Stanley Milgram's Study Of Obedience

I choose to watch Stanley Milgram “Obedience” study, where basically Milgram focused on the conflict between obedience to authority and conscience. He wanted to know what obedience does to people, and was curious to know if obedience had anything to do with genocide. He wondered if soldiers killed people just because they were following orders from higher ranked officers. Milgram gathered his participants by advertising via newspaper, particiacally for male participants. His study consisted of two people, one was one of the participants, and the other was a confederate of Milgram’s. His experiment was rigged to where the confederate was always the learner, and the participant was the teacher.
The teacher would ask questions to the learner, and if the learner got it wrong he would be shock, from slight shocks to deadly shocks. Everytime the teacher would shock the learner he’d feel bad and think he was harming the learner. Whenever the teacher refused to continue the experimentalist would tell them to continue, and most people did. Milgram wanted to see …show more content…
There are many strengths to conducting a lab based experiments such as being in a controlled environment, if any were to go wrong with the teacher, Milgram would be able to step in and fix the situation. In this case fixing the situation most likely means to debrief. Another strength would be the ability to collect more data, since Milgram was in a controlled environment he was able to have more time with the participant and was able to collect more data and to repeat his experiment with a new participant. A weakness for this research method would be that Milgram raises ethical concerns. His experiment involves him deceiving participants, so throughout the experiment they think they are harming another person. This causes stress during the experiment and may cause psychological harm long