Stanley Milgram's Experiments On Obedience

Comparative Critique on Parker’s “Obedience” and Baumrind’s “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience”
“… The dependent, obedient attitude assumed by most subjects in the experimental setting is appropriate to that situation” states psychologist Diana Baumrind in her article “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience” (Baumrind 90). Baumrind cites certain passages from Stanley Milgram’s abstract of his experiment. Baumrind first explains why she thinks the location of the experiment is a hindrance (Baumrind 90). Another point that Baumrind reviews is the permanent harm and emotional disturbance to the subjects from Milgram’s experiment (Baumrind 92). She states that the emotional disturbance will later effect the subject’s …show more content…
She states that the subjects of Milgram’s experiment may have been in shock from what the experimenter was compelling them to execute to the learner (Baumrind 93). Parker would agree with Baumrind’s thoughts that Milgram’s comparison was overly broad and invalid; however, Parker is more effective in his argument because he incorporates valid points and supports his statements with historical examples such a Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s study of ordinary German citizens in the Holocaust that disobeyed authority because they thought the orders were morally objectionable (Parker 101). Mat Little, a freelance journalist, would agree with both Baumrind’s and Parker’s standpoints on Milgram’s comparison in his article “The Ordeal of Disobedience”. Little, like Baumrind and Parker, critiques Milgram’s experiment (“The Ordeal…”). Little explains that society can be organized differently into a non-obedient society and that their ability to produce acts should not connect to their desires (“The Ordeal…”). One could interpret that Little believes that obedience can be broken, which would support Parker’s and Baumrind’s standpoints because it nullifies Milgram’s experiment as a whole. The staff at The Atlantic would also agree with both author’s standpoints. In the staff’s article “Rethinking One of Psychology’s Most Infamous Experiments”, they quoted Stephen Reicher, a professor of psychology at Saint Andrews (“Rethinking One of Psychology’s Most Infamous Experiments”). Reicher states that even though Milgram discovered a remarkable phenomenon with his experiment, he did not compose a compelling argument comparing his experiment with Nazi Germany (“Rethinking…”). The staff at The Atlantic also states that Milgram was a proponent of situationism, which is when a person’s behavior is determined greatly by their surroundings (“Rethinking…”). Thus, if