Moral Responsibility In Albert Bandura's Milgram Experiments

Based on the story, this college graduate is facing evident unethical authority. Because he is new to the company and his team project, he will do anything the authority asks of him so he is able to keep his job. Unfortunately, this involves some unethical phone calls and calling himself a project manager for a made-up company, the college graduate is able to land his company a significant share of the market. While he did get a bonus for his contribution, this graduate acted unethically because he wanted to obey his authority. Ultimately, the consultant justified his actions because an authority figure told him what to do. According to Albert Bandura’s moral disengagement mechanisms, the consultant was acting under the displacing responsibility because he can blame his …show more content…
Strong evidence, as evidenced during the Milgram experiments, correlates Hitler as the figure of authority and the Nazi’s merely obeying the authority figure. The Nazi army had to be loyal to their leader, Hitler, because they had no other choice. In the story, the consultant had to obey his figure of authority because he wanted to be a team player and did not want to run the risk of being fired after just graduating college. In the case of the story and Nazi Germany, Bandura’s mechanism of dehumanizing the victim is also present. All the victims are treated poorly because the figure of authority justifies this treatment based on their position/rant in society. Maybe the figure of authority did not think he was acting unethically because he knew that this scheme would get their product on the market and it would be a success. However, I do not believe that Bandura’s dehumanizing of the victim can be applied to Milgram’s experiments. While the shocks were unethical, Milgram did not choose his participants because he wanted to dehumanize them; he wanted to see how far humans would go, with pain involved, to obey a figure of