In Replicating Milgram (The Open University, 2014), Milgram explains how he set up his obedience experiment. His aim was to get a volunteer, a ‘teacher’ to inflict increasing amounts of pain, through electric shocks, to another volunteer a ‘learner’ and to see when the ‘teacher’ would turn to the researcher, the ‘authority figure’ and ask to stop. Unknown to ‘the teacher’, the ‘learner’ and the ‘authority figure’ were aware of the real purpose of the experiment; the ‘teacher’ was told it was to study the effect of punishment on learning, and genuinely thought that they were inflicting pain on the ‘learner’ sat in another room. It was this deception and the emotional stress it generated to the ‘teacher’ that prompted the ethical issues debate…
Nearly half a century after they were conducted, Milgram’s (1963, 1965, 1974) obedience studies remain among psychology’s most widely known and most often discussed experiments. Briefly, under the guise of a learning study, an experimenter instructed participants to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to a ‘‘learner’’ when the learner made mistakes on a memory task. Although in reality no shocks were delivered, participants were instructed to start with a 15-volt shock for the learner’s first mistake and to increase the voltage in 15-volt increments for each successive mistake. In the basic procedure (Experiment 5), participants could hear the learner’s vocal protests and demands to be set free through the wall that separated…
In 1963, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted a series of social psychology experiments to study the conditions under which the people are obedient to authorities and personal conscience. The purpose of his experiment was to determine whether or not people were particularly obedient to the higher authority who instructed them to perform various acts even if they violate their own morals and ethics. It was one of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology as it has inspired other researchers to explore what makes people question authority and more importantly, what leads them to follow orders. There were several replications of his experiment and the results were identical to those reported by Milgram about how…
It has been found by Milgram that people obey for four main reasons these are; legitimate authority, the momentum of compliance, the agentic shift and passivity.…
The Stanley Milgram experiment takes normal everyday people and gives them orders to do horrible…
The Bobo doll experiment was essentially about getting children to watch an adult act aggressively towards a Bobo doll, children's behaviour was then measured after seeing the adult being rewarded punished or suffer no consequences for beating up the doll. it shows that children not only learn from being rewarded or punished for their own actions, which is behaviourism, they can learn from watching someone else being rewarded or punished, this is called observational learning.…
It is clearly shown when the difference in people's malicious behavior when shocking the students in the presence of authority and when given the freedom to choose the level of shock. The thesis of Milgram's essay was that obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency; indeed, a potent impulse overriding reining ethics, sympathy and moral conduct is right on the dot. He also discusses the extreme willingness of man to obey authority at any length. This shows that "ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process." This is proven by the fact that the majority of people were willing to shock students almost to the assumed point of death when instructed to do so by a…
An advertisement was placed in a newspaper to ask for volunteers, which inspired 296 people to respond to the advertisement. However, Milgram was aiming for a larger sample size, therefore invitation letters were posted out to several thousand people, with approximately 12 % of return rate. Participants ranged between 20 and 50 years old from varying occupations. Misleading the participants, Milgram told them that the aim of the study is to determine ‘the effect of punishment on learning’ (Milgram, 1974). However the true purpose of the study was to identify how far would participants go to comply with the authority (the experimenter) before disobeying the authority…
Stanley Milgram was an extremely famous psychologist who was best known for his groundbreaking experiment on the subject of obedience during the 1960s. Milgram began his career as a psychologist just around the time that the horrifying truth of the concentration camps came out. The fact that almost an entire nation obeyed one man, who commanded them to do inhumane and grotesque acts to other human beings intrigued Stanley Milgram. He became even more interested when he began watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who simply did not seem to be the appalling monster that many people expected and portrayed him to be. In fact, Milgram described Eichmann as being less of a “sadistic monster…[and] that he came closer to being an uninspired bureaucrat…
That theory is along the lines of that is how people are raised so they know no better. They assume that someone is in a position of authority for a reason and they will follow the orders handed down even if they conflict with their own moral views in some cases. It could also have to do with the fact that some people just have a deep hatred and anger in them and want to release it and use the cover of authority to do so. This is clearly visible in the movie A Few Good Men. The soldiers are taught to follow orders so they do not question Col. Jessep when he orders them to give a code red to P.F.C. Santiago. In the Milgram experiment it is possible to see how some people may have a deep aggression down inside as some were very willing to take it to the maximum of 450 volts and even continue after the learner went silent. All of these things come together to try to explain why people will follow the orders of authority so…
In my opinion this article was a very good article. It covered the bases of the experiment without giving to much information but no too little at the same time. The experiment could have been a very hard peace to cover but Milgram did a very good job of covering it. This experiment was kind of a weird experiment, but the results were absolutely astonishing. It is crazy to me how much we let people influence our lives and how we let the control us. Some people in this experiment would shock people all the way up to 450v. All because someone with fake authority to them too. This experiment shows up that we really are influenced but the people over us, even if what they are telling us to do it something bad. I think that everyone should read…
As per recent research done by the U.S Psychology department, it shows “there is a positive correlation between the volume of cream consumed per capita in the US and the rate of drowning deaths in the U.S.”…
He set out to prove that individuals would obey with the request of authority figures. McLeod in his summary states, “Milgram was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities for example, Germans in WWII.” (McLeod, The Milgram Experiment, 2007) The experiment was carried out by asking participants/teachers to deliver a series of electrical shocks to another person when a question was answered incorrectly. Also, if a mistake was made, the teacher could deliver an increased voltage level to the student. The general findings were that individuals who were going to disobey were those who responded not to the learner’s cries of pain but to the learners request to be set free. People are more likely to obey if there is an authority figure there to take the blame. “The power of legitimate, close-at-hand authorities is dramatically apparent in stories of those who complied with orders to carry out the atrocities of the Holocaust, and those who didn’t.” (Social Psychology) Milgram’s experiment further proves that obedience plays a major part in behavior and people are going to do what is necessary to fit…
In Fromm essay” Disobedience as a psychological and moral problem”, he discusses and compares the different kinds of obedience and disobedience, and how they can have a positive or negative impact on the human society. There are many physiological comforts to obedience. For example, when a person obeys the law, or is obedient to their superior it leaves them with a feeling of accomplishment. They feel as though they have succeeded in their said job, therefore they are accepted within society. Some people assume, to obey is to be accepted and to disobey is to be withdrawn from society. Another benefit of obedience is reassurance. I believe that Authorities would rather have people obey out of love, over fear because then it is a true thing.…
When asked to continue administering shocks the teachers would tend to obey the orders from the experimenter allowing the experimenter to act through them and causing them to Enter an agentic state. “People will obey an authority when they believe that the authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions”(Milgram 3). When the teachers did not administer a shock they were read a series of prods in order to ensure the authority of the experimenter as well as giving responsibility to the experimenter. “When participants were reminded that they had responsibility for their own actions, almost none of them were prepared to obey”( Milgram 3). When the teachers were faced with the responsibility of their actions none of them were willing to proceed with the experiment, but when relieved of responsibility of actions the teachers entered an agentic state allowing an obedience to the…