Stanley Milgram Case Study

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In 1963, Stanley Milgram of Yale University created one of the most well- known and famous studies on obedience. Milgram conducted this study in order to figure out if there were similarities involving obedience in the systematic killing of Jews from 1933 to 1945. The question Milgram was trying to answer was whether the Nazi's excuse for the murders of millions was a valid excuse and if the mass killings were because of orders the Nazi’s obeyed. According to Milgram, “obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose”. Essentially obedience means compliance with an order, request, or law or submission to another's authority. Obedience in society is both a good and bad thing in terms of it being an act of kindness or in terms of it being destruction. Milgram then creates a procedure consisting of a subject shocking a victim. This electric shock is caused by a generator used with 30 marked voltage levels that all range from 15 to 450 volts. In other words, these shocks vary from “Slight shock to Danger: Severe Shock”. The subject administers these shocks to the victim and if at a certain point in the experiment the subject refuses to go on with the experiment resulting in the act of "disobedience". Continuing the experiment is considered “obedience”. The subjects of his experiment were 40 males from New Haven and the surrounding areas. Participants all were from ages 20 to 50. Subjects responded from a newspaper advertisement and mail solicitations and believed that they were participating in a study of memory and learning at Yale. The men of this study all had a wide variety of jobs and all ranged in education levels. The men were paid $4.50 to participate in the study and no matter the ... ... middle of paper ... ...res; it is how we are raised to obey authority such as parents or teachers. Some have argued that individuals today are more aware of the dangers of following authority than they were in the early 1960s. This experiment is biased because the participants are all male and all were volunteers. Milgram points out that the majority of the subjects knew what they were doing was not right or moral. Opting out of the experiment would be wrong on the victim’s part because they agreed to go through even after they knew they were going to be the victim. Overall, disobedience was hard to do in an experiment such as this once. Participants felt as though they had a duty to fulfill this study and that they had to go through with it. Participants put their morals aside for this experiment which is why the outcome of victims that made it to the final series of shocks was so high.

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