Assessing Obedience

ASSESSING OBEDIENCE Obedience is a characteristic ingrained in every person. No matter who a person is, there is always a more authoritative figure that they must obey to. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted experiments that tested obedience towards authority. These experiments were conducted in 1963 at Yale University. The experiments Milgram performed gained many different reactions from people. Two authors that wrote their thoughts on the experiments done by Milgram are Diana Baumrind and Richard Herrnstein. Diana Baumrind, who wrote the “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience”, believes that the experiments Milgram conducted were not necessary and should not have been conducted unless the subject knew the harms that could occur after the experiment was done. Baumrind is a psychologist, who was employed at the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkley at the time that Milgram’s experiment was performed. Richard Herrnstein has a different belief. Herrnstein, the author of the article “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience”, believes Milgram’s experiments were well done and show great potential of what we are able to do in the future. Milgram’s experiment is valid because it was conducted in an appropriate setting, there was minimal psychological harm done, and it contained valuable results. The experiments conducted by Milgram consisted of two different subjects. The first subject was named the “teacher”. The teacher’s role to read lists of word pairs to the second subject. The second subject was named the “learner”. The learner’s role was to remember and recite the second word in the word pair when he was given the first one. The learner was strapped in a miniature version of an electric chair and was told they would receive electric shocks (given by the teacher) intensifying from fifteen to four hundred fifty volts each time they got a word pair incorrect. Milgram explained