Preview

Milgram's Experiment

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1548 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Milgram's Experiment
Social Experiment Paper The Milgram’s Experiment The Milgram’s Experiment was conducted by Social psychology by the name of Stanley Milgram, he created this experiment on how being in the presents of an authority figures would affect the way people behaved. This study was conducted in July 1969, just one year after the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram developed this experiment to answer the question "Could it be that Eichmann and his millions of accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (The Milgram Experiment by Saul McLeod published 2007) One of the most horrific example that Milgram …show more content…
As you look back all though out history, which has example after example of people obeying authority figures. The definition of obedience in human behavior, is "social influence in which a person yields to explicit instructions or orders from an authority figure. Obedience is normally distinguished as compliance to instructions received form an authority figure, or a behavior that has been influenced by peers. Obedience can be seen as immoral, amoral and moral”. (Colman, Andrew (2009) Even as we go back to the begin of time reading the Bible it starts with the story of Adam and Eve the first man and woman who ever walked on the face of the earth. God had told them that they could eat from any tree in the garden, but there were not allowed to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Eve disobeyed God by eating from the tree, and then offering some of the tasty fruit to her husband Adam. Since both Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they were punished. For the first time Adam and Eve noticed they were naked they felt embarrassed, and guilty for disobeying God. Story’s like the one about Adam and Eve are all though out the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. The Bible has a lot to say about obedience, another well-known story that talks about obedience is the story of Moses and the burning bush. God told Moses to go Pharaoh the king of the Israelites and tell him to let his people go. Moses did not want to go he was worried that pharaoh would not listen to him. Moses keep making excuses about why he could not go. But God keep telling Moses that he would be with him the whole time if he would just take the first steep. Moses new he had to obey God that he could not let him down so he went to Pharaoh. We see how important obedience is to God. “Deuteronomy 11:26–28 sums it up like this "Obey and you will

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    Milgram's Experiment brings up the point that people under the pressure of other, will more likely obey orders even if it goes against their moral beliefs. In "To Obey of Not to Obey", most of the soldiers obeyed their superiors because they were taught to do so. Similarly in Migram's Experient, the "teachers" obeyed when the experimenter pressured the subject to continue with the shocks. This can be related to Slaughterhouse Five because the German soldiers are under the command of their superiors who are requiring them to take American prisoners. This pressure was passed down from the German soldiers who demanded the American soldiers to clean up the charred remains of dead civilians after the bombing of Dresden.…

    • 119 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Parker talks of Milgram struggling to place his findings in a scientific context until he put them in a place to make sense of the Holocaust. While always using the Holocaust as context for his experiments he often compared his work to Adolf Eichmann’s who was put on trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Milgram published his first obedience paper in 1963 where he placed Eichmann’s name in the first paragraph, giving the paper a place in the debate. Milgram argued that ordinary people committed acts in the Holocaust because they were given orders to. Because of this normal American people could commit the acts the Nazis did if they were told to.…

    • 560 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Luke might have acted this way due to the way he grew up. Luke might have acted this way because his family might have not enacted strict rules on his life. This is evident because of how he spoke with his mom. In the movie, the conversation he has with his mom seemed very casual. Almost seemed like he did not have respect for his mom nor did it seem like he treasured his mom, after she visited him in jail. She was very sick as well. This shows how much Luke has a problem with authority because of the way he talks to his mom. And his learning of authority starts with where he learned authority.This is relevant to the participants in the Milgram experiment. Because there was the few people that refused to continue with the experiment despite…

    • 298 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Daniel Parks Freshman Studies Term II Critical Analysis and Milgram’s Response Obedience to Authority and the obedience experiments that produced Stanley Milgram’s famous book have produced almost equal amounts of surprise, curiosity and criticism. The criticism of social psychologist John Darley and playwright Dannie Abse are each representative of the general criticism Milgram has received; Darley focuses on whether the study has any relevance to real world events (such as the Holocaust), and Abse focuses on justification of the experiment, i.e. was the study worth doing in spite of the deception employed and its potential harm to the subjects. To Milgram, this criticism demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the goals and implications of the obedience study, to which he has responded by restating the goal of the experiment and explaining its beneficial effects upon the subjects.…

    • 1351 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    In Milgram’s article, he explains an experiment he designed to test whether the subjects of the experiment would refuse the orders of authority and follow…

    • 1226 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    milgrams obedience study

    • 409 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The experiment was inspired by the Holocaust - were the Germans in league with the Nazis, or where they simply following orders as they exterminated the Nazi's victims? Milgram wanted to study whether people would obey an authority figure, or would their own morals make them stop the experiment?…

    • 409 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    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…

    • 1558 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    This idea that perhaps seemingly “good” people can be able to ignore what is obviously morally wrong led me to an article about an interesting experiment: The Milgram experiment. This experiment, developed and run by Stanley Milgram, took place at Yale University in 1961. Milgram’s experiment consisted of having volunteers from a diverse range of backgrounds and occupations individually brought into a room and sat at a table with an array of levers. Across from this volunteer was another person who knew about the parameters of the experiment, who was strapped into a fake electric chair. A “scientist” in a lab coat would come in and tell the volunteer that he or she was to administer increasingly powerful shocks to the individual in the chair.…

    • 355 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Stanley Milgram experiment takes normal everyday people and gives them orders to do horrible…

    • 343 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Milgram's experiment in 1960 by social psychologist Dr. Stanely Milgram's (1963, 1965) was a controversial experiment. He researched the effect of authority on obedience. I don't think the scientific community overreacted to this experiment because it is unethical to reduce subjects to "twitching shuttering wrecks". Though the human mind is amazing strong we still do not know its breaking point. For interviewers to carry out the kind of experiment they did, they have to be willing to face the consequences of the experiment which could be a permanent damaged mental state. I do believe we need to do experiments like this as the outcome was very eye opening but it has to be better regulated and the background and methods of experimentation clearly…

    • 580 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    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…

    • 1583 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Milgram Aims and Context

    • 471 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Milgram’s study was done after the trial of Adolf Eichmann. This was after the holocaust where 6 million Jews were murdered. This trial displayed an example of destructive obedience where people were said to have complied with what they were told to do, even if it had a negative impact on others, which in this case was murdering innocent people, although being completely mentally aware of what they were being asked to do and yet still carried out the task.…

    • 471 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Throughout our nation's history, we have taken part in many unethical means of gaining information or knowledge. Some of the more famous cases include, The Milgram Obedience and Authority experiment, The Stanford Prison experiment, and of course the Abu Ghraib scandal involving our own U.S. soldiers. While two of these instances were not intended to cause physical harm, they were all branded unethical due to the extent of not only the physical abuses that took place, but the painful psychological impact it left on those involved.…

    • 1492 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Milgram Experiment

    • 313 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In nineteen sixty-three, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment on obedience to authority figures. It was a series of social psychology experiments which measured the willingness of the study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience and confronted them with emotional distress. The experiment resulted in twenty-six out of forty of the participants administering the final massive shock of four-hundred and fifty volts, that is sixty-five percent. Milgram believes his experiment to be effective because (need to finish this sentence) On the other hand, Diana Baumrind argues that Milgram’s experiment is unethical to alter the participant’s trust for a figure of authority and believes they could be hesitant to do so in the future in any circumstance. (what else can i write here?)…

    • 313 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    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…

    • 743 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays