Summary Of The Behavioral Study Of Obedience By Stanley Milgram

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Stanley Milgram’s article “Behavioral Study of Obedience” was published in volume 67 of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. The article discusses the experiment led by Milgram to determine how willing a person is to harm another individual if ordered to do so by a superior individual. Milgram based this study of off the question that asked “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” The participants of this experiment were males between the ages of 20 and 50 who had attained different levels of education and worked in various occupations. They were under the impression that they would be participating in a study of learning and memory at Yale. As payment …show more content…

It stays on track with relevant information from introduction to conclusion, and with practice reading experimental research articles, the reader should have little to no difficulty understanding the language and terminology of the article. The author does an exceptional job explaining how the predicted results and the actual results of the experiment are so different from each other; he offers this concept to the reader through use of numerical data and by discussing how the experimenters believed morals affected obedience prior to and following the experiment. Results are communicated though the use of a table that is easy for any reader, experienced or unexperienced, to understand. The ethical soundness of the study is questionable, however Milgram does highlight some of the precautions taken by the experimenters to assure the well-being of their participants. At the end of the article, he lists multiple possibilities for why the observed amounts of obedience could have been so extreme, however, the article still leaves many questions unanswered. Regardless of the ability of this article to be generalized for an entire population or answer many difficult questions, it still offers insight into an experiment that provided evidence that actions that violate personal moral can be influenced to occur if ordered by some form of authoritative

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