Evaluate Milgram's Experiment Essay

Obedience is ‘’compliance with an order, request, law or submission to another’s authority’’. Eichmann, who killed four million Jews, was described to be terrifyingly normal and stated that he was just following orders. Milgram (1963) conducted multiple experiments to investigate how strong an authorities influence was over other’s sense of morals and how far they were able to make them obey. One of the biggest limitations that Milgram’s experiment faced was his ecological validity, the ability to generalize his findings to the real-world. His first experiment could have been considered ethnocentrically bias, favoring only your own cultural society. All of the self-selected applicants were white males from America, meaning that his findings were unable to be globally …show more content…
To counteract the possibility of Demand characteristics and the fact his experiment was criticized for lacking ecological validity Milgram continued to replicate his experiment. The new variations of his experiment involved the teacher having to read out word pairs to the student, Milgram had a confederate initiate the shock, the outcome of this proved further evidence of people’s capabilities to obey to authority with 92.5% of people continuing onto the 450volts. However, despite Milgram replicating his experiment to avoid this, it can be argued otherwise. Orne and Holland (1972) argued that Milgram’s participants may have simply been trying to ‘be good participants’ and suggested Milgram’s work lacked experimental realism. This claim can be supported by some of the Volunteers claiming that they didn’t think the researcher would have let anyone come to harm. However many participants showed signs of stress, such as sweating, trembling and stuttering making it hard to suggested that they thought it was a fake