...conform to the orders of authority in order to promote obedience as a social virtue. This often leads man to equate disobedience with sin, which traces as far back as the biblical account of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. However, neither disobedience nor obedience could exist without the power of an authority figure to dictate the rules and restraints of submission. In his article “The Perils of Obedience,” Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram asserts that authority as a whole is an essential component of social living and that obedience to this authority is a social behavior unknowingly entrenched in a majority of the population. Milgram’s scientific review explores this claim as he shares data from his experiment in which subjects blindly obey someone they believe to be an expert, simply due to his prompting. Supported with reactions...
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...“The Perils of Obedience” Response Rochelle Jarmer Composed 2 Karsten Piper Due: 06-23-15 “The Perils of Obedience” by Stanley Milgram is a disturbing and thought-provoking article that details the author’s experimentation in human obedience. The article describes an experiment in which the “teacher”, is put in a position to administer a shock to the “learner” when a wrong answer is given during a test. The teacher is left unaware that the learner is an actor and not being shocked and, in fact, the focus of the experiment is the teacher himself. I think this article is particularly disturbing because people tend to believe that evil only lurks in the shadows. It is terrifying to realize that any ordinary person can commit cruel and horrible...
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...Discussion of the Stanley Milgram’s "Perils of Obedience" As Milgram writes in his article, for some people obedience is a deeply “ingrained behavior tendency”, which can create an impulse that can override past ideas in morality and ethics. While his experiment focused closely on the psychology behind response to obedience, his central idea conveyed substantial themes which bore on conceptions of professional ethics. One of these themes involved the previously underestimated significances of the potency of authority in influencing decision-making, even ones that go against one’s own conscientious imperatives. As most of us are “indoctrinated” in our childhood to develop a basic conception of values and virtues, one of the things we as human beings have grasped, through many phases in our evolution as societal creatures, is the importance of obedience to some form of authority. This scheme, now deeply ingrained in our psychology, plays a very strong role in the decisions we make daily, including playing a part towards trumping moral values, including possibly a code of professional ethics. [EXAMPLE] Individual morality, according to Milgram’s opinion, can be heavily compromised in the face of authority figures, in fact suggesting that in truth, in our society, individuality may be something that does not exist at all, and that the vast majority of our decision making may have sociological origins. In fact as Stanley Milgram showed, the weakening of the individual’s moral conscience...
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...article, "The Perils of Obedience", Stanley Milgram describes his experiment on obedience in everyday citizens. As the "teacher" in his experiment reads word pairs to the designated "learner", the teacher is further instructed by the experimenter in the back of the room to administer shocks of increasing strength every time a word is missed. Through the increasing levels of shock the experimenter can then hear the agonized screams of the learner who, in reality, is not actually being administered any amount of shock. Instead the voices heard are merely a recording, deceiving the teacher in order to study their reactions. The willingness of the teacher to continue was tested when being urged on by the experimenter. Feeling as if they will fail the experiment if they fail to continue, most people do. In Herbert C. Kelmans and Lee Hamilton's article, "The My...
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...The Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram and the example of the Milgram-related Hoax Case informs humanity that we need to stay true to our moral conscience, independent with our thoughts and fully incorporated in the decisions we make, they remind us of the importance of a clean political process and the right to be informed they warn us of the dangers that can come from surrendering to the decision of the majority and the blind obedience to authority. In “Perils of Obedience” by Stanley Milgram he states, “The form and shape of society and the way it is developing have much to do with it. There was a time, perhaps, when people were able to give a fully human response to any situation because they were fully absorbed in it as human beings. But as...
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...The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram Stanley Milgram’s “ The Perils of Obedience” shows that some people can obey authority even when it requires committing terrible actions within their society. Milgram begins his essay by describing what obedience is and how deeply ingrained of a behavior tendency that it is. He then sets up an experiment at Yale University that will push the limits of human obedience. He has a “teacher” give out a series of simple word pairs for the “learner”. If the learner gets a word pair wrong then the teacher gives out a series of shock ranging from 15 to 450 volts. The teacher who is the real subject in the experiment does not know that the learner is a paid actor who does not receive any actual shocks. The motivation behind this experiment for Milgram was to test just how far people would go to obey the command of an authority figure. Milgram’s theory is that the subject will have total control of what they are doing and will disobey the authority figure when inflicting pain onto a hopeless human being. One of his subjects, Gretchen Brandt, is participating with the experiment when the learner got the word pair wrong she showed the self control to stop shocking to not continue. Milgram thought that this is how the majority of subjects would react, “Her behavior is the very embodiment of what I envisioned would be true for almost all subject”(Milgram, 44). Brandt simply wasn’t worried about rejecting the authority if it meant that she no longer...
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...Emanuel Coleman Professor Smicialas English 161 9 September 2014 The Perils Of Obedience “Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to.” (Milgram 631). In Stanley Milgram’s 1963 study Perils of Obedience, he finds that human beings, when ordered by an authority, will commit atrocious acts against another human being. He proves this through an extensive scientific study. In this study, he pulls from a multitude of different social classes and cultures. Asking, the subjects to bring bodily harm to another person in the form of increasingly stronger electric shocks, ranging from 15 to 450 volts. The role assigned to the test subjects is that of "teacher" and "learner."The learner is put in a room and strapped to an electric chair, the teacher is in another room where they can see the learner. The teacher is seated next to a huge machine that administers the shocks. The scientist starts commanding from near by. He begins by calmly demanding that the teacher shock the student if the student does not accurately repeat a set of words that progressively advance in difficulty. The results of his 1963 study were shocking, even the people he sought to predict the outcome, which includes a variety of people from psychiatrists to college students and middle class adults. Interestingly enough, Milgram states that, “with remarkable similarity they predicted that virtually all subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter” (Milgram 634)...
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...Running Head: POWER OF SITUATION AND 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...
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...Third Paper: Analysis Obedience and disobedience to the authority has always been a favorite topic of psychologists and researchers. Stanley Milgram’s experiments shows that people are more often to submit themselves toward authority as compared to the people who disobey. According to Milgram, the pillars or support of the society is being threatened by disobedience. On the contrary, Erich Fromm rejects the theory of “obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice”(621). Human history has formed by an act of disobedience by Adam and Eve, who were living in heaven obediently but a little act of disobedience changed everything. Fromm claims that their act of disobedience opened their eyes. After disobedience, man created his own heaven. Acts of disobedience evolved and changed by time. Milgram’s and Fromm’s theories are opposite to each other, one supports obedience and other doesn’t....
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...Obedience, Authority and Moral Conflict Thomas E. Colley ENGL 213, P11: Writing in the Social and Natural Sciences Dr. Joan O’Leary January 28, 2010 Obedience, Authority and Moral Conflict In the 1963 report, “The Perils of Obedience,” psychologist Stanley Milgram detailed the results of experiments on the obedient response of individuals to the commands of an authority figure while experiencing moral conflict. Milgram conducted his experiments with diverse subjects in many countries. The trials consisted of three participants: the learner, the teacher and the experimenter. Witnessed by the teacher, the experimenter strapped the learner to an apparatus that appeared to be “a miniature electric chair.” The teacher tested the learner on his ability to remember the second word of a pair when prompted by reading the first word. Seated in front of an instrument panel in a separate room, the teacher administered an electric shock of increasing intensity to the learner for any memory errors. Milgram provided a detailed description that left little doubt that the shock and intensity administered was the result of the teacher’s manipulation of this device. Unbeknownst to the teacher, the learner was part of the trial and responded to the shocks in an increasingly agonizing display. Milgram’s findings, which directly contradicted his predictions, demonstrated full compliance in 60-85% of the participants. Obedience in the face of moral conflict was directly...
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...Luke Saxon Dr. Loper EN 101-129 23 November 2014 Argumentative Synthesis Final Obedience to authority comes somewhat naturally to most people because of the world we live in, every civilization has some type of authority. However, power brings on great responsibilities, and not all authority figures have the ability to handle that. For years psychologists have studied obedience to authority to learn new things about humans and our interaction with those giving the orders. For me exploring this topic has led me to believe that power has the ability to corrupt, situations are a key factor in decision making, and most people are inclined to obey authority. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is a popular quote from Lord Acton. This statement has been proven true time and time again throughout history. A few good examples come from the Stanford Prison Experiment, where some of the students that played the role of guard abused the power they had been given for the experiment. During the testing two main guards took it upon themselves to become the authority of the prison even though they were not asked to do so. This shows that even a small amount of power can start to affect the way you act. They began taunting the prisoners, calling them demeaning names, and even forced them to do unnecessary exercises at times simply because they had the power to. Not only does power have the ability to corrupt, but it has the ability to do it quickly at times...
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...The perils of obedience "Be quiet! Write this down." How often have you heard this, or something like it? We hear or come across commands, instructions, directions and orders every day. What is it that makes us obey (or disobey) them? Millions of people were killed in Nazi Germany in concentration camps but Hitler couldn't have killed them all, nor could a handful of people. What made all those people follow the orders they were given? Were they afraid, or was there something in their personality that made them like that? In order to obey authority, the obeying person has to accept that it is legitimate (i.e. rightful, legal) for the command to be made of them. Obedience is a form of social influence where an individual acts in response to a direct order from another individual, who is usually an authority figure. It is assumed that without such an order the person would not have acted in this way. Obedience occurs when you are told to do something (authority), whereas conformity happens through social pressure (the norms of the majority). Obedience involves a hierarchy of power / status. Therefore, the person giving the order has a higher status than the person receiving the order. Adolf Eichmann was executed in 1962 for his part in organizing the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people, as well as gypsies, communists and trade unionists were transported to death camps and murdered in Nazi Germany and surrounding countries under Nazi control. Eichmann was...
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...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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...For Milgram's other well-known experiment, see Small world experiment. The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the latter believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subject believes that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual electric shocks, though in reality there were no such punishments. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level.[1] The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,[1] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.[2] The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the question: "Was it that Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust had mutual intent, in at least with regard to the goals of the Holocaust?" In...
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...Flawed or Not?: That is the Question Shanelle L. Todd and Kayla L. Thompson Brenau University Flawed or Not?: That is the Question What if I told you that the US Naval and Marine corporations funded a what they called, “prison experiment” in 1971, with a goal of finding that the prison environment produces aggressive attitudes? Zimbardo conducted this experiment in the basement of the Psychology department at Stanford University. He took regular everyday college students like you and I made some prisoners and some guards, locked them up in a very small area, and evaluated their behaviors. The question is, how were the guards and the prisoners distinguished between? Now this is where the word evil comes in. In order to make the environment a real “evil” environment the guards wore hats and badges while the prisoners wore nothing but frowsy dresses. This was Zimbardo’s bright idea of an evil environment. So, does perception come into play? Does what each person perceives as evil environments make for a trustworthy study, setting out to support such a claim? Ultimately, did Zimbardo adequately reconstruct a fair representation of a true prison setting or did Zimbardo exaggerate that too? Well, according to two documentary professionals, this study did support that evil environments produces evil behaviors stated not only by Ratnesar’s, but also by Sheere. The funding corporations were kept a secret from the general public for more than 20 years. Just recently on...
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