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Stanley Milgram's Obedience To Authority

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Obedience to Authority, written by Stanley Milgram, is a book about a highly controversial experiment. The experiment has 3 people in it; with two of them being a part of the experiment. The subject will be told to give the victim shocks up to a dangerously high voltage. The experiment is set up to see if ordinary people will be obedient or defy an authority figure to harm the victim. The experiment is first set up at Yale University to see how the students who are very intelligent would act to authority. Milgram, who made the experiment, set this experiment up because he was curious to as if humans will do cruel and out of their usual behavior things just because an authority figure says so. First, to completely understand the experiment …show more content…
Although the victim is placed in another room his screams can still be heard. As the experiment begins the victim does not begin to grunt or show he is in pain until the shock level is 150. When the subjects start to hear the victim is in pain some become stressed and nervous; they will ask the scientist if they should continue and the scientist will say four replies when the subjects asks to stop. “Please go on…It’s absolutely essential to the experiment that we continue…There is no permanent tissue damage… You have no other choice you must go on.” (Milgram, Stanley. "Individuals Confront Authority." Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. N. page. Print.) After the fourth time a subject defies the experiment is called off. Surprisingly to Milgram 65% of the subjects (26 out of 40) go all the way to the most dangerous shock level. 3 more experiments were performed. The situation of the experiment never changed but where the victim was placed, in the same room or in another room, different kind of people and different kind of feedback from the …show more content…
Total of 4 kinds of experiments were performed at Yale and out of those 137 students 114 say they felt moderate to extreme nervousness. To understand more what tension is Milgram says that “tension defines the strength of the aversive state from which the subject is unable to escape through disobedience. When a person is uncomfortable, tense, or stressed, he tries to take some action that will allow him to terminate this unpleasant state…But in the present situation even where tension is extreme, many subjects are unable to perform the response that will bring about relief…must be a competing drive, tendency, or inhibition that precludes activation of the disobedient response.” (Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. 43. Print.) To put it simply and not as much to read; tension causes you to resist and want to stop the thing you are doing that is causing that tension. However, in the experiment the subjects are going through huge amounts of tension but are not able to defy obedience. As stated before Milgram believes that humans have a potential for obedience. And what brings out the potential is what he calls the agentic state and the binding factors. Those two explain the reasons why people feel as if they can’t disobey. The loss of responsibility that the subject feels over the victim because the experimenter takes all of the

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