Stanley Milgram's Obedience To Authority

Stanley Milgram was born on August 15th, 1933. His father was Hungarian, his mother Romanian, and they both immigrated to America during World War I. Milgram’s father owned a bakery and worked there until he died, providing an honest income. Upon his death, his mother took over and looked after the bakery. Milgram went to James Monroe High School and graduated in only three years. He was always a highly motivated student and a great leader among his friends.

After high school, Milgram went on to further pursue education and one year after his father’s death, in 1954, Milgram obtained a bachelor’s degree in political science from Queens College in New York City. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard in social psychology in 1960. He then became an

Parental injunctions are also the source of moral imperatives. However, when a parent instructs a child to follow a moral injunction, he is, in fact, doing two things. First, he presents a specific ethical content to be followed. Second, he trains the child to comply with authoritative injunctions per se”. Milgram suggests that when a parent instructs or commands their child about something, they are implying an implicit and explicit imperative. For example, when a parent tells their child not to play too rough with their younger sibling, the child automatically receives two messages. The first is how to treat their younger sibling, and the second implicit imperative, is to obey the command itself. This is only the beginning of many more methods of conditioning a child will experience in their life. For example, when a child emerges out from the nesting of their family, they will enter another system of authority, which is school. At school, a child learns how to function in society, their actions regulated by their teachers. The child will soon grow older and enter the workforce, where their boss must permit everything they say or do. In this way, Milgrim suggests that the very basis of our morals and ideals are innately connected to having an obedient attitude. The groundbreaking results Milgram found from his obedience study can be explained using this view that people are conditioned early on in life to obey authority figures in order to achieve success and acceptance. This can explain why over 50 percent of all participants obeyed the command of delivering severe electrical shocks to someone who they believed was undeserving. It seems that it does not matter whether one is male or female, young