My Lai and the Perils of Obedience

989 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience” by Diana Baumrind

My Lai and the Perils of Obedience The My Lai massacre is probably one of the most infamous cases of atrocity carried out by U.S. military personnel. This paper will attempt to connect the actions of the American soldiers at My Lai with the study conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1974 on the impact authority has on obedience. My Lai was a hamlet in the Son My Village. The hamlet was marked on American maps as consisting of My Lai 1 through My Lai 6. The massacre actually occurred at Tu Cung, a sub-hamlet of My Lai. Task Force Barker was to conduct a three-day search and destroy operation beginning at 0730 on 16 March 1968, code named “Operation Muscatine” (Raimondo, p. 4). As the purpose of the mission might suggest, this was a search and destroy mission. Search and destroy mission were generally a reference used to identify a mission against an enemy combatant; not a civilian population. However, that is exactly what happened. Within four hours of making first contact with the village, the soldiers from Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Division had murdered over 400 unarmed Vietnamese men, women, and children. What turned seemingly normal, albeit soldiers, into merciless killers of innocent civilians. According to Stanley Milgram, the answer may be found in “Obedience to Authority.” Milgram believed that obedience was as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to (Milgram, Perils, p. 1). This is a significant factor in why people are generally reluctant to question authority. In 1974, Milgram set up an experiment at Yale University to test how much pain a person might inflict on another person simply because they were ordered to do so. The basic design of the exp... ... middle of paper ... ...e they were relieved of personal responsibility for the learner, they were more willing to apply increased voltage to the participant. The same can be said for the soldiers. Once they believed the order was to kill everything that moved, they were simply the means to that end. Although there are many contributing factors to this atrocity, when combined with the stresses of war, ordinary people can become agents of significant hostility. This is the underlying lesson to Milgram’s experiment and likely the underlying cause for the transformation of the seemingly normal soldiers of My Lai. When even the destructive effects of their actions become clear and they are asked to continue with this action, even though it is obviously incompatible with their fundamental standards of morality, few have the wherewithal to resist the desires of authority. Sources Cited:

Show More
Related

  • The Genocidal Killer in the Mirror” by Crispin Sartwell and Erich Fromm’s Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem

    1278 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the pursuit of safety, acceptance, and the public good, many atrocities have been committed in places such as Abu Ghraib and My Lai, where simple, generally harmless people became the wiling torturers and murderers of innocent people. Many claim to have just been following orders, which illustrates a disturbing trend in both the modern military and modern societies as a whole; when forced into an obedient mindset, many normal and everyday people can become tools of destruction and sorrow, uncaringly inflicting pain and death upon the innocent.

    Read More

  • A Summary of "The Perils of Obedience"

    525 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • What Combat Requires in Philip Caputo's Rumor of War

    1230 Words  | 3 Pages

    Laws exist to protect life and property; however, they are only as effective as the forces that uphold them. War is a void that exists beyond the grasps of any law enforcing agency and It exemplifies humankind's most desperate situation. It is an ethical wilderness exempt from civilized practices. In all respects, war is a primitive extension of man. Caputo describes the ethical wilderness of Vietnam as a place "lacking restraints, sanctioned to kill, confronted by a hostile country and a relentless enemy, we sank into a brutish state." Without boundaries, there is only a biological moral c...

    Read More

  • Comparative Analysis Of The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal

    1188 Words  | 3 Pages

    Comparative Analysis The power of blind obedience taints individuals’ ability to clearly distinguish between right and wrong in terms of obedience, or disobedience, to an unjust superior. In the article “The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism,” Marianne Szegedy-Maszak discusses the unwarranted murder of innocent individuals due to vague orders that did not survive with certainty. Szegedy-Maszak utilizes the tactics of authorization, routinization, and dehumanization, respectively, to attempt to justify the soldiers’ heinous actions (Szegedy-Maszak 76-77). In addition, “Just Do What the Pilot Tells You” by Theodore Dalrymple distinguishes between blind disobedience and blind obedience to authority and stating that neither is superior;

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime Of Obedience

    1262 Words  | 3 Pages

    The soldiers at My Lai were in an environment conducive to obeying orders. They have been trained to follow the orders of their commanders; respect for authority is weighed heavily upon. It is hard for them to disobey because they have been integrated into the social structure of the military and when in the middle of a war they would have nowhere to turn if they choose to disobey the orders of their commanders. The consequences of disobedience for them could be sent to death. A classic example of the power of authoritative factors is provided by Stanley Milgram’s

    Read More

  • Comparative Analysis of A Few Good Men

    1375 Words  | 3 Pages

    Kelman, Herbert C., Hamilton, V. Lee. “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience”. Writing & Reading for ACP Composition. Ed. Thomas E. Leahey and Christine R. Farris. New York: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2009. 266-277. Print.

    Read More

  • The Perils of Obedience, by Stanley Milgram

    1490 Words  | 3 Pages

    If a person of authority ordered you to inflict a 15 to 400 volt electrical shock on another innocent human being, would you follow your direct orders? That is the question that Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, tested in the 1960’s. Most people would answer “no,” to imposing pain on innocent human beings, but Milgram wanted to go further with his study. Writing and Reading across the Curriculum holds a shortened edition of Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” where he displays an eye-opening experiment that tests the true obedience of people under authority figures.

    Read More

  • Compare And Contrast The Perils Of Obedience

    1257 Words  | 3 Pages

    The guards began mistreating the prisoners, not physically, but emotionally and psychologically, taking advantage of the power and authority appointed to them by the experimenter (Zimbardo 109). Crimes of obedience and mistreatment of other human beings are not only found in Milgrim’s and Zimbardo’s experiments. In 1968, U.S. troops massacred over 500 villagers in My Lai.

    Read More

  • The Influence Of Obedience In A Few Good Men

    1024 Words  | 3 Pages

    Obedience is a widely debated topic today with many different standpoints from various brilliant psychologists. Studying obedience is still important today to attempt to understand why atrocities like the Holocaust or the My Lai Massacre happened so society can learn from them and not repeat history. There are many factors that contribute to obedience including situation and authority. The film A Few Good Men, through a military court case, shows how anyone can fall under the influence of authority and become completely obedient to conform to the roles that they have been assigned. A Few Good Men demonstrates how authority figures can control others and influence them into persuading them to perform a task considered immoral or unethical.

    Read More

  • The My Lai Massacre

    2698 Words  | 6 Pages

    On March 16, 1968, in the Quang Ngai region of Vietnam, specifically My Lai, the United States military was involved in an appalling slaughter of approximately 500 Vietnamese civilians. There are numerous arguments as to why this incident even had the capacity to occur. Although some of the arguments seem valid, can one really make excuses for the slaughter of innocent people? The company that was responsible for the My Lai incident was the Charlie Company and throughout the company there were many different accounts of what happened that reprehensible day. Therefore there are a few contradictions about what had occurred, such as what the commanding officers exact instructions for the soldiers were. Even with these contradictions the results are obvious. The question that must be posed is whether these results make the American soldiers involved that day “guilty”. There is the fact that the environment of the Vietnam War made it very confusing to the soldiers exactly who the enemy was, as well as providing a pent up frustration due to the inability to even engage in real combat with the enemy. If this is the case though, why did some soldiers with the same frustrations refuse the orders and sit out on the action, why did some cry while firing, and why then did one man go so far as to place himself between the Vietnamese and the firing soldiers? If these men who did not see the sense in killing innocents were right with their actions, then how come the ones who did partake were all found not guilty in court? The questions can keep going back and forth on this issue, but first what happened that day must be examined.

    Read More

  • Ordinary Men by Browning

    1625 Words  | 4 Pages

    ...test, it is hard not to draw some parallels. Milgram noticed that if people did not have direct contact with the people they were inflicting pain on, two-thirds of the subjects inflicted what was considered extreme pain. If they had visual and voice feedback, only forty percent obeyed orders. The number fell to thirty percent if they were in direct contact with the person they were shocking. Browning also points out that the social pressures of conformity were quite apparent. "Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets the moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?" (Browning, 189) In closing, these men, who appeared to be quite ordinary, became extraordinary in their brutality and killing, no matter what the reason. Decidedly, their contribution to the genocide was quite significant. It is a shame that many received little, or no punishment for the slaughter they participated in.

    Read More

  • The Vietnam War

    1443 Words  | 3 Pages

    There were many events that lead up the Vietnam War, it started in 1945 with the hostilities between the French and Vietminh. “Geopolitical Strategy, economics, domestic US politics, and cultural arrogance shaped the growing American involvement in Vietnam” (Anderson 1). As a matter of fact, the Vietnam War was several wars, but it was not until 1962 that America had their first combat mission, however, Americans were killed during ambushes by the Vietnamese before the first combat mission. There is much controversy over the reasons for the Vietnam War, supported by the several different books and articles written about the war. “The most famous atrocity occurred in a tiny hamlet called My Lai in March 1968” (Detzer 127). History shows that the reaction of many Americans to the attack by US soldiers on the village of My Lai during the Vietnam War was opposition, and the actions of the US soldiers during the My Lai Massacre will be forever remembered as a significant part of the Vietnam War and American History.

    Read More

  • Blindly Obeying Authority

    1789 Words  | 4 Pages

    Individuals often yield to conformity when they are forced to discard their individual freedom in order to benefit the larger group. Despite the fact that it is important to obey the authority, obeying the authority can sometimes be hazardous especially when morals and autonomous thought are suppressed to an extent that the other person is harmed. Obedience usually involves doing what a rule or a person tells you to but negative consequences can result from displaying obedience to authority for example; the people who obeyed the orders of Adolph Hitler ended up killing innocent people during the Holocaust. In the same way, Stanley Milgram noted in his article ‘Perils of Obedience’ of how individuals obeyed authority and neglected their conscience reflecting how this can be destructive in experiences of real life. On the contrary, Diana Baumrind pointed out in her article ‘Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience’ that the experiments were not valid hence useless.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Perils Of Obedience Stanley Milgram

    1107 Words  | 3 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • Short Summary of Vietnam

    470 Words  | 1 Pages

    The paranoia and fear of death never left them. The My Lai Massacre occurred in 1968, when the village of My Lai was completely destroyed, although it did not contain a single enemy troop. Over a hundred villagers were slaughtered. It became clearer to Americans how soldiers were losing control, and how there was no easy way to win this war.

    Read More

More about My Lai and the Perils of Obedience

Open Document