Essay About Obedience Experiments And Stanley Milgram

The Obedience ExperimentsJoin now to read essay The Obedience ExperimentsYale University psychologist, Stanley Milgram, conducted a seminal series of experiments between 1960 and 1963 which examined how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to do so by an experimental scientist. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study. Although people were instructed to do something that they fundamentally did not want to do, their resulting anxiety and tension did not predict disobedience, underscoring the power of authority to override the dictates of conscious. In his 1986 publication, The Obedience Experiments, Arthur G. Miller presents and evaluates these experiments, providing a summary of empirical support and appraisals that have developed amongst social psychologists and other professionals as a result of this landmark work.

The study itself encompassed over one thousand individual participants, each experiment using a similarly balanced distribution of subjects according to age and socioeconomic status. The construction of the experiments was such that each subject believed they were involved in a study of “learning and punishment”. An experimenter ordered the participant (assigned as a “teacher”) to give what the subject believed were painful electric shocks to a “learner”, who was actually a confederate. The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving increasingly severe electrical shocks as administered by a series of leavers at the subjects disposal. In actual fact, there were no real shocks involved. Obedience was measured in terms of the average maximum shock level administered by the subjects, as well as the percentage obeying to the maximum (450-volt) level against clear protests from the learner. If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of increasingly persistent verbal prods by the experimenter. If the subject still wished to stop after four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.

Variations in the specific setting in terms of status, position, peer influence, and experimenter proximity to the subject were all associated with the largest influence on obedience. Other seemingly important factors, such as gender, personnel characteristics, locale, and the presence of a contractual agreement proved to have little effect. In general, it was not the substance of the setting or command, but the source of authority that was the decisive factor. That is, participants appeared to focus almost exclusively on who was giving the instruction.

Milgrams central concept was that of the agentic shift describing the tendency of people to deny responsibility when they define themselves as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others. Certain background factors such as the socialisation of obedience and contextual settings (including the “look” of an authority figure and the “authenticity” of the institution he/she inhabits) add to the extent to which one tunes into an agentic state, binding that individual to a hierarchical structure and enhancing the likelihood of obedience. Appraisal of Milgrams work has been widespread and mixed, focussing both on methodological and theoretical/conceptual aspects. In general, while the originality and scope of the experiments is highly regarded, there still remains controversy over the objectivity and ethics of the methodology as well as the empirical support for his theory. As Miller notes, the status of the agentic shift must certainly be regarded as “unproven”.

I agree that Milgrams experiments were undoubtedly influential in casting light onto the Nazi atrocities discovered after World War II. Milgram himself suggested that one of the major factors accounting for the Holocaust was the ready propensity of human beings to obey authorities even when obedience is wrong. The Nazi regime operated under a fiercely intense social structure whereby ordinary people quickly became agents in a terribly destructive process without any particular hostility on their part. In fact, the Germans who ran the death camps were often reported as ordinary “decent” citizens, with consciences no different from those of any of us. Yet even when the destructive effects of their work became patently clear, and they were asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few Nazis were found to possess the resources needed to resist their clearly defined authority.

{table:fatalist, text-block, bold: “I agree.”} The following comment from my friend Michael O’Neill was critical of the Holocaust, stating that: “To understand that there was a real Holocaust among certain people from the point of view of their actuality of being involved in the Holocaust is to understand the role these crimes played in legitimizing a certain social structure: The Nazi regime, for reasons which appear to lie beyond the pale, used it to legitimize a particular structure.” The following comment from Michael O’Neill was critical of the Holocaust, stating that: “To understand that there was a real Holocaust among certain people from the point of view of their actuality of being involved in the Holocaust is to understand the role these crimes played in legitimizing a certain social structure: The Nazi government, for reasons which appear to lie beyond the pale, used it to legitimize a particular structure.” The following comment from Michael O’Neill was critical of the Holocaust, stating: “The Holocaust was a political and social disaster. It involved massive political power, and the Jews fought viciously in various forms of oppression, sometimes in various degrees. Although they would have been able to avoid committing those most responsible for that power, and yet are unable to do so, this could not have prevented the real destruction wrought by Hitler. The point was not to tell the reader much about its meaning, and the consequences of a terrible, even monstrous, crime. But the point was to tell the reader why and how such horrors could be possible, by means of a single narrative form and a single moral order that was fundamentally different from those which were previously available to the mass of human beings whose actions were deemed criminal at the time. These words were at once contradictory and almost as if the Nazis used them to justify their actions.

[19][20] 201009/20/chilcot_march_in_syria.html An argument that was made by a number of historians who were in Europe, especially German and Russian historians, as well as other major scholars who thought that the genocide in question would be repeated in other regions, is that the Nazis and Stalin were at times at odds but were still working together to exterminate the Jewish population of that country. Commentary by Alexander Gerber, “The Second World War During the First World War.” Commentary by William P. Koehn. Commentary by David Lippstadt; “The “Second World War” after the end of the war. After the fall of the Berlin Wall. By Richard Leak, “In light of the nature and extent of the “Cold War”, and specifically with reference to Churchill, the following discussion of the fate of the Jewish population in Germany is presented as a general point of view. Commentary by Henry B. Wortner. Commentary by Robert A. Ehrlich; “Soviet Union-Soviet War.”