Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist, conducted an experiment in 1963 about human obedience that was deemed as one of the most controversial social psychology experiments ever (Blass). Ian Parker, a writer for the New Yorker and Human Sciences, and Diana Baumrind, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, responded to Stanley Milgram’s experiment. These articles represent how the scientific community reviews and scrutinizes each other’s work to authenticate experiment results. Baumrind focuses on the moral and ethical dilemma while, Parker focuses more on the experiment’s actual application.
The experiment’s original intent was to determine if society would simply obey to authority when put under pressure by an authoritative figure. Milgram put a twist on the experiment asking the age-old question of, “if the Germans during WWII were simply obeying to authority when carrying out the Holocaust or were they all acting on their own”(Blass). The test subject, or teacher, would administer electric shocks to the learner, a paid actor, when the learner incorrectly answered the word pairings. The teacher thought the learner was receiving electric shocks when in reality the learner was not receiving any shocks. An instructor, the authoritative figure, was sitting behind the teacher reassuring the teacher that the shocks may be painful but would not inflict permanent damage. Throughout the experiment, the teacher can be seen looking back towards the instructor for permission on whether to continue or stop (ABC).The teacher instructed the learner to continue even when the learner cried out in pain and begged for the experiment to stop (ABC). Sixty-five percent of the time, the teacher continued until he administered the ...
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... Baumrind’s idea that if Milgram were to fully disclose the experiment would it still produces the same results as the original experiment? Milgram does arrange for a friendly meeting between the teacher and the learner after the experiment. The meeting was supposed to relieve all tensions that are burdened upon the teacher throughout the experiment. Baumrind does not believe that this simple meeting between the teacher and learner was enough to relieve all tensions of the experiment (227). She simply suggests that Milgram should have offered a psychiatric evaluation or therapy to the patients after participating in the experiment (227). The ethical treatment that Milgram showed towards his patients denied him his APA membership. “The ethical furor preyed on Milgram’s mind – in the opinion of Arthur G. Miller, it may have contributed to his premature death…”(234).
In Lauren Slater’s book Opening Skinner’s Box, the second chapter “Obscura” discusses Stanley Milgram, one of the most influential social psychologists. Milgram created an experiment which would show just how far one would go when obeying instructions from an authoritative figure, even if it meant harming another person while doing so. The purpose of this experiment was to find justifications for what the Nazi’s did during the Holocaust. However, the experiment showed much more than the sociological reasoning behind the acts of genocide. It showed just how much we humans are capable of.
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.
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.
At first Milgram believed that the idea of obedience under Hitler during the Third Reich was appalling. He was not satisfied believing that all humans were like this. Instead, he sought to prove that the obedience was in the German gene pool, not the human one. To test this, Milgram staged an artificial laboratory "dungeon" in which ordinary citizens, whom he hired at $4.50 for the experiment, would come down and be required to deliver an electric shock of increasing intensity to another individual for failing to answer a preset list of questions. Meyer describes the object of the experiment "is to find the shock level at which you disobey the experimenter and refuse to pull the switch" (Meyer 241). Here, the author is paving the way into your mind by introducing the idea of reluctance and doubt within the reader. By this point in the essay, one is probably thinking to themselves, "Not me. I wouldn't pull the switch even once." In actuality, the results of the experiment contradict this forerunning belief.
Obedience is when you do something you have been asked or ordered to do by someone in authority. As little kids we are taught to follow the rules of authority, weather it is a positive or negative effect. Stanley Milgram, the author of “The perils of Obedience” writes his experiment about how people follow the direction of an authority figure, and how it could be a threat. On the other hand Diana Baumrind article “Review of Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience,” is about how Milgram’s experiment was inhumane and how it is not valid. While both authors address how people obey an authority figure, Milgram focuses more on how his experiment was successful while Baumrind seems more concerned more with how Milgram’s experiment was flawed and
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.
Stanley Milgram selected 40 college participants aged 20-50 to take part in the experiment at Yale University. Milgram says, “The point of the experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measureable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim” (632). Although the 40 men or women thought that they were in a drawing to see who would be the “teacher” and the “learner,” the drawing was fixed. The learners were a part of Milgram’s study and 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 being shocked, the teachers believed t...
Milgram’s experiment started shortly after the trial of Adolf Eichmann began. Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi who tortured many Jews during the Holocaust, and had others under his hand do whatever he told them to do. Milgram decided to plan a study to merely see if the followers of E...
The experiments on obedience conducted by Stanley Milgram shed a previously unforeseen light on human nature and the evil tendencies therein. Since it was conducted, many professionals have reviewed Milgram 's work and inserted their own opinions into the work. One of these many is Ian Parker, who, in his article titled "Obedience," critiques Milgram 's experiment with other professionals, thus stating that the experiment is corrupted and false in almost any way conceivable. Later, Parker states that the comparison asserted by Milgram to the Holocaust is quite a stretch, asserting that the Holocaust was nothing even near what was studied by Milgram (Parker 97). Many other established psychologists published their own works on this controversial
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).... ...
n hypothesis of the experiment is that the group containing four members will perform better than the group containing two members. This is the foundation from which we have conducted our experiment.
Such as in The Crucible when Mary tries to convince the court that the other girls are lying to the court about the many people accused for witchcraft. She, in the end, flees from John Proctor and falsely proclaims to the people of Salem that he is a witch himself because she knows she is now vulnerable to being arrested for lying to the court. No matter what time period this is going on. The Milgram Experiment is a demonstration that shows people will obey authority simply because they are the authority and won't do the right thing because the authority told them what the right thing is. countless teachers are put to the test. The experimenter would instruct the teacher, which is shocking the ?learner?, that they must read a series of questions that the ?learner? must answer, if the question is wrong, the teacher must shock him and increase the voltage while sitting in a separated room. In reality the ?learner? is an actor, which will be unharmed. The real experiment is how long the teachers will continue as instructed to cause pain to the actor.
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...
Testing obedience is a difficult task, and psychologists disagree on the ethical boundaries of testing the human psyche. Stanley Milgram and Diana Baumrind are two psychologists that disagree on the effectiveness of several obedience experiments conducted by Milgram. The experiments were conducted in 1963 to test the obedience of a variety on individuals from different social classes and genders. The subjects volunteered to enter a laboratory and assume the role of a teacher, where they read word pairs to a learner and test his knowledge by shocking the learner when he answers incorrectly (Milgram 78). An experimenter provokes the teacher to administer shocks of increasing voltage to the learner, causing more than half of the subjects to deliver
Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience to authority-sometimes referred to as the "shock" studies-are the most influential and controversial in modern social psychology. They have affected fields as varied as law, business, medicine and the military. Plays, films and songs have been based on the experiments, and well known authors such as Doris Lessing and Arthur Koestler have written about them at length. Within academic social psychology, it would be difficult to overestimate their impact. In social psychology textbooks, a significant study is usually described in just a couple of sentences, or at most a paragraph, but the obedience experiments nearly always receive pages of coverage.The obedience studies indelib...