Stanley Milgram's Experiment Psychological Analysis

Through a psychological perspective we can analyze actions people take and determine why they acted the way they did. Experiments such as Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiment shed light on the great lengths people are willing to go to for an authority figure. When his research first came out it was believed that the “banality of evil” was the cause of the subject’s behavior, however new studies suggest that people’s willingness to abide to authorities is conditional to the belief that the authority figure is right and they should do as they are told. When examining Milgram’s shock experiment, we can evaluate the subjects who participated and how the power of the situation affected their behavior. We will also compare the findings in this …show more content…
What is being shown is that people commit to what an authoritative figure tells them to do because they feel a sense of obligation and necessity to do as they are told. Unconsciously they decide that this person is in charge for a reason, so what they are saying must be true and they need to do as they are told. Zimbardo’s ideology can correlate with this due to that fact that he believes that it is not about the bad apples in the barrel, as he likes to put it, it is really the situation you put a person in that turns them to harming others. As previously stated, millions of Germans took part in the genocide of Jews, it was not just a small portion of the population who were psychologically damaged and numb to the idea of killing other people. Seemingly normal, everyday people turned against Jews because of the reign Hitler had over his followers. The hatred for Jews was already instilled in society, he just heightened that hate and made his followers act on it and attempt to abolish the Jewish population. When there is a notion that a certain race, ethnicity or sex is lesser, it makes it easier for people to harm them because society dehumanizes that group. It creates an environment where it is okay to kill off these people simply because of what they …show more content…
He wanted to understand the behavior between two groups without an authority head being present. He randomly assigned students to either be guards or prisoners and he created a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford Psychology building. It was supposed to carry out for two weeks, but due to the multiple breakdowns of the prisoners and abuse that erupted he had to terminate it after just 6 days. Yet again another shocking turn of events that no one would have even guessed could occur, and did in such a short amount of time. As stated by Haslam and Reicher (2012), Zimbardo concluded that people conform to oppressive behavior to fit the authoritative role that they are assigned, even without specific orders (p.2). The “natural” role of a man dressed in a guard uniform is to assert their power by using abuse to gain control over the prisoners to establish their dominancy. Also, when someone is labeled a prisoner, they lose their rights and respect, which only escalates the guard to try to demand power over the lesser population in this scenario. What Smith (2008) discusses, is that Zimbardo created the term “The Lucifer Effect”, which attempts to explain the point in which a person turns from good to evil, and is based on the situation that they find themselves in (p.287). Zimbardo took his knowledge and became an eye witness