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Essay On Milgram's Experiment

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According to Saul McLeod, Stanley Milgram, a professor with Yale University, devised an experiment looking for justification for the acts of genocide committed by the Nazis accused of atrocities at the Nuremberg War Criminal trials. His experiment began the year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann which took place in Jerusalem. Adolf Eichmann was a lieutenant colonel who was tasked with organizing and managing the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German occupied Eastern Europe during the Second World War. During his trial, which was widely publicized, he insisted that he did not feel guilty has he had no authority and was simply following the orders of his superiors. Milgram wanted to see if the German people …show more content…

To Milgram’s surprise, the pilot study showed a 60 percent fully obedient rate, far different than what most had predicated. However, this pilot was dismissed as “irrelevant” by one of his colleagues on the basis that Yale students are highly aggressive and competitive by nature. Milgram then moved on to regular experiments drawing his subjects from regular New Haven society by way of newspaper advertisements. Subjects ranged from white collar professionals to the unemployed, although all were male, and the results were the same as the experiment with the Yale students. Again, Baumrind dismissed Milgram’s experiment insisting that his selection method was not of sufficient scale to validate his results and would make it hard for colleagues who might hold diverging theories to reproduce his results. In Baumrind analysis of Milgram’s experiment she fails to see a correlation between Milgram’s experiment and the relationship between German authority figures and members of the SS. Baumrind also states that she would still question the validity of Milgram’s study even if it was reproduced outside of New Haven and the confines of Yale University as well as how illustrative of human behavior the sample could be when using subjects who volunteered to take part in an experiment conducted outside of a

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