Punishment in the Milgram Obedience Experiment

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The Milgram obedience experiment began in July of 1961. The experiment was conducted by Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University. The experiment was met to measure the willingness of participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform an experiment that was against their moral views. Milgrams participants for his experiments were from all backgrounds. The subjects ranged from college graduates to people that had not finished grade school. (Milgram’s Experiment on Obedience to Authority)

They were told the experiment would study the effects of punishment on a person’s learning ability. They were offered money for participating in the experiment. Three people were in a room the experimenter, and his two subjects. The subjects drew a piece of paper to assign their role, teacher or learner. The drawing was fixed so that the participants were always the teacher and the learner which was an actor always received that role. (Milgram’s Experiment on Obedience to Authority)

The Experimenter and the teacher were in one room with the machine that gave the shocks to the learner. This machine had switches labeled from 15 to 450 volts that stepped up the voltage in 15 volt increments. The learner, which was in a separate room, was read a list of items to memorize, the learner would then answer the teacher by pressing one of four buttons that lit up numbers for the teacher to see. The teachers were asked to shock the learner when questions were answered incorrectly stepping up the voltage for each wrong answer. The only real shock was a single 45-volt shock given to each teacher. This was to let the teachers see how the shocks would feel. (Milgram’s Experiment on Obedience to Authority)

The Stanford Priso...

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...completely obedient to the guards, other than a few of the prisoners that acted out. The experiment was cut short after only six days when Zimbardo decided that it was getting out of hand. Both of these show that man has a dark side that will come out when provoked. (The Famous Stanford Prison Experiment)

If I had to make changes to the experiments In the Milgram experiment I would make the punishment harsher for the learner to see if people would inflict very severe bodily harm to another person. With the prison experiment I would have let the prisoners and guards switch roles with prisoners at the end of the experiment to see if they would treat the new prisoners any less harsh than they were treated. I don’t think that the experiments would be successful if they were reproduced today. There are many people who know about them and it could result in bad results.

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