Exploring The Impact Of Milgram's Obedience Experiment

Milgram's obedience experiment or the Milgram experiment is a series of famous social psychological experiments. The aim of the experiments was to highlight and measure the subjects' aptitude to obey an authority instructing the subject to perform actions that they would normally not want to perform for conscience reasons. At the end of World War II, many in the West were surprised by how seemingly healthy and socially well-behaved people could commit to murder, torture and other abuse of civilians during the Holocaust and similar crimes against humanity. One of the Milgram experiments was to investigate the impact of obedience and authority on the ability of a test person to harm another person. The experiments were conducted in two adjacent rooms. The set time for the experiment was one hour, with $ 4.50 compensation regardless of whether the participant completed the experiment or not. All participants were men, aged 20-50 years, with educational background from those who did not complete secondary school to those who held doctoral degrees. …show more content…
The subjects were assigned the role “teacher” and the learner was an actor, trained and prepared for the role. However, the subjects had the impression that the victim and himself were of the same status in the trial and that it was not decided in advance which one would get which role. The subjects were told that they, as the teacher, were going to train the learner to remember words in a specific order, and whenever the learner said an incorrect word, the teacher would be instructed to administer progressively stronger electric shocks to the