Milgram's Blind Obedience Essay

Milgram’s infamous 1963 study into the nature of obedience is often portrayed in the media as strong evidence for an innate human predisposition to obedience, “resistance is futile” (Parker, 2007) when it comes to the human condition to obey – even in a “destructive” (Milgram, 1963) sense. As Milgram (1963) himself states, obedience as a concept is one of the most fundamental aspects of society, and much has frequently been made of drawing parallels with the atrocities carried out by the Third Reich and the data produced by Milgram’s obedience studies [most notably the dramatic results of the baseline study (Haslam, 2012)]. The ideation is frequently asserted that Nazis themselves were displaying blind obedience (Debattista, 2012) to their superiors, and this blind obedience is what is captured in Milgram’s 1963 experiment, although this proposition must be questioned in lieu of a scientific analysis of Milgram’s actual works,
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,