More handpicked essays just for you.
Review of Stanley Milgram's Experiments on Obedience
Review of Stanley Milgram's Experiments on Obedience
Review of Stanley Milgram's Experiments on Obedience
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
“The Perils of Obedience” was written by Stanley Milgram in 1974. In the essay he describes his experiments on obedience to authority. I feel as though this is a great psychology essay and will be used in psychology 101 classes for generations to come. The essay describes how people are willing to do almost anything that they are told no matter how immoral the action is or how much pain it may cause.
This essay even though it was written in 1974 is still used today because of its historical importance. The experiment attempts to figure out why the Nazi’s followed Hitler. Even though what he told them to do was morally wrong and they did it anyway. If this essay can help figure out why Hitler was able to do what he was then able to do, then maybe psychologists can figure out how to prevent something like that from happening again.
“The Perils of Obedience” is about an experiment that was made to test the obedience of ordinary people. There are two people who come and perform in the lab, one is the subject or the teacher and the other is an actor or the learner. The teacher doesn’t know that the learner is an actor. They are there to see how far someone would go on causing someone pain just because they were told to do so the authority figure. The learner is given a list of word pairs and has to memorize them. Then he has to remember the second word of the pair when he hears the first word. If he is incorrect the “teacher” will shock him until he gets it rig...
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.
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
One cannot be obedient to one’s power without being disobedient to another. In his article, “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem,” Erich Fromm argues people obey authority to feel safe. When one obeys, they become an ambiguous part of a whole, no longer accountable for actions or left on their own. In Ian Parker’s article, “Obedience,” analyzing Milgram's experiment, he claims people obey orders when there is no second option. According to Parker, if someone obeys an order, but there is no alternative, their accountability is lessoned. The two articles can speak to the tomfoolery that takes place in the motion picture, Mean Girls, which highlights a typical high school under the regime of the queen bee, Regina George, with her followers Gretchen Weiners and Karen Smith; the regime is usurped by a new girl, Cady Heron. Under the scope of Parker and Fromm, it can be argued that Gretchen was not disobeying Regina when she realigned with Cady, but actually remaining obedient to the social order of high school.
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
If a person of authority ordered you inflict a 15 to 400 volt electrical shock on another innocent human being, would you follow your direct orders? That is the question that Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University tested in the 1960’s. Most people would answer “no,” to imposing pain on innocent human beings but Milgram wanted to go further with his study. Writing and Reading across the Curriculum holds a shortened edition of Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” where he displays an eye-opening experiment that tests the true obedience of people under authority figures. He observes that most people go against their natural instinct to never harm innocent humans and obey the extreme and dangerous instructions of authority figures. Milgram is well aware of his audience and organization throughout his article, uses quotes directly from his experiment and connects his research with a real world example to make his article as effective as possible.
The theme that has been attached to this story is directly relevant to it as depicted by the anonymous letters which the main character is busy writing secretly based on gossip and distributing them to the different houses. Considering that people have an impression of her being a good woman who is quiet and peaceful, it becomes completely unbecoming that she instead engages in very abnormal behavior. What makes it even more terrible is the fact that she uses gossip as the premise for her to propagate her hate messages not only in a single household but across the many different households in the estate where she stays.
Sammy, a young cashier at the local A & P Store in John Updike’s short story is a character that we see as someone who is ever changing and has deep level of subconscious thoughts and feelings. Sammy is well aware of his surroundings and the process of human nature, seeing as people watching is the thing he spend the most of his time doing. Throughout the story we start to see that Sammy has a subconscious disrespect for authority and hypocrisy.
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
“Without Conscience" by Robert D. Hare is one aimed towards making the general public aware of the many psychopaths that inhabit the world we live in. Throughout the book Hare exposes the reader to a number of short stories; all with an emphasis on a characteristic of psychopaths. Hare makes the claim that close monitoring of psychopathy are vital if we ever hope to gain a hold over Psychopathy- A disorder that affects not only the individual but also society itself. He also indicates one of the reasons for this book is order to correctly treat these individuals we have to be able to correctly identify who meets the criteria. His ultimate goal with the text is to alleviate some of the confusion in the increase in criminal activity by determining how my of this is a result of Psychopathy.
Human behaviorist’s have long studied changes in people’s behavior as it relates to obedience in authoritative relationships. Two of the most renowned obedience studies were conducted by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, in which they each tested reactions to authority using important variables that were manipulated throughout their experiments. However, some psychologists, like Dina Baumrind, a psychologist for the Institute of Human Development, believe experiments that test humans impetuous reactions should not be conducted unless the subject is well-informed of the purpose. Baumrinds, “Review of Stanley Milgrams Experiments on Obedience” criticizes the accuracy of Milgrams study and further explores the emotional response those submitted to testing inadvertently experience. While other psychologists, like Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University, believe even experimentation with known factors can produce the same psychological effect, as seen in Milgrams experiment. As Zimbardo notes in “The Stanford Prison Experiment”, even the voluntary role-playing of his study on obedience had a large impact on the subject’s mental-health, proving that Baumrind remains bias with her argument. While both Baumrind and Zimbardo care for the well-being of the subject during and after the experiment, Baumrind argues that all research, like Milgrams, must be conducted with consent of the subject, whereas Zimbardo views all types of experiments are crucial for developing human insight toward obedience to authority.
How far would you go to be obedient? At Yale University, Stanley Milgram set up an experiment testing how much pain a person would cause to an ordinary citizen, only with the reason of being told to do so by an experimental scientist. The subject is told that they are helping with an experiment on punishment-based learning and believe they are conducting this test on someone other than themself. What the subjects do not know is that the true experiment is testing them, not another person. The subjects send an increasing amount of pain to another person. If the subject wishes to discontinue, he must complete the experiment or clearly resist authority. What Milgram found in this study was that adults would go to severe lengths to obey their authority’s commands.
Individuals often yield to conformity when they are forced to discard their individual freedom in order to benefit the larger group. Despite the fact that it is important to obey the authority, obeying the authority can sometimes be hazardous especially when morals and autonomous thought are suppressed to an extent that the other person is harmed. Obedience usually involves doing what a rule or a person tells you to but negative consequences can result from displaying obedience to authority for example; the people who obeyed the orders of Adolph Hitler ended up killing innocent people during the Holocaust. In the same way, Stanley Milgram noted in his article ‘Perils of Obedience’ of how individuals obeyed authority and neglected their conscience reflecting how this can be destructive in experiences of real life. On the contrary, Diana Baumrind pointed out in her article ‘Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience’ that the experiments were not valid hence useless.