Effects Of Milgram's Experiment On Civil Disobedience

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Humans have been socially networked with each other since the time they have been created. Civilization was fashioned by humans interacting with one another. With this interaction with others and communal peers, “social man is a somnambulist” (Asch 61). In other terms, when humans become social, they are really “sleep walking”, or following the crowd, even though belief in the western world has it that people are “free” to choose for themselves. This sleepwalking factor then turns individuals into mindless ants. It only occurs because a human is a social animal and with that comes, social pressures and authoritative figures.

Stanley Milgram studied at Harvard University and tested how social humans would react in a certain situation. Milgram …show more content…

A different scientist who redid this experiment found that 85 percent of his subjects were obedient (Milgram 42). As a result it was evident that individuals will succumb to authoritative figures. Strudler and Warren explain that the subjects acted the way they did because of authority heuristics, which is the reliance on an authority figure (57). In Milgram’s experiment, the scientist was the authority figure in the experiment and the subject trusted his/her judgment because they believed that the scientist knows what he/she is doing. Even though the subject believed they have “free” will in their choices, the pressures of the authority figure “forced” the individual into believing that they had no other choice but to continue, or they just trusted the decision of the scientist. Those individuals did believe that they had their own choice to leave when they can but they stilled stay and performed the shock even if they were reluctant. Milgram explains his results: “for many, obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct” …show more content…

Asch research was to test how a person would react to group pressure upon the minds of the individuals. Subjects were put into a room with six to eight of their peers. After several tests, the subject would then say the wrong answer and agree with the group. In ordinary circumstances, people would normally only make a mistake less than 1 percent of the time but during these experiments the individual would make mistakes about 36.8 percent of the time (Asch 64). There were extremes of course but that meant that on average people would fall into group pressure even though the group might be obviously wrong. The subjects are letting the group decide for them and they are not deciding for themselves. Conformity and unconformity is based on this same principle. Conformists are defined as those who will give up there own free will to follow others and unconformists is defined as those who do not follow others. Both groups are conformist in sense; the unconformists are conformist but just to the type of society that is different than that of the conformist. If the unconformists group together they are in sense conforming. As humans, we live our lives in groups. Not many individuals are happy by themselves for a long time (Lessing 37). Groups are everywhere our lives and we just need to find ways to deal with it but still being able to decide

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