Stanley Milgram's Behavior Study Of Obedience

Decent Essays
In “Behavior Study of Obedience”, Social psychologist professor at Yale university, Stanley Milgram experiments on male participants, to see if one can be obedient to authority or can follow orders from his or her superior, even if the certain task involves hurting others.
For instance, Milgram uses electroshock therapy every time one of the participants, or learners, make a mistake. If the learner continuously makes mistakes when asked a task, the shock wave strength increases. Similarly, when the teacher refused to shock the participants, the experimenter gave out orders to make sure they continued to listen.
People tend to obey orders from others if they know their authority to be right, like in schools, family, or the workplace. It’s simply

Related Documents

  • Great Essays

    Milligram’s experiment was based on his interest in researching who and how would someone obey authority figures. He was driven by the thought that maybe there is something about human nature that led people to obey. Having studied previously both Milgram and Zimbardo’s obedience studies, it was easier for me to analyze and apply it to the purpose of the book. The authors point out that although general results are important, there was not much thought put into the difference among the individuals in the experiments. Milgram focused on the 65% of subjects who obeyed the authority, but was less interested on why the 35% of the subjects…

    • 1341 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Question 1 The Milgram study was done with the objection of finding out whether obedience for from an authoritative figure was a common occurrence, for example, the killing of Jews by Nazis. Therefore, how long were subjects willing to inflict pin on another person when asked to, despite knowing the seriousness of the injuries. From the experiment, the experimenter established routine through the use of the predefined prods such as ‘please go on and please continue (Myers & Twenge, 2017).’ That way the subject would know what to do when they would hear these words.…

    • 1155 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Variations of his experiment have been conducted over many years and in other settings with similar findings. The effect of authority on obedience is striking. People obey either out of fear or out of a desire to appear cooperative, even when acting against their own better judgment and desires. The vast majority of people will obey authority even when it overrides their own moral judgement. Their feelings of duty and personal emotion are separated, and responsibility shifts in the mind of the subordinate to that of the authority figure.…

    • 616 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The primary purpose of the Milgram's obedience/electroshock experiment was to test people's obedience to authority. I feel the test was able to fulfill its objectives. It was successful because it should that the majority of people tested were willing to fully accept, with some reservations, what a authority figure instructed them to do. In The Real World by Ferris and Stein (2008), we are told that to conducted the experiment a system was set were a research subject was assigned being a teacher and then two others who were administering the test would join, one as experimenter, the other as a learner. The teacher was then shown the learner being strapped to a chair and electrodes being attracted to there body.…

    • 1361 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A Few Good Men was written by Aaron Sorkin and it is about a lawyer trying to defend two marines accused of murder. The two marines claimed to have received an order to discipline another marine and killed him in the process. The lawyer, Lt. Daniel Kaffee, then has to gather evidence for this claim and eventually get Colonel Jessep to state he gave the marines the order. The story encompasses many factors of obedience to authority and peer pressure and shows what can happen when orders are followed blindly. Many experiments and studies have taken place to explain why people follow orders even if it might violate their morals and result in someone getting hurt.…

    • 1739 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Obey At Any Cost Analysis

    • 1258 Words
    • 6 Pages

    In the article which is named Obey At Any Cost which is the Milgram study which talks about how when someone is in command, they can make people do anything. In the beginning of the article it talks about how they believe humans have the tendency to obey people in charge, Milgram’s hypothesis is if they put people in situations where there is a student and teacher and the subject is the teacher and the other person who is an actor will be the student. The subject will ask the student questions if they get it wrong they will give them a shock with fifteen intervals each time they shock them it goes by fifteen until four hundred and fifty volts. Surprisingly twenty six of the forty subjects continued until four hundred and fifty volts which confirms…

    • 1258 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “The Perils of Obedience” written by Stanley Milgram and “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience” written by Diana Baumrind are both intriguing articles about Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience. Diana Baumrind believes that Stanley Milgram failed at his experiences on obedience rather than succeeded. Stanley Milgram believed that he succeeded on his experiments if an authority figure tells the test subject to do something then the test subject will. “Stanley Milgram designed an experiment that forced participants either to violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands” (Milgram 77). While both authors address experiments on obedience, Stanley Milgram approaches…

    • 812 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    We often change our attitudes and behaviors to match people around us. One reason for this conformity is a concern about what other individuals might think of us. Another reason we conform to the norm is because other people often might have information we do not, and relying on norms can be an easy strategy when we are uncertain about how we are supposed to act. Unfortunately, we frequently misperceive how the typical person acts when obeying orders from an authority figure which can sometimes lead to disturbing behavior. This danger was illustrated in a mental institute, in which participants were instructed to administer painful electric shocks in which the nurses believed to be a learning experiment.…

    • 485 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, shares his results from an experiment he conducted in regards to obedience of authority in 1963 in, “The Perils of Obedience.” His experiment illustrated that when put under particular circumstances, ordinary citizens have the capability to perform terrible and unexpected actions (Milgram 85). Milgram rationalizes these proceedings through the conclusion that the average individual will decide to please the experimenter rather than resist his authority to protect the wellbeing of the learner (Milgram 86). Diana Baumrind, a psychologist who worked at the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, writes in response to Milgram’s experiment “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments…

    • 1334 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Perils Of Obedience

    • 1336 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The movie A Few Good Men provides a perspective with which to view the issues of the defense of obedience to authority when following instructions from superiors. Stanley Milgram, author of “The Perils of Obedience,” and Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, authors of “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience,” would likely argue that numerous factors other than intentional sadistic urges could cause a person to unnecessarily inflict violence on another human being. Both articles use psychological methods to examine the reasons a person would knowingly inflict pain on another human. Milgram’s article begins by explaining the dilemma of submission to authority and continues to describe his well-known experiment in its entirety (78-79).…

    • 1336 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the article "The Perils of Obedience” Stanley Milgram describes obedience as a basic element in the structure of social life and the effects it has on all communal living(Milgram 693). What if one is asked to be obedient to something that doesn’t aline with their personal morals? Milgram wanted to run an experiment to find this out. He simply wanted to know if the Nazis were acting out in pure evil or just simply following direct orders by a person who, they thought, was placed in a position of authority. In order to do this, he sets out to test how a normal person reacts when given violent orders by a person, who they believe are in a place of authority.…

    • 2072 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Milgram and Hofling et al. have found the possible danger of obedience in different groups of people. In Milgram’s experiment the participants were 40 men in age range of 20-50 that can be described as average members of public. Hofling et al. conducted his study on 22 nurses.…

    • 1000 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    During the experiment, the experimenter (another actor) would encourage the teacher to keep giving shocks (which were fake), bringing in the idea of conforming to a higher power. Additionally, Philip G. Zimbardo wrote “The Stanford Prison Experiment” in which people were assigned a role and were either obedient or disobedient to authority. This experiment consisted of subjects who were randomly assigned to play the role of “prisoner” or “guard.” The guard’s role was similar to the teacher’s role in the Milgram experiment in which these two groups of people were to be in control of the other individual’s life. But why do people consciously decide to cast their morals away and follow authority figures?…

    • 1464 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout the movie, A Few Good Men, there is controversy about obedience to authority when two marines follow an order believed to be unethical. Privates Dawson and Downey, carry out a “code red”, or hazing, of another member of the unit, and were put on trial for the unintentional murder of Private Santiago. Stanley Milgram, Yale psychologist and author of “The Perils of Obedience” claims, “Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living” (Milgram 78). Along with Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, and Erich Fromm also converse on the psychological issues regarding human behavior. Milgram’s test subjects were tricked into thinking they were electrically shocking someone if they answered a question wrong.…

    • 814 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The film Compliance portrays a true story that draws a eerie connection to the Stanley Milgram’s experiment and the Stanford Prison experiment. It involves seemingly normal people committing horrible acts under social influence. However, the real setting of the story in the film versus the laboratorial conditions of the experiments entail the debate over the extent of their connection. While the results of experiments certainly provide insights into the possible social psychological mechanisms that drive film characters’ behavior, their different settings lead to considerable differences.…

    • 911 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays