Stanley Milgram's Destructive Obedience

As human beings, we possess different qualities that influences the way we behave. Throughout history, psychologists performed a myriad of experiments to understand different forms of human behavior. One well known psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment that concentrated in understanding “destructive obedience”. Milgram’s interest in researching “destructive obedience” came from the Holocaust. “Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose”. Milgram’s experiment proposed that the murder of innocent people occurred because of the obedience from the soldiers to their leader. The experiment focuses on analyzing on why the degree of obedience from each subject varies from their actions. Milgram’s experiment makes it transparent that obedience is a “determinant of behavior”. In 1961, Stanley Milgram selected a group of
Prior to determining that Milgram’s experiment successfully demonstrated the subject’s obedience to the experimenter, it is essential to identify the dependent measures. “The primary dependent measure for any subject is the maximum shock he administers before he goes any further”. To determine if the subject was obedient, the experimenter looked at how many shock levels were administered. The subject is considered a “defiant subject if he administered below thirteen shock levels and an obedient subject if he administered all shock levels commanded”. Obtaining sufficient evidence is important before drawing any conclusions; therefore Milgram considered the predictions of fourteen Yale seniors where he gave them the same “experimental situation”. The predictions from the Yale Seniors and the actual results were different. The students predicted that only an “insignificant amount would go through the end of the shock series” and the actual results stated that more than half made it to the