Examples Of Obedience To Authority By Stanley Milgram

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Aaron Keime
Block #4
Obedience to Authority: Stanley Milgram (1963)
Introduction
Stanley Milgram in 1963 decided to do a sociological experiment that tested peoples devotion to authority. How far would people go if an authority figure ordered them to? Milgram took a random sample, meaning he took random people to take part in his experiment. He did so to get a generalized overview of the American population. These random people were to take part in one of the most influential social experiment in history. It still inspires sociologists to try experiments close to Milgrams to see not only if they get the same results today but also to find out how far people with go to follow their commanding figure. Questions and accusations after World …show more content…

The authority figure in the experiment was the scientist that posed himself as researching people 's memory of words. If the person got the word wrong then they would receive a shock that rose as the actor in the room keep getting them wrong. The actor in the room even goes as far as to say he has a heart condition but most subjects didn’t seem to care. The person doing the shocks at wrong answers was the Research subject in the experiment because that person was the whole observation of the experiment. That subjects responses were in response to the scientist or the actor in the room.
The controls within the Milgram’s experiment was the shock machine was kept the same. But more importantly the voice recording was the same every time. The scientist actor also tried to replicate every meeting the same way so as not to change any variable. Controls seemed very important in this experiment. Because dealing with actual people has many possible outcomes that could happen. Saying something not quite the same could give the test subject a different attitude towards the actor in the room. Both the actor in the room and the actor scientist had to be very …show more content…

It showed that most people would not be able to stand up against such pressure and would rather follow. Follow to the extent that they might even kill someone for the authority figure because he said to keep going. Of course the actor in the room didn’t actually die but the subjects did not know that at the time. The experiment put a whole new spin on how people look at the Holocaust and all human cruelty under oppressive authority. Some psychologists even found that such studies should not happen. Stanley Milgram tore down walls that people built up to separate themselves from Nazi-Germany. Such words as “monsters”, “psychopaths”, and others are used on Holocaust guards to separate them from “normal”

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