The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram (Summary Essay)
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Professor Williams
English 1101-13
23 Febuary 2014
The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram In “The Perils of Obedience,” Stanley Milgram develops a experiment that puts to test the the question , “Will humans inflict extreme pain to others under the command of higher authority?”. The essay starts off with Milgram explaining the history of obedience by exhibiting the loyalness that was portrayed by followers in historical documents. The experiment that Milgram set up was simple. He elected an “experimenter” who is the authority figure, a “teacher” which is the subject of the experiment, and a “learner” whose only obligation is to act as if s/he is in pain. The teacher in the experiment reads off a simple list of words, and the student must remember the second word of a pair upon hearing the first one again. If the student is wrong, the teacher must inflict pain on the student, increasing the pain each time the student makes an error. Before actually conducting these experiments, Milgram asked for predictions from various groups of people. It was predicted that almost all the subjects would deny to obey the experimenter, but these predictions were proved wrong. In the first group of subjects, only 25 of the 40 who participated in the experiment obeyed all the orders from the experimenter. In another scenario where Yale undergraduates were used as subjects, 60 percent of them were obedient to the experimenter.
In the first experiment that Milgram conducts, the subject Gretchen Brandt defies the experimenters request by refusing to inflict anymore pain on the student because of the immoral pain that she believed the student was in. This is the response that Milgram initially thought would be for all subjects. In the second experiment that Milgram conducted, his subject Fred Prozi, was obedient to the experimenter, although he clearly did not want to cause any harm to the learner, Prozi respected the authority that the experimenter
Professor Williams
English 1101-13
23 Febuary 2014
The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram In “The Perils of Obedience,” Stanley Milgram develops a experiment that puts to test the the question , “Will humans inflict extreme pain to others under the command of higher authority?”. The essay starts off with Milgram explaining the history of obedience by exhibiting the loyalness that was portrayed by followers in historical documents. The experiment that Milgram set up was simple. He elected an “experimenter” who is the authority figure, a “teacher” which is the subject of the experiment, and a “learner” whose only obligation is to act as if s/he is in pain. The teacher in the experiment reads off a simple list of words, and the student must remember the second word of a pair upon hearing the first one again. If the student is wrong, the teacher must inflict pain on the student, increasing the pain each time the student makes an error. Before actually conducting these experiments, Milgram asked for predictions from various groups of people. It was predicted that almost all the subjects would deny to obey the experimenter, but these predictions were proved wrong. In the first group of subjects, only 25 of the 40 who participated in the experiment obeyed all the orders from the experimenter. In another scenario where Yale undergraduates were used as subjects, 60 percent of them were obedient to the experimenter.
In the first experiment that Milgram conducts, the subject Gretchen Brandt defies the experimenters request by refusing to inflict anymore pain on the student because of the immoral pain that she believed the student was in. This is the response that Milgram initially thought would be for all subjects. In the second experiment that Milgram conducted, his subject Fred Prozi, was obedient to the experimenter, although he clearly did not want to cause any harm to the learner, Prozi respected the authority that the experimenter