Stanley Milgram's Experiments On Obedience: Chapter Analysis

The second chapter focuses on Stanley Milgram and his controversial experiments on obedience. The first part of the chapter focuses on how Milgram’s experiments involved random volunteers and a few actors. The experiments involved being strapped into an electric chair while another volunteer went into another room filled with a generator and voltage options. If the person strapped into the electric chair fails to answer questions about word association correctly, the other volunteer had to shock them with increasing voltage levels for every subsequent question that was answered incorrectly. They were also instructed not to stop shocking, despite the pleas from the other volunteer. Milgram believed that the purpose of this experiment was to understand the concept of obedience, as the actors in the experiment were dressed up as doctors in …show more content…
The reason Joshua decided to stop the experiment was because he thought he had a heart problem. In terms of Joshua’s background, he was in the army and took part in World War II. Although the army carries the connotation of obedience, Slate believes that “ how a subject acts in the laboratory does not necessarily generalize to how he or she will act in situations outside the laboratory, which is a whole different” (53). The other subject that Slater talks to is a person with the code name of Jacob Plumfield. He was one of the volunteers that obeyed the entire experiment. The experiment forever changed Jacob as it “caused me [him] to confront my [his] own compliance and really struggle with it” (59). After the experiment, Jacob came out and also understood how pathetically vulnerable “I [he] was to authority” (59). Milgram’s experiments were very controversial, resulting in many critics and detractors of his work such as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Ultimately, Stanley Milgram lost his legitimacy as a psychologist and had a hard time picking up a new