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Brief summary of milgram's experiment
A classic series of experiments by Stanley Milgram demonstrated the profound effect of…
Brief summary of milgram's 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.
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.
In this article “The Pearls of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram asserts that obedience to authority is a common response for many people in today’s society, often diminishing an individuals beliefs or ideals. Stanley Milgram designs an experiment to understand how strong a person’s tendency to obey authority is, even though it is amoral or destructive. Stanley Milgram bases his experiment on three people: a learner, teacher, and experimenter. The experimenter is simply an overseer of the experiment, and is concerned with the outcome of punishing the learner. The teacher, who is the subject of the experiment, is made to believe the electrical shocks are real; he is responsible for obeying the experimenter and punishing the learner for incorrect answers by electrocuting him from an electric shock panel that increases from 15 to 450 volts.
Upon analyzing his experiment, Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, concludes that people will drive to great lengths to obey orders given by a higher authority. The experiment, which included ordinary people delivering “shocks” to an unknown subject, has raised many questions in the psychological world. Diana Baumrind, a psychologist at the University of California and one of Milgram’s colleagues, attacks Milgram’s ethics after he completes his experiment in her review. She deems Milgram as being unethical towards the subjects he uses for testing and claims that his experiment is irrelevant to obedience. In contrast, Ian Parker, a writer for New Yorker and Human Sciences, asserts Milgram’s experiments hold validity in the psychological world. While Baumrind focuses on Milgram’s ethics, Parker concentrates more on the reactions, both immediate and long-term, to his experiments.
With this research, Milgram uses two participants that were a confederate and an actor who looked authoritative. As each participant participated in the experiment, each one was to draw pieces of paper from a hat that determined if they were either a teacher or a learner. Yet, the drawing was manipulated so that the subject would become a teacher and the associate was the learner. The learner was confined to a chair and wired up with electrodes that were attached to the shock generator in the adjacent room. There were questions that were proposed to the learner and for every answer that was wrong, the subject was to conduct an electric shock.
A former Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram, administered an experiment to test the obedience of "ordinary" people as explained in his article, "The Perils of Obedience". An unexpected outcome came from this experiment by watching the teacher administer shocks to the learner for not remembering sets of words. By executing greater shocks for every wrong answer created tremendous stress and a low comfort levels within the "teacher", the one being observed unknowingly, uncomfortable and feel the need to stop. However, with Milgram having the experimenter insisting that they must continue for the experiments purpose, many continued to shock the learner with much higher voltages.The participants were unaware of many objects of the experiment until
The learners were a part of Milgram’s study and were taken into a room with electrodes attached to their arms. The teachers were to ask questions to the learners and if they answered incorrectly, they were to receive a 15-450 voltage electrical shock. Although the learners were not actually shocked, the teachers believed they were inflicting real harm on these innocent people.... ... middle of paper ...
In “ Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments On Obedience” by Diana Baumrind, and in “Obedience” by Ian Parker, the writers claim that Milgram’s Obedience is ethically wrong and work of evil because of the potential harm that the subjects of the experiment had. While Baumrind’s article focused only on the Subjects of the experiment, Parker’s article talked about both immediate and long term response to experiment along with the reaction of both the general public and Milgram’s colleagues, he also talks about the effect of the experiment on Milgram himself. Both articles discuss has similar points, they also uses Milgram’s words against him and while Baumrind attacks Milgram, Parker shows the reader that experiment
The experiment was to see if people would follow the orders of an authority figure, even if the orders that were given proved to cause pain to the person taking the test. In the “Milgram Experiment” by Saul McLeod, he goes into detail about six variations that changed the percentage of obedience from the test subject, for example, one variable was that the experiment was moved to set of run down offices rather than at Yale University. Variables like these changed the results dramatically. In four of these variations, the obedience percentage was under 50 percent (588). This is great evidence that it is the situation that changes the actions of the individual, not he or she’s morals.
By looking at Milgram’s experiment we can see how certain elements play a part in making our decisions. Like when the Teacher asked the experimenter who was going to take responsibly for shocking the learner. The Teacher was more willing to continue the experiment when the experimenter was in a lab coat instead of street clothes. From the experimenter wearing the lab coat the teacher saw him as superior individual making the teacher more likely to obey. Whereas the experimenter wearing street clothes made the teacher uneasy to obey his command to continue shocking the
Those participating were also led to believe that their contribution went to a worthy cause – to advance knowledge and understanding of learning processes. They were also told that the victim (the learner), was taking part voluntarily meaning they had an obligation to fulfill even if it became unpleasant (also applies to the teacher). Additionally, the volunteers were being paid, which created a further sense of commitment to the investigation. Those who took part also had little knowledge about how psychological experiments ran, as Milgram’s study was most likely the first one they ever partook in. Therefore, they had little knowledge about the rights and expectations of the situation, and felt more confined than if they had been through a similar experience prior.
The experiment consists of two people that take part in a study of memory learning, one of them referred to as the "Teacher" and the other as the "Learner." The experimenter explains that the study's main goal is to observe the effect of punishment on learning. The learner will be seated in something similar to the electric chair, his arms will be strapped and an electrode will be attached to his wrist. The learner will be told that he will be tested on his ability to remember the second word of a pair when he hears the first one again. If he makes a mistake, he will then receive electric shocks of increasing intensity.
In finding that people are not naturally aggressive. Milgram now alters the experiment to find out why do people act the way they do. He compiled the experiment to answer, why do people obey authority, even when the actions are against their own morals.
Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience are the focus of Theodore Dalrymple and Ian Parker. Theodore Dalrymple is a British physician that composed his views of the Milgram experiment with “Just Do What the Pilot Tells You” in the New Statesman in July 1999 (254). He distinguishes between blind obedience and blind disobedience stating that an extreme of either is not good, and that a healthy balance between the two is needed. On the other hand, Ian Parker is a British writer who wrote “Obedience” for an issue of Granta in the fall of 2000. He discusses the location of the experiment as a major factor and how the experiment progresses to prevent more outcomes. Dalrymple uses real-life events to convey his argument while Parker exemplifies logic from professors to state his point.
Summary of the Experiment In Stanley Milgram’s ‘The Perils of Obedience’, Milgram conducted experiments with the objective of knowing “how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist" (Milgram 317). In the experiments, two participants would go into a warehouse where the experiments were being conducted and inside the warehouse, the subjects would be marked as either a teacher or a learner. A learner would be hooked up to a kind of electric chair and would be expected to do as he is being told by the teacher and do it right because whenever the learner said the wrong word, the intensity of the electric shocks increased. Similar procedure was undertaken on the teacher and the results of the experiments showed conclusively that a large number of people would go against their personal conscience in obedience to authority (Milgram 848).... ...
In 1961, Stanley Milgram, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University wanted to study and observe how people would react to authority if asked to continue on a task even if it meant hurting another human being. The experiment first began at night in a small shadowy room. For the experiment, it required three people, there was first the volunteer which was a random person from the street who was considered the teacher in the experiment. Then their was the two actors who Milgram had payed them to be in the experiment, one of the two actors was the leaner who was strapped to the electric