Milgram’s Destructive Obedience

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Stanley Milgram was a social psychologist best known for an experiment he did regarding destructive obedience (Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2011). According to McLeod, Milgram had originally set out to prove that Germans were somehow more obedient than Americans. This was a short while after WWII had finished and the horrors committed by the Nazis under Hitler’s authority had been learned. His experimental results were contradictory to the results predicted by fellow psychiatrists, college students and some adults of various occupations. They had predicted that very few people would obey an order that would harm another person; however, the actual results proved quite the opposite. Instead of proving that German’s were more obedient, Milgram opened the door to the possibility that anyone is capable of carrying out orders that would harm another person (2007). Douglas Navarick expanded on the experiment’s results and derived a three-stage model for defiance and withdrawal (2012). After comparing the three sources on the previously mentioned topic, it is my belief that the peer reviewed journal (Navarick, 2012) is the most credible. Its credibility is largely accredited to the established requirements of publication in the journal it is found in.

Hockenbury and Hockenbury summarized Milgram’s experiments as simply as they could. The test subject was led to believe that the second participant was as uniformed as they were and that their roles in the experiment were chosen at random. They were told that the experiment was about learning and memory and the effect punishment has on them. The test subject was given the role of “teacher” and the other participant given the role of “learner” seemingly at random. The second partici...

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... it means avoiding personal discomfort. A source is considered credible if it is accepted by general consensus of the experts of the field it concerns. It should also show the scientific facts that support it. A standalone source that does not show any form of reference to other psychologists that agree with or support his/her theory would not be considered as credible.

Works Cited

Hockenbury, D., & Hockenbury, S. (2011). Discovering Psychology (5th ed.). New

York: Worth.

McLeod, S. A. (2007). Simply Psychology; Obedience in Psychology. Retrieved 25

March 2012, from http://www.simplypsychology.org/obedience.html

Navarick, D. J. (2012). Historical Psychology and the Milgram Paradigm: Tests of an Experimentally Derived Model of Defiance Using Accounts of Massacres by Nazi Reserve Police Battalion 101. Psychological Record, 62(1), 133-154.

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