Nazi’s in germany where truly evil or just following orders, so he conducted an experiment to test this idea. This experiment would have a teacher who was random, a learner, who Milgram selected but acted as if he didn’t, and a experimenter, whom would act as the authoritarian figure of the study. The teacher would do a word association and if the learner got it wrong would shock him, the more they got wrong the more voltage they were shocked with, this was of course ordered by the experimenter. The results where much in the same, most people are willing to shock people to extreme measure of discomfort in order to follow their guidelines set in place by the authority figure. This is another prime example of people's willingness to cause fellow citizens pain or discomfort in order to follow an authority figure. I felt this study to be a little more accepting because the learners weren't really getting shocked as hard as the teacher thought they were, but the same ideas as the Stanford experiment it could have quite possibly caused harm to the psyches of the
After watching the video on the Stanford Prison Experiment, there are substantial amounts of ethical concerns that are seen with the way this study was conducted from beginning to the very end. The first ethical issue perceived to be one of the leading concern in this experiment which was that this experiment overall was gone too far there wasn’t appropriate control or limitation made to this experiment, I think this was mainly was because of the role Zimbardo played in the experiment being an administrator of the prison as well as the doctor who was conducting the study and cause of this he didn’t know where to stop and end his experiment when it was going too far because he became a part of the study.
A fundamental aspect of psychology is the concept that psychology is empirical. The premise of psychology being empirical essentially states that psychology’s conclusions are drawn from one’s direct observations as opposed to one’s reasoning, speculation, core beliefs or common sense (Weiten, 2014). This approach relies on scientific experiments and the experimental method. The experimental method, essentially, is where an investigator creates a testable hypothesis, accordingly adjusts a single variable (experimental group) under carefully monitored conditions, then observes whether any changes have occurred on a second variable (control group). Neither Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Study nor Milgram Obedience Study met the traditional
The Zimbardo experiment was the study of a group of students who would portray bodyguards in a prison, while the other group were the inmates of the prison. The study was conducted to determine whether or not people will conform to their social norms based on power and stereotypes.