Preview

Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
694 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?
Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?

The Milgram Experiment Is a very well-known experiment in social psychology .The concept was first started in 1963 by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgren in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in Behavioral Study of Obedience published a paper, later also in his 1974 publication Obedience to Authority: Discussed in the An Experimental View.

The main purpose of this experiment is testing the subjects issued against conscience commands in the face of authority how much power can they do to refuse it. The subjects were chosen from the people from 25-50 who will get 4.5 dollars per hour. Meanwhile the location was at the basement of the old college campus and there were
…show more content…
Because this is the challenge of human’s moral bottom lane. Back in the day, this experiment took place when the time was right after the World War II in order to find out "Was it that Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust had mutual intent, in at least with regard to the goals of the Holocaust?" As a result, I would say this experiment was particularly discussing about the human’s moral bottom lane. First, I assume I was in that situation to a “teacher” I would never touch that button to shock those people. For the simple reason is that they did not do something bad to me and I need to shock them and no matter how much they will pay me to participate this experiment. According to the resources, [2] 5% of a sample average American adult men were willing to punish another person with increasingly higher voltages of electric shock all the way to the maximum (450 volts) when ordered to by an experimenter who did not possess any coercive powers to enforce his commands. When asked to predict the outcome of the obedience experiment, neither a group of Yale seniors nor a group of psychiatrists were even remotely close to predicting the actual result: Their predicted obedience rates were 1.2% and .125%, respectively. What’s more, The dramatic demonstration that people are much more prone to obey the orders of a legitimate authority than one might have expected remains an enduring insight, but one that is in need of some qualification: Milgram did indeed find drastic underestimations of full obedience (with 3% of the subjects, at the most, expected to obey), [3] but others have obtained findings suggesting that greater accuracy in predicting the outcome of an obedience experiment is possible. Milgram also showed how difficult it is for people to translate their intentions into actions even when moral principles might be at stake, and that momentary situational pressures and

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    In Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” Stanley Milgram designed an experiment that would involve an experimenter, a teacher, and a learner to determine how far obedience would play a role on willing participants. The purpose of Milgram’s experiment is to see how far a willing participant would go based on orders to continue knowing that the orders would result in another person’s pain. The experiment was set up so that two willing participants went into the experiment understanding that they were taking part in a memory and learning exercise. One of the two willing participants played the role as the…

    • 632 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Stanley Milgrams experiments are some of the most recognized behavior experiments in psychology today. Milgrams most known experiment was ‘shocking’ to people and has also been controversial ethically. As Ian Parker stated it would “make his name and destroy his reputation.” Parkers Obedience essay talks much of Milgrams life before the experiment and how the psychology community thought about his ethics.…

    • 560 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good 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

    I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The…

    • 409 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    100 Chapter 2 Study Guide

    • 815 Words
    • 9 Pages

    The social psychologist who used electrical shock in his experiments in order to find out how far people would go in obeying the commands of an authority figure is:…

    • 815 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    draft5 1

    • 1345 Words
    • 4 Pages

    “The Perils of Obedience” was an experiment done by Stanley Milgram concentrating on the conflict between obedience to the authority and individual’s self. Milgram created a threatening shock generator with starting level of 30 volts and expanding up to 450 volts. The experiment was set up with having an experimenter, a participant who was the subject, and a confederate pretending to be a volunteer. The teachers were told to ask questions from the learners and every time they gave a wrong answer, an electric shock was given and was increased 15 volt on each wrong answer. As the experiment advanced, the participants heard the learners argue to be discharged and complained about their heart condition.…

    • 1345 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the experiment, the subject is told by the experimenter to give shocks from a scale of low to dangerously high to the person in the electric chair (who was an actor) when they give a wrong answer. The shocks were not real, but prior to the experiment, the subjects were given a small shock to influence them that the shocks in the experiment were true. After the experiment, Milgram assesses that “between the command and the outcome, there is a paramount force, which is the subject’s capacity for choosing their own behaviour” (p. 851). Although there were people who acted in immoral ways and increased the shock levels, there were also those who chose to renounce the unjust commands of authority, “providing affirmation of human morals and ideals” (p. 851). Therefore, people do have a choice in refusing to abide by authority’s rules and demands, but they choose not to because they do not want to suffer the…

    • 816 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    However, in Milgram’s experiment, people complied due to the authority figure urging them to continue and appealing to their sense of responsibility. However, this has caused many of the participants to reflect in quiet horror that they were willing to harm another by executing up to 450 volts of electricity. It is a dreadful thing to realize that humans can be so easily manipulated to participate in heinous acts, causing us to take a second look on where we stand…

    • 529 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Milgram’s findings, as read in the article “If Hitler Asked You to Electrocute a Stranger, Would You?”, apply to the first case of a manager and her fiancé ordering a teenage girl to strip and her following their commands. Milgram’s data suggested that humans are obedient even to the extent of blindly following authority. His findings were demonstrated by his experimental subjects who continued to increase the voltage to electrocute the learner, despite the subject’s moral code conflicting with the idea of…

    • 549 Words
    • 3 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
  • Powerful Essays

    Obedience is omnipresent; it is difficult to differentiate between obedience and conformity, therefore it is a complicated subject of social psychology. However, Stanley Milgram was devoted to understand the phenomena of obedience, and created a dramatic masterpiece. Interested in many different aspects of life, Stanley Milgram was an influential key figure in psychology. However his work on the field of obedience is respected and still exiting for both psychologists and lay people. The aim of this essay is to expose the historical context of his book together with its influences, while demonstrating a deep understanding of his groundbreaking work.…

    • 1363 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    In The Perils of Obedience, Stanley Milgram expresses his findings of an experiment he conducted trying to prove the lengths people will go to be obedient to authority.…

    • 407 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Milgram (1963) himself, however, recognises a plethora of caveats – demonstrating a scientific awareness of his experiment’s scientific limitations such the location of the experiment was cited as a possible influence as Yale University is and was considered to be prestigious, thus reinforcing the reliability and plausibility of the experimenter himself. This was demonstrated by a follow up study which replicated the procedure in a rundown location, in which the obedience rate dropped to 47.5% (McLeod,…

    • 1215 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Milgram’s obedience to authority experiment countered the participant’s moral beliefs against the demands of authority. For this study, Milgram took out a newspaper ad that offered $4.50 for one hour of work, at Yale University, for a psychology experiment that sought to investigate memory and learning. Participants were told that the study would look at the relationship of punishment in learning, and that one person would be the teacher, and the other would be the learner (a confederate), and that these roles would be determined by a random drawing. The learner was then strapped into a chair, and…

    • 1785 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful 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