...Questioning Authority: A Rethinking of the Infamous Milgram Experiments By Liliana Segura, AlterNet Posted on February 12, 2009 Between 1963 and 1974, Dr. Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments that would become one of the most famous social psychology studies of the 20th century. His focus was how average people respond to authority, and what he revealed stunned and disturbed people the world over. Under the pretense of an experiment on "learning" and "memory," Milgram placed test subjects in a lab rigged with fake gadgetry, where a man in a lab coat instructed them to administer electrical shocks to a fellow test subject (actually an actor) seated in another room in "a kind of miniature electric chair." Participants were told they were the "teachers" in the scenario and given a list of questions with which to quiz their counterparts (the "learners"). If the respondent answered incorrectly to a question, he got an electric shock as punishment. The shocks were light at first -- 15 volts -- and became stronger incrementally, until they reached 450 volts -a level labeled "Danger: Severe Shock." The actors were never actually electrocuted, but they pretended they were. They groaned, shouted, and, as the current became stronger, begged for relief. Meanwhile, the man in the lab coat coolly told the test subjects to keep going. To people's horror, Milgram discovered that a solid majority of his subjects -- roughly two-thirds -- were willing to administer the highest levels...
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...The Milgram Experiment was conducted by Stanley Milgram who was a psychologist at Yale University. He invented this study to explore the issue of authority. Milgram wanted to understand obedience. Milgram asked the question, “What is there in human nature that allows an individual to act without any restraints whatsoever that allows us to act inhumane and not limited by compassion or conscience.” This experiment allowed insight into the topic of conflict between obedience to authority and conscience. How far would people proceed in obeying authority if it involved hurting another person? In order to conduct this experiment Milgram used male subjects from 20 to 50 years old. The authority figure told the subjects they were testing to see if people...
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...such as the Holocaust and why crimes of obedience are so prevalent in society. Are all people capable of committing crimes of obedience given the right situation? Is there a certain disposition or combination of personality traits that leads to crimes of obedience? Situations are unique and dispositions vary; attempting to distinguish what causes these occurrences is a complex task that has been the subject of numerous studies, yet no concrete answers are found. Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments ignited the flame of a subject that, instead of diminishing over time and becoming obsolete as a result of improved methods and new ideologies, has remained at the forefront of social and behavioral psychology. Modern research faces the critical challenge of attempting to study obedience under much more restrictive guidelines than previous studies; the results that are produced can only hope to shed light on one component of obedience and use other studies to synthesize a more complete explanation. The predecessor to all of this modern research was the Milgram obedience experiment and all of its variations. It has remained a fixture of social psychology for so long for several reasons: the enormity of the results (65% of a normal population of American men is willing to administer dangerous shocks to innocent learners), its magnitude (over 1000 people tested in 18 variations), its clarity in defining how situation influences the obedience of participants, and the questions...
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...the investigation at any time and be assured of confidentiality. However, in some cases these rules can not be fully complied with and only after safeguards have been put in place, especially for children or those that have a disability, can deviation from the guidelines take place. However, there will always be conflict between participants and psychologists needs or expectations of the experiment. In some experimental situations the participant will not be fully informed of what they are taking part in so the psychologist can achieve a non-biased outcome from the results. This could be classed as harmful to the participants as the outcome of being deceived could lead to psychological harm. In Milgram’s (1963 cited in Hill, 2001 p24) study participants took part in the obedience to authority experiment. At this time the ethical guidelines were not as strict and this has brought outrage to some of his critics, Baumrind (1964) in particular is extremely critical of his approach and outcome of the experiment. Baumrind (1964) argued that the participants were not protected from harm throughout the experiment and they did not have fully informed consent. Her concerns were that the participants could have been psychology affected long term and the end result does not justify the means. She also implied that the participants were forced by the experimenter to shock the confederate; this was not the case as the participants were free to leave at any time....
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...AS Psychology - Unit Two Social Psychology Social Influence Student workbook Name: .................................................................................. Form: ................................................................................... Teacher: .............................................................................. Specification requirements Social psychology Candidates will be expected to demonstrate: • Knowledge and understanding of concepts, theories and studies in relation to individual differences • Skills of analysis, evaluation and application in relation to individual differences • Knowledge and understanding of research methods associated with this area of psychology • Knowledge and understanding of ethical issues associated with this area of psychology. |Content outline | |Social influence |Conformity (majority influence) and explanations of why people conform, including informational | | |social influence and normative social influence | | | | | |Types...
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...1960s, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram did a famous research study called the obedience study. It showed that people have a strong tendency to comply with authority figures. Milgram’s Obedience Study Milgram told his forty male volunteer research subjects that they were participating in a study about the effects of punishment on learning. He assigned each of the subjects to the role of teacher. Each subject was told that his task was to help another subject like himself learn a list of word pairs. Each time the learner made a mistake, the teacher was to give the learner an electric shock by flipping a switch. The teacher was told to increase the shock level each time the learner made a mistake, until a dangerous shock level was reached. Throughout the course of the experiment, the experimenter firmly commanded the teachers to follow the instructions they had been given. In reality, the learner was not an experiment subject but Milgram’s accomplice, and he never actually received an electric shock. However, he pretended to be in pain when shocks were administered. Prior to the study, forty psychiatrists that Milgram consulted told him that fewer than 1 percent of subjects would administer what they thought were dangerous shocks to the learner. However, Milgram found that two-thirds of the teachers did administer even the highest level of shock, despite believing that the learner was suffering great pain and distress. Milgram believed that the teachers had acted...
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...Individual Programmatic Assessment: Exploring a Classic Study in Social Psychology Daryl Bonelli Psych/620 January 25th, 2016 Colleen Story Individual Programmatic Assessment: Exploring a Classic Study in Social Psychology Introduction Norman Chomsky once wrote “I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.” There is a true feeling of what authority can do if placed in situations that require someone to follow instructions. What happens to someone when they follow the orders of another person in authority? An experiment conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram reveal how situationism applies to study results. How would this experiment differ if the participants were from various races, cultures, gender groups? A summary of the study and how it was conducted Stanley Milgram is a psychologist who conducted a study based on obedience during the 1960’s, and this experiment produced startling results. Questions still arise about the experiments validity, but the impact on psychology remains to be one of the best measures to assess how authority plays a role in obedience. In 1961 after the Trial of WWII criminal Adolph Eichmann, Milgram started his study. Stanley Milgram's experiment built on the idea of obedience...
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...complex field of study; the ethics for individual and social are undefined. Though ethical codes could stretch back through history of the Ancient Greek. There have been many up to date versions of ethical codes since then, such as being respected when taking part in psychological research conducted (McGaha & Korn, 1995). Within the departments of psychology there are various ethics committee, the aim of every department is to avoid participants experiencing distress and making sure participants welfare and dignity is kept. Ethics within psychology means the researcher’s key focus have to be to reduce any sort of discomfort or risks which are involved within the study. Also preventing the participants from experiencing any long-term undesirable consequences as well as having to notifying participants on all features of the study which could have an influence on their decision to take part (Hobbs, 1948). Throughout the psychological history many research studies have been conducted by various psychologists. There have been some which have been ethically critisied, with the lack of ethics taken into consideration. The most commonly discussed research study which has many ethical issues is known to be conducted by a behavioral psychologist Stanley Milgram (1963). Leading to many discussions Milgram (1963) purpose of his study was to investigate how far an individual would obey a figure of authority (Bernstein, 2011). Stanley Milgram (1963) introduced his well-known study on obedience...
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...Stanley Milgram is one of my personal academic heroes and one of the reasons that I gained an interest in psychology many years ago. After studying his experiments and reading “Obedience to Authority” about six years ago, I truly began to admire his Avant-garde ways of approaching the science. I am an avid student of social issues and studying this “rock star” of social psychology has heightened my senses and allowed me to look beyond what the masses consider socially unacceptable in the name of discovery. The following is a reply to a video entitled “Into the Mind: Mind Control” which focuses on famous experiments conducted to discover the “whys” behind certain behaviors. While the video highlights a number of psychological experiments, this short work will focus on Stanley Milgram and answer the following: what are the ethical inferences and did his results justify the manner in which the experiment was conducted? According to Milgram (1984), “The case touched on a fundamental issue of the human condition, our primordial nightmare. If we need help, will those around us stand around and let us be destroyed or will they come to our aid? Are those other creatures there to help us sustain our life and values or are we individual flecks of dust just floating around in a vacuum” (Memorable quotes). The Experiment: Why this Approach? At a rudimentary level, human behavior and all of the questions that revolve around it is why psychology exists. Man studies the differences...
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...OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY The Power of the Situation in Milgram's Obedience Experiments Ahsan Chishty Ohlone College POWER OF SITUATION AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY The Power of the Situation in Milgram's Obedience Experiments Stanley Milgram is a name universally known for the Yale professor who shocked the world with his experiments on obedience. In 1961, Milgram along with many other colleagues devised an experiment after receiving a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct an experiment in response to the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Milgram wanted to know if Germans under the rule of authority figures did exactly what they were instructed to do by those of higher power than them due to the fact that many of the explanations for the Nazi atrocities was simply that Nazi soldiers were following orders. After placing an ad in the New Haven Register for a learning experiment on the study of memory. According to Thomas Blass (2009), offering participants $4.50 and a paid bus fare for an hour of their time seemed to be the biggest factor that attracted people to the ad but several of the participants also agreed to be a part of the study to learn something about themselves, expand their curiosity about psychology, or because they were fascinated by memory and hoped to understand it better through an experiment like Milgram's. The subjects were introduced to a man in a lab coat who would administrate the experiment. Subjects...
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...Born on August 15th, 1933, Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist. He is most notable for his Milgram experiment, a controversial experiment that drastically changed the way social psychologist’s looked at obedience. Early Years and Education In his early years, Milgram lived in the Bronx. By the time he had reached college age, his family had moved to Queens. Here, Milgram attended Queens College in New York. In 1954, he would receive his Bachelor’s degree in political science. From here, his interests shifted to psychology. He applied to Harvard University’s graduate program in Social Relations but was initially rejected due to never have taken a single psychology course in his undergraduate years. Later, he was able to gain...
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...Stanley Milgram’s “Issues in the Study of Obedience: A Reply to Baumrind” addresses his concerns regarding the argument she presents in her article in which she critiques his notable experiment on obedience. Correspondingly, he attempts to defend his premise as well as the chosen experimental methods he employs. However, Milgram’s response is ineffective in conveying his assertions to the article’s intended and likely audience because Milgram proves himself to be an unreliable authority. This fraudulence is evident given his clear display of bias, his illustration of false dilemmas, and his usage of an ad hominem attack. Milgram’s deliberate selection bias is evident throughout the entirety of this artic;e and it indirectly informs the reader...
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...The Milgram Experiment was one of the most influential experiments in social psychology. It was conducted by Stanley Milgram and was published in the 1960s. These laboratory experiments offer a powerful and disturbing look into the power of authority and obedience. Milgram was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying orders if it involved performing dangerous and even deadly action against another person and that violate their own personal beliefs and values. Simply put, Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities for example, Germans in WWII (Taylor, Peplau & Sears, 2006). Milgram selected participants for his experiment by advertising, through the newspaper, for male participants to take part in a psychology study of learning at Yale University. The procedure was that the volunteer was paired with another person and they drew straws to find out who would be the “learner” and who would be the “teacher.” The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s associates (pretending to be a real participant). While in another room, the "teacher" would deliver a shock, ranging from 15 to 450 volts, to the “learner" every time an incorrect answer was produced. While the participant believed that he was delivering real shocks to the learner, the associate was simply pretending to be shocked. As the level of shock increases, the learner’s reactions...
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...Science is a field full of discovery, and psychology is always looking for answers and studying the mind, and behavior characteristics of individuals in certain settings. Stanley Milgram, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale in 1961, was unlike any other, in regards to wanting answers to questions that swirled in his mind (Slater 31). And just as others before him, and others after, he wanted to conduct his own experiments. What did Milgram want to prove or disprove, and how he went about it, was it right or wrong in the eyes of ethics? He was intrigued by the capacity of obedience to authority even to the point of thwarting one owns morals. Milgram grew up in the World War II era, and his family would listen to the radio on a regular...
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...Obedience is complying with an order from another person to carry out an action. Many studies have been conducted into looking at obedience in people and what factors in a certain situation lead people to obey. In 1963, Milgram carried out a study among 40 American males between the ages of 20 and 50 years old, with the study aim being wanting to find out under what conditions would different people obey to authority under. The participants were deceived into thinking they would be emitting electric shocks, to inflict pain onto an individual when they gave a wrong answer to a question; the question being a word matching query. The participant here played the role of a teacher and the learner in this case was in fact the confederate. The shock meter went up in pain voltages as the experiment went on and more wrong answers were issued. However, there was no real pain being inflicted, just the sound of the learner acting as if he was hurt. The experiment carried on until the participant refused to obey the orders being given to them, or until the highest shock voltage of 450 volts was reached. However, stern encouragement was given to the participant by the leader of the experiment to carry on going and issue out the shocks, even though it was putting the learner through a great deal of audible pain. The experimenter would tell the teacher ‘it’s absolutely essential that you continue’ or ‘you have no choice, you must go on’. It seemed that in fact these instructions from an authoritative...
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