The Milgram Experiment Summary

In 1963 soon after the Holocaust, Stanley Milgram executed an experiment to document and test human behaviors. The test was to see how far and individual would go to inflict pain on another human when in the company of an authority figure. 40 subjects applied through a newspaper ad and were paired together as a teacher and student. The student however, was an actor stating he had a heart condition and was concerned the test would affect it. Before the test started he was replaced with a recording of a voice in distress. During the experimentation, the teacher would read words to the victim and if the response was not corresponding, a shock was delivered. Each time the victim would provide an incorrect answer the voltage would increase causing …show more content…
Putting yourself in the subject’s shoes, how do you think your consciousness would be reacting to hurting an individual? Mindfulness best describes the state of consciousness the subjects were facing when conducting this experiment. It’s a state of higher consciousness that includes and awareness of the thoughts passing though one’s head (Citation. 2011). As the experiment was being conducted, you could see the teacher getting flustered and start making anxious gestures like head scratching, and second guessing themselves. Also asking questions like “Just how far can you go on this thing?” From a behavioral aspect of it, every subject responded quite differently to the way they acted when harming another individual. Some psychologists were troubled by the ethics of the experiment, most of the subjects were found that when put into a highly stressful situation like such that they were stammering, shuddering, and laughing inappropriately. But, even given the situation 60% of the subjects went all the way to the top of the shock …show more content…
Some of the theories examined include but are not limited to: the self-concept, social influence, group processes, and social cognition. Social-cognitive theorists believe we learn many of our behaviors either through conditioning or by observing and imitating others (Myers, 2014). In relating to the Milgram experiment, the social cognition aspect of psychology shows when an individual is put in a highly stressful situation with an authority figure present their obedience to authority is remarkable in the standpoint that our conditioning and observational learning interact with cognition to create behavior