...Running Head: POWER OF SITUATION AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY The Power of the Situation in Milgram's Obedience Experiments Ahsan Chishty Ohlone College POWER OF SITUATION AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY The Power of the Situation in Milgram's Obedience Experiments Stanley Milgram is a name universally known for the Yale professor who shocked the world with his experiments on obedience. In 1961, Milgram along with many other colleagues devised an experiment after receiving a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct an experiment in response to the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Milgram wanted to know if Germans under the rule of authority figures did exactly what they were instructed to do by those of higher power than them due to the fact that many of the explanations for the Nazi atrocities was simply that Nazi soldiers were following orders. After placing an ad in the New Haven Register for a learning experiment on the study of memory. According to Thomas Blass (2009), offering participants $4.50 and a paid bus fare for an hour of their time seemed to be the biggest factor that attracted people to the ad but several of the participants also agreed to be a part of the study to learn something about themselves, expand their curiosity about psychology, or because they were fascinated by memory and hoped to understand it better through an experiment like Milgram's. The subjects were introduced to a man in a lab coat who...
Words: 1884 - Pages: 8
...Obedience to Authorit Obedience to Authority Obedience is a term that can take place in many forms and with diverse individuals, especially with those who are authoritative figures. With many forms of destruction and life-threatening violence taking place during the middle part of the 20th century, many psychologists and scientists took interest in how ordinary individuals reacted to individuals in authority. One psychology in particular, Stanley Milgram, conducted a series of experiments investigating individuals’ obedient behavior to authoritative figures, whether positive deeds or acts of violence. This paper will summarize Milgram’s famous research as well as analyze the most current research of conforming to authority. Additionally, this paper will examine the current research on Milgram's findings from the early part of the 1960s. Summary of Milgram's Research Stanley Milgram (1963) was a social psychologist who set out to investigate human obedience, especially following the Second World War and in particular, the Holocaust (Milgram, 1963). Milgram’s interest was to conduct a study to answer the research question, are Germans different? However, as Milgram began to develop a tool used for studying obedience, he soon discovered that all individuals are remarkably obedient to people in authority. Milgram chose a naive subject to administer a dangerous electric shock to a victim, which releases voltage ranges from 15 to 450 (Milgram, 1963). Throughout the experiment...
Words: 1126 - Pages: 5
...Obedience is a form of social influence that occurs when a person yields to explicit instructions on orders from an authority figure. Obedience is compliance with commands given by an authority figure. In the 1960s, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram did a famous research study called the obedience study. It showed that people have a strong tendency to comply with authority figures. Milgram’s Obedience Study Milgram told his forty male volunteer research subjects that they were participating in a study about the effects of punishment on learning. He assigned each of the subjects to the role of teacher. Each subject was told that his task was to help another subject like himself learn a list of word pairs. Each time the learner made a mistake, the teacher was to give the learner an electric shock by flipping a switch. The teacher was told to increase the shock level each time the learner made a mistake, until a dangerous shock level was reached. Throughout the course of the experiment, the experimenter firmly commanded the teachers to follow the instructions they had been given. In reality, the learner was not an experiment subject but Milgram’s accomplice, and he never actually received an electric shock. However, he pretended to be in pain when shocks were administered. Prior to the study, forty psychiatrists that Milgram consulted told him that fewer than 1 percent of subjects would administer what they thought were dangerous shocks to the learner...
Words: 1700 - Pages: 7
...unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.” There is a true feeling of what authority can do if placed in situations that require someone to follow instructions. What happens to someone when they follow the orders of another person in authority? An experiment conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram reveal how situationism applies to study results. How would this experiment differ if the participants were from various races, cultures, gender groups? A summary of the study and how it was conducted Stanley Milgram is a psychologist who conducted a study based on obedience during the 1960’s, and this experiment produced startling results. Questions still arise about the experiments validity, but the impact on psychology remains to be one of the best measures to assess how authority plays a role in obedience. In 1961 after the Trial of WWII criminal Adolph Eichmann, Milgram started his study. Stanley Milgram's experiment built on the idea of obedience, and the experiment would deliver a shock to participants who participated in the experiment. There were levels of voltage from mild to dangerous, and to a maximum voltage of 450, the highest level were labeled XXX. The role of a teacher who would deliver the shock to the student every time the student answered incorrectly. The student would only pretend to be shocked, but the teacher...
Words: 1162 - Pages: 5
...Discussion of the Stanley Milgram’s "Perils of Obedience" As Milgram writes in his article, for some people obedience is a deeply “ingrained behavior tendency”, which can create an impulse that can override past ideas in morality and ethics. While his experiment focused closely on the psychology behind response to obedience, his central idea conveyed substantial themes which bore on conceptions of professional ethics. One of these themes involved the previously underestimated significances of the potency of authority in influencing decision-making, even ones that go against one’s own conscientious imperatives. As most of us are “indoctrinated” in our childhood to develop a basic conception of values and virtues, one of the things we as human beings have grasped, through many phases in our evolution as societal creatures, is the importance of obedience to some form of authority. This scheme, now deeply ingrained in our psychology, plays a very strong role in the decisions we make daily, including playing a part towards trumping moral values, including possibly a code of professional ethics. [EXAMPLE] Individual morality, according to Milgram’s opinion, can be heavily compromised in the face of authority figures, in fact suggesting that in truth, in our society, individuality may be something that does not exist at all, and that the vast majority of our decision making may have sociological origins. In fact as Stanley Milgram showed, the weakening of the individual’s moral conscience...
Words: 866 - Pages: 4
...bad experiment Psychologists often choose to conduct experiments to help support their theories, or to also try and figure out why people react the way they do to certain things. Not everyone is going to always agree on the way the experiment is done or the methods used during the experiment, but that does not change the fact that they are done. In the 1960’s a Yale professor, Stanley Milgram, decided to conduct an experiment that is still being talked about and analyzed fifty years later. Milgram’s experiments where immoral and had significant negative effects on the participants. Does he deserve the credit and praise for his work? In Milgram’s study he placed a add asking for volunteers then he mislead them into thinking they were involved...
Words: 653 - Pages: 3
...well as having to notifying participants on all features of the study which could have an influence on their decision to take part (Hobbs, 1948). Throughout the psychological history many research studies have been conducted by various psychologists. There have been some which have been ethically critisied, with the lack of ethics taken into consideration. The most commonly discussed research study which has many ethical issues is known to be conducted by a behavioral psychologist Stanley Milgram (1963). Leading to many discussions Milgram (1963) purpose of his study was to investigate how far an individual would obey a figure of authority (Bernstein, 2011). Stanley Milgram (1963) introduced his well-known study on obedience within psychology. Milgram (1963) was a psychologist based at Yale University; he had based his laboratory experiments in a form to be able to study the occurrence of obedience to authority within humans. To be able to conduct the experiment Milgram (1963) advertised his experiment on a newspaper, which he then used to select 40 males age ranged from 20 – 50...
Words: 1546 - Pages: 7
...Stanly Milgram’s Obedience Test In chapter two of Opening Skinner’s Box, by Lauren Slater, she talks about a man named Stanley Milgram and his test to see why people obey even the worst of orders. His studies were compelled by the holocaust. German soldiers were getting hit by war time crimes but all they had to say about them was “I was just obeying orders” so what was it exactly that made these soldiers kill of tons of people even though they knew what they were doing was wrong? What he did was hire people off the streets to do an experiment. He had a paid actor play the role of the learner and the test subject be the teacher. The test was simple the teacher would say a series of words and the learner would have to say them back in proper order. If the learner messed up then the teacher would have to shock him and for every time he messed up the shock would stronger...
Words: 1071 - Pages: 5
...The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram Stanley Milgram’s “ The Perils of Obedience” shows that some people can obey authority even when it requires committing terrible actions within their society. Milgram begins his essay by describing what obedience is and how deeply ingrained of a behavior tendency that it is. He then sets up an experiment at Yale University that will push the limits of human obedience. He has a “teacher” give out a series of simple word pairs for the “learner”. If the learner gets a word pair wrong then the teacher gives out a series of shock ranging from 15 to 450 volts. The teacher who is the real subject in the experiment does not know that the learner is a paid actor who does not receive any actual shocks. The motivation behind this experiment for Milgram was to test just how far people would go to obey the command of an authority figure. Milgram’s theory is that the subject will have total control of what they are doing and will disobey the authority figure when inflicting pain onto a hopeless human being. One of his subjects, Gretchen Brandt, is participating with the experiment when the learner got the word pair wrong she showed the self control to stop shocking to not continue. Milgram thought that this is how the majority of subjects would react, “Her behavior is the very embodiment of what I envisioned would be true for almost all subject”(Milgram, 44). Brandt simply wasn’t worried about rejecting the authority if it meant that she no longer...
Words: 682 - Pages: 3
...conform to the orders of authority in order to promote obedience as a social virtue. This often leads man to equate disobedience with sin, which traces as far back as the biblical account of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. However, neither disobedience nor obedience could exist without the power of an authority figure to dictate the rules and restraints of submission. In his article “The Perils of Obedience,” Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram asserts that authority as a whole is an essential component of social living and that obedience to this authority is a social behavior unknowingly entrenched in a majority of the population. Milgram’s scientific review explores this claim as he shares data from his experiment in which subjects blindly obey someone they believe to be an expert, simply due to his prompting. Supported with reactions...
Words: 1203 - Pages: 5
...Third Paper: Analysis Obedience and disobedience to the authority has always been a favorite topic of psychologists and researchers. Stanley Milgram’s experiments shows that people are more often to submit themselves toward authority as compared to the people who disobey. According to Milgram, the pillars or support of the society is being threatened by disobedience. On the contrary, Erich Fromm rejects the theory of “obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice”(621). Human history has formed by an act of disobedience by Adam and Eve, who were living in heaven obediently but a little act of disobedience changed everything. Fromm claims that their act of disobedience opened their eyes. After disobedience, man created his own heaven. Acts of disobedience evolved and changed by time. Milgram’s and Fromm’s theories are opposite to each other, one supports obedience and other doesn’t....
Words: 843 - Pages: 4
...brand of specialization (Gibson, 1994). Throughout the articles overview it speaks on the different branches of psychology, counseling psychology, clinical psychology and developmental psychology. This article is a review of existing research and psychological experiments. I can tell that the information in this article is based from existing research due to the article making reference several times to different classic studies, insights and experiments that were conducted to implement the study of “Social Psychology”. The main purpose of this article was to conduct classic social psychological studies including Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience; the study also examined the Bystander Effect and also addressed cognitive dissonance to better understand how one’s behavior changes through a social psychological lens. Stanley Milgram’s Experiment on Obedience was titled “Behavioral Study of Obedience”, and was designed to uncover material encompassing the darker side of human behavior. Throughout the Milgram experiment they used fake actors who assumed various roles within the framework of a man made scenario to receive psychological insight towards human obedience and authority. The repercussions of the Milgram experiment showed the offset of this study, and social psychologists scrutinized the compelling sway that those in positions of power may demand, solely by virtue of their roles, which may be exacerbated by extraneous factors such as personality traits and environmental...
Words: 569 - Pages: 3
...Emanuel Coleman Professor Smicialas English 161 9 September 2014 The Perils Of Obedience “Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to.” (Milgram 631). In Stanley Milgram’s 1963 study Perils of Obedience, he finds that human beings, when ordered by an authority, will commit atrocious acts against another human being. He proves this through an extensive scientific study. In this study, he pulls from a multitude of different social classes and cultures. Asking, the subjects to bring bodily harm to another person in the form of increasingly stronger electric shocks, ranging from 15 to 450 volts. The role assigned to the test subjects is that of "teacher" and "learner."The learner is put in a room and strapped to an electric chair, the teacher is in another room where they can see the learner. The teacher is seated next to a huge machine that administers the shocks. The scientist starts commanding from near by. He begins by calmly demanding that the teacher shock the student if the student does not accurately repeat a set of words that progressively advance in difficulty. The results of his 1963 study were shocking, even the people he sought to predict the outcome, which includes a variety of people from psychiatrists to college students and middle class adults. Interestingly enough, Milgram states that, “with remarkable similarity they predicted that virtually all subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter” (Milgram 634)...
Words: 682 - Pages: 3
...Questioning Authority: A Rethinking of the Infamous Milgram Experiments By Liliana Segura, AlterNet Posted on February 12, 2009 Between 1963 and 1974, Dr. Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments that would become one of the most famous social psychology studies of the 20th century. His focus was how average people respond to authority, and what he revealed stunned and disturbed people the world over. Under the pretense of an experiment on "learning" and "memory," Milgram placed test subjects in a lab rigged with fake gadgetry, where a man in a lab coat instructed them to administer electrical shocks to a fellow test subject (actually an actor) seated in another room in "a kind of miniature electric chair." Participants were told they were the "teachers" in the scenario and given a list of questions with which to quiz their counterparts (the "learners"). If the respondent answered incorrectly to a question, he got an electric shock as punishment. The shocks were light at first -- 15 volts -- and became stronger incrementally, until they reached 450 volts -a level labeled "Danger: Severe Shock." The actors were never actually electrocuted, but they pretended they were. They groaned, shouted, and, as the current became stronger, begged for relief. Meanwhile, the man in the lab coat coolly told the test subjects to keep going. To people's horror, Milgram discovered that a solid majority of his subjects -- roughly two-thirds -- were willing to administer the highest levels...
Words: 2438 - Pages: 10
...Stanley Milgram is one of my personal academic heroes and one of the reasons that I gained an interest in psychology many years ago. After studying his experiments and reading “Obedience to Authority” about six years ago, I truly began to admire his Avant-garde ways of approaching the science. I am an avid student of social issues and studying this “rock star” of social psychology has heightened my senses and allowed me to look beyond what the masses consider socially unacceptable in the name of discovery. The following is a reply to a video entitled “Into the Mind: Mind Control” which focuses on famous experiments conducted to discover the “whys” behind certain behaviors. While the video highlights a number of psychological experiments, this short work will focus on Stanley Milgram and answer the following: what are the ethical inferences and did his results justify the manner in which the experiment was conducted? According to Milgram (1984), “The case touched on a fundamental issue of the human condition, our primordial nightmare. If we need help, will those around us stand around and let us be destroyed or will they come to our aid? Are those other creatures there to help us sustain our life and values or are we individual flecks of dust just floating around in a vacuum” (Memorable quotes). The Experiment: Why this Approach? At a rudimentary level, human behavior and all of the questions that revolve around it is why psychology exists. Man studies the differences...
Words: 1044 - Pages: 5
