Milgram Reflection Paper

It has been many years since I went to the Museum Tolerance. I believe that my experience as an adult was so very different from when I went as an adolescent. As an adolescent I did not understand the ignorance and significance and the pure hatred that Germans felt towards a group of people, Jews, giving them permission to eliminate them as if their mere existence permitted it. Visiting the three areas of the museum, The Tolerance Center, The Holocaust, and Finding our families was so powerful, enlightening and educational.

The Holocaust section was so powerful. I walked away feeling so very sad that the Jewish History was comprised of such horror and hate, but also resiliency and hope. I do not think that I understood the true evil that

The study was done at Yale University by the psychologist Stanley Milgram. The study assessed the willingness of men from various jobs and levels of education, to obey an authority figure who directed them to follow through with actions that conflicted with their personal conscience. The study found that most of the participants were willing to inflict both injury and affliction even though it went against their moral compass. Two concepts came out of Milgram’s experiment, the theory of conformity and agentic state theory. The first concept conformity described the person who could not make decisions so would leave it up to the group. The second theory agentic was that people who carried out the wishes of the person in charge that they were no longer responsible for their actions. I also recalled the Stanford Prison experiment conducted by Phillip Zimbardo. The goal of the experiment was to shift the power between the guards and the prisoners, creating a sense of powerlessness and power shift. In both experiments the participant’s submitted to social pressure, reinforced by permitting some participants to feel more powerful than