Analysis Of Milgram's Experiment And The Stanford Prison Experiment

Throughout the ages, people have always followed the orders of a person with a higher status: students have always listened to their teacher, Catholics have always listened to their priests, and soldiers have always listened to their commander. However this norm is not always acceptable, especially when the followers blindly obey the authority. Throughout this paper I will explore why people are so willing to accept orders particularly in dire situations and how this psychological phenomenon can be addressed in the modern day.
Although many of us would agree not to commit crimes, Milgram's experiment proves that humans are easily manipulated. At the beginning of the 1930’s, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party exploited the widespread discontent in Germany to attract popular and political support. Though the Germans were
A dozen were picked as prison guards and the other half as prisoners. In the experiment, the prison guards abused their power to show dominance over the prisoners. With such power, the guards physically abused and humiliated the prisoners to show dominance. Although the experiment was not directly linked to World War II, similar things happened during the war. To blame the German loss in World War I, the Nazi’s blamed the Slavs and Jews that “backstabbed” the Germans on the homefront. Building a nationwide hatred and taking over their little to no land, the Germans started to realize the power they had over the Jewish people. The death camps were a place where the German soldiers had unlimited power over the Jewish people. Like the Stanford Prison Experiment, the guards of these death camps would physically abuse and ultimately kill them. By the end of the war these soldiers who ran the death camps were treated as uncontrollable beasts during the trials, yet in reality they were just ordinary men who happened to have a lot of perceived power during the