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Milgram perils of obedience sparknotes
Milgram the perils of obedience
Milgram the perils of obedience
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“Let Me Out Of Here, let me out, let me out” is just one of the many saying that was heard from the Learner during Milgram’s Experiment. Stanley Milgram a psychologist at Yale University, conducted experiments in 1961 focusing on an individual obedience to authority and their personal conscience. The goal of the experiment was to ration the effects of punishment concerning memory and learning. He began this by posting an advertisement in the paper of the New Heaven area requesting male participants between ages 20 and 50. The men who replied and participated in the experiment were paid 4.50 (McLeod) (Ferris p.140). When the men arrived they were paired with another man an actor who was a confederate. The two men drew pieces of paper stating what they were expose to be during the experiment either the “Teacher” or the “Learner”. What the men who replied form the paper did not know was that the drawing was rigged and the actor always became the Learner. There was …show more content…
It just goes to prove that obedience is ingrained in us all from the way we are raised. We are raised to listen to our elders in the family situation or individuals in authority in the school and workplace situations (McLeod). By looking at Milgram’s experiment we can see how certain elements play a part in making our decisions. Like when the Teacher asked the experimenter who was going to take responsibly for shocking the learner. The Teacher was more willing to continue the experiment when the experimenter was in a lab coat instead of street clothes. From the experimenter wearing the lab coat the teacher saw him as superior individual making the teacher more likely to obey. Whereas the experimenter wearing street clothes made the teacher uneasy to obey his command to continue shocking the
In "The Perils of Obedience," Stanley Milgram conducted a study that tests the conflict between obedience to authority and one's own conscience. Through the experiments, Milgram discovered that the majority of people would go against their own decisions of right and wrong to appease the requests of an authority figure. The study was set up as a "blind experiment" to capture if and when a person will stop inflicting pain on another as they are explicitly commanded to continue. The participants of this experiment included two willing individuals: a teacher and a learner. The teacher is the real subject and the learner is merely an actor.
In this article “The Pearls of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram asserts that obedience to authority is a common response for many people in today’s society, often diminishing an individuals beliefs or ideals. Stanley Milgram designs an experiment to understand how strong a person’s tendency to obey authority is, even though it is amoral or destructive. Stanley Milgram bases his experiment on three people: a learner, teacher, and experimenter. The experimenter is simply an overseer of the experiment, and is concerned with the outcome of punishing the learner. The teacher, who is the subject of the experiment, is made to believe the electrical shocks are real; he is responsible for obeying the experimenter and punishing the learner for incorrect answers by electrocuting him from an electric shock panel that increases from 15 to 450 volts.
Upon analyzing his experiment, Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, concludes that people will drive to great lengths to obey orders given by a higher authority. The experiment, which included ordinary people delivering “shocks” to an unknown subject, has raised many questions in the psychological world. Diana Baumrind, a psychologist at the University of California and one of Milgram’s colleagues, attacks Milgram’s ethics after he completes his experiment in her review. She deems Milgram as being unethical towards the subjects he uses for testing and claims that his experiment is irrelevant to obedience. In contrast, Ian Parker, a writer for New Yorker and Human Sciences, asserts Milgram’s experiments hold validity in the psychological world. While Baumrind focuses on Milgram’s ethics, Parker concentrates more on the reactions, both immediate and long-term, to his experiments.
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
He observes that most people go against their natural instinct to never harm innocent humans and obey the extreme and dangerous instructions of authority figures. Milgram is well aware of his audience and organization throughout his article, uses quotes directly from his experiment and connects his research with real world examples to make his article as effective as possible. Stanley Milgram selected 40 college participants, aged 20-50, to take part in the experiment at Yale University. Milgram says, “The point of the experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measureable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim” (632). Although the 40 men or women thought that they were in a drawing to see who would be the “teacher” and the “learner,” the drawing was fixed.
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.
Scientist tell people they are doing a test on the effects of punishment on learning, but the real
Another reason people obey is that they have a sense of obligation to their duty. This is just the whole idea of completing the job that’s given to you. Some people have a fear of being perceived as brash, or rude. In general, people want to present themselves in the best way possible.
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.
In school, many teachers or instructors might influence their student by knowing their level of obedience. Some of them might use punishment if the students didn’t follow a certain instruction or disobey the rule. On the article The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram, the experiment has huge confusion if it is successful by punishing other people with electric shock if they got wrong or disobey an instruction. If you were the student in this experiment, do you think you would face harm? Although Milgram’s experiment was unethical, his studies brought attention to human behavior that is both interesting and terrifying.
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
Through my research and findings of obedience to authority this ancient dilemma is somewhat confusing but needs understanding. Problem with obedience to authority has raised a question to why people obey or disobey and if there are any right time to obey or not to obey. Through observation of many standpoints on obedience and disobedience to authority, and determined through detailed examination conducted by Milgram “The Perils Of Obedience,” Doris Lessing “Group Minds” and Shirley Jackson “The Lottery”. We have to examine this information in hopes of understanding or at least be able to draw our own theories that can be supported and proven on this subject.
Dalrymple starts his essay by stating that some people view opposition to authority to be principled and also romantic (254). The social worker Dalrymple mentions on the airplane with him is a prime example that certain people can be naturally against authority, but she quickly grants authority to the pilot to fly the plane (255). Dalrymple also mentions his studies under a physician and that Dalrymple would listen to her because she had far greater expanse of knowledge than him (256). Ian Parker writes his essay explaining the failed logic with Stanley Milgram’s experiment and expounds on other aspects of the experiment. One of his points is the situation’s location which he describes as inescapable (238). Another focus of Parker’s article is how Milgram’s experiment affected his career; the experiment played a role in Milgram’s inability to acquire full support from Harvard professors to earn tenure (234).
In 1961, Stanley Milgram, a Yale University Psychologist conducted a variety of social psychology experiments on obedience to authority figures. His experiments involved three individuals, one of them was a volunteer who played the role of the teacher, one was an actor who played the role of the student, and one was the experimenter who played the role of the authority. The teacher was instructed by the authority to administrate shocks to the student (who claimed to have a heart condition) whenever they answered a question incorrectly. The voltage of the shock would go up after every wrong answer. The experimenter would then instruct the teacher to administrate higher voltages even though pain was being imposed. The teacher would then have to make a choice between his morals and values or the choice of the authority figure. The point of the experiment was to try to comprehend just how far an individual would continue when being ordered by an individual in a trench coat to electrically shock another human being for getting questions incorrect. The experiment consisted of administrating pain to different people and proved that ordinary people will obey people with authority. Some of the various reasons are that the experimenter was wearing a trench coat, fear of the consequences for not cooperating, the experiments were conducted in Yale University a place of prestige, and the authority f...
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).... ...