Essay on Stanley Milgram

This quote, by Stanley Milgram (1974, p. 205), exemplifies the debate that exists around the topic of obedience. Obedient behaviours have been studied in Milgram’s famous obedience experiments, and evidence of atrocities being carried out as a result of obedience can be seen in situations such as the holocaust in World War Two (Mastroianni, 2000) and more recent events such as (My Lai). This essay will explain both sides of the debate, arguing for situation and individual factors that influence people to behave in particular ways. Therefore, an interactional approach is argued here, that the situation and individual influences cannot be disentangled. A brief explanation of Milgram’s baseline study (1963) will be introduced first, before evaluating the different interpretations Milgram held in later years. These evaluations will be used to display the opinions held about both sides of the argument, in which the situation and the individual person both play an important role in how a person will behave in regards to obedience to authority.

The original baseline experiment (Milgram, 1963), took place at Yale University, with 40 participants. Each participant would arrive at the laboratory to meet the confederate (whom they thought was another participant). In the laboratory room there was a ‘shock generator’, presented as a machine that could deliver a graduated amount of shocks, increasing by 15-volt intervals, with a maximum of 450 volts. In fact, it could only administer 45 volts, and this was administered to the participant, to convince them the machine was real. The participant (who was the teacher) and the experimenter were in a separate room from the learner, with the participant asking the learner simple word-pairing que...

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