Society and government require people to be obedient towards authority, but is it always the best thing to do? During the aftermath of World War II many of the major leaders of the Nazi regime were put on trial for crimes against humanity (History.com). These trials were known as the Nuremburg war trials, were most of the convicted proclaimed that they were “just following orders” (McLeod 584). Being an accomplice to a crime is also against the law. In the Nuremburg trials, those accused were not breaking the law that their government had created, they were actually following it. These individuals had to follow their orders and ignore their own moral laws to prevent disobeying the law. This shows how people need to focus more on following their …show more content…
His experiment was used to demonstrate how people respond to orders from people with authority no matter what the order was. He started by having participants test another “participant”, who actually was one of Milgram’s men who knew what was going on. Each time the fake participant chose the wrong answer, the real participant had to shock them with a higher voltage until they got to one that would be deadly. Milgram changed parts of the experiment to find variables that changed how far the real participant would go. He noticed that location and experimenter’s dress apparel changes how likely it is that the real participant would go to the deadly voltage. He saw that the more personal, or close, the real participant had to be to the fake one, while they were being shocked, affected the obedience as well. He also noticed that if there were two other fake participants teaching that refused to shock their learners that the real participant would not comply. Finally, he tested the experimenter telling the real patient to shock the learner by telephone, instead of actually being there in person, reduced obedience as well (McLead). The Milgram experiment and the Nuremburg trials can relate extensively to explain how the Holocaust happened the way it did. Obviously the high ranking officers and buildings that these orders were carried out in helps make the people receiving them threatened to carry them out. The high ranking …show more content…
Many of the accused got sentenced to life in prison or death. Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to explain the correlation of the environmental aspects that make people do terrible things and how far people will go to harm others. Social pressures also play a big role in how people think. Minorities can have their ideas of what is right and what is wrong swept over by majorities which was displayed in Solomon Asch’s experiments. The most important thing to learn from the Nuremburg trials, Milgram’s experiment, and Asch’s experiment is that sometimes it is better to resist authority if it means following moral
Jacob, on the other end of the spectrum, gave up a career as a doctor to become “…a gay activist teaching inner –city kids,” (60). Jacob, who kneeled to authority and flipped the switch on the shock machine, lived his real life by sticking up for himself and others against the crowd or norm. It seems obvious that the only logical explanation is that Milgram’s experiment did not accurately display how our personalities affect whether we obey authority or
In the experiment, Milgram uses purposeful deception as the teacher is the naive subject and is told they are participating in a memory and learner psychology experiment and are in charge of delivering shocks to the learner, who, in fact, is an actor. The majority of the participants in the study were obedient to the experimenter even though the experimenter "did not threaten the subjects with punishments such as loss of income, community ostracism or jail for failure to obey. Neither could he offer incentives" (Milgram 651). Despite having nothing to gain, the subjects continued participating in the experiment. The participants continued to administer shocks to the student because they were instructed to
There were two groups in this experiment, the teachers and students. All of the volunteers to the experiments were the teachers and they had some actors play the students. The idea was to punish the students for their wrong answer through a shock treatment (http://nature.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7article/article35.htm 1). Throughout the experiment, they began to realize that the “test subjects”
The Milgram Experiment was a test done originally in the 1960s. It involved bringing people in to be a “teacher” and having the “teacher” give a test to another person who is hooked up to a generator. Whenever the “learner” gets a question wrong the “teacher” issues a shock. These shocks go all the way to 450 volts. The point of the experiment was to see how far people would go with the shocks.
When the Milgram obedience experiments were being conducted the core of the experiments were all based on the false impression that an electrical shock would be administered to another individual at the push of a button with an incorrect answer, when in fact they weren’t. If the Milgram experiments were not based on lies and each participant did in fact administer a shock to another individual in response to a wrong answer, I feel that the results would have been the same with no alternative result. The reason for this would be because from the very beginning of the experiment the participants already believed that they would be actually administering an electrical shock. The participant’s reactions and concerns before, during and even after the experiments were all real with their true feelings and thoughts about their participation of either walking away from the experiment or completing the experiment. If the participants were to know that the electric shocks they were administering were not real, then the whole purpose of the experiment would have been useless and unnecessary.
Then, the participants were fully debriefed about the situation and how no physical harm was inflicted. Generally, “the obedience experiments produced a disturbing view of human behavior” (Blass, Print). The procedure heavily relied on the experimenter because the participant, upon instinct, chose to turn to them when in doubt or when showing nervousness. They were always commanded to continue the
At the forefront of this account is Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment. The experiment saw a learner on one side of the wall and the teacher, the subject of the experiment, on the other. The subject was instructed by the experimenter to meet any wrong answers from the learner with electric shocks of increasing intensity from 15 up to 450 vaults. The subject was given a shock of 45 vaults in order to experience the intensity of the treatment. (Jones 2006:271)
Stanley Milgram conducted a famous experiment focusing on the struggle of obedience and to authority and personal conscience. Milgram selected participants and told them that this was a study of the effect of punishment on learning. Milgram then paired the participants up and made them chose slips from a hat to see who would be the “teacher” and who would stand as the “learner.” Because the slips both said “teacher,” both participants drew the “teacher” slip. One of the participants in every pair was a confederate, or an actor working with the experimenter.
Stanley Milgram’s All I can say to these experiments is “Wow” to me I saw it as inhumane. The interviews confirmed that an everyday normal person can cause pain and suffering to another. Milgram also noticed that the inclination toward a particular characteristic or type of behavior of the teacher was to devalue or demean the learner, to help to internally justify the teacher’s behavior of continuing to conduct the shocks in which it helped to continue the process of the experiment. The experiment gave an enormous amount of insight into the human behavior and the human obedience.
Milgram’s baseline experiment was to study whether people would comply with an authority figure during a brutal experiment or if they would utilize their own morals to make the experiment stop. This study was influenced by the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes. For his experiment he had taught an accomplice to pretend to receive electric shocks. The experimental subject/administrator was placed in front of some sort of dial and they were told would give them incrementing levels of shock to the actor. The administrator would then ask a series of questions and if he answered incorrectly the actor would then receive an electric shock.
David’s claim that the Holocaust occurred because the Germans became unusually cruel is false based on the fundamental attribution error and Milgram’s experiments. The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to attribute other people’s behavior to internal factors, instead of accounting for situational factors. David committed this error when stating that Germans, as a whole, were “sadistic people with abnormal and twisted personalities”. David did not account for the immense pressure that the German public felt from Hitler during World War II. Although many atrocities were being committed, the Germans feared for their lives if they stood up for the Jews and disobeyed Hitler’s rule.
Both Milgram and Meyer were disgusted with the results that so many people would electrocute a stranger to the point of death, just because they were asked to. Meyers said that Milgram is no longer worried about the Nazis but is more worried about people like Meyers and normal people in America. Meyers also believes that people think that they would not go so far as many did in the experiment, but until they are put in that situation there is no way to tell what would happen.
Similarities between the Stanley Milgram, and Stanford prison experiment extend beyond the conventional commonalities of psychological experiments. The approach of setup were at extremes with one having a student teacher relationship, compared to that of a prisoner and a guard, but the results of human responses were unnervingly relatable with both teacher and guard, being in the superior position and allowing themselves to degrade the inferior to extremes of death. Psychologist Zimbardo may have compromised the legitimacy of his experiment with the inability to remove himself, as he admitted in his conclusion, to remain objective and from influencing the results, but the authenticity of the reactions were not compromised. The motivation, some of the interviewes claimed, was to have control of the situation. Whether control meant psychological harassment or not eating, everyone had an excuse that they were playing roles in an experiment to justify the drastic measures of manipulation taken
By slowly upping the shock instead of going all out conditioned the subjects into complying with the directions given by the experimenter. Like the Holocaust it was a slow process that built up gradually and ended with the death of 5 million innocents (Blass 277). Milgram then found out what led to the genocide (Rathus 489). In Milgram’s obedience experiments, buffers were used to increase the distance between the students and the subject which lead to an increase in the subjects compliance. The Holocaust used buffers in order to divide the people using negative stereotypes and anti-Semitic propaganda, in order to separate and dehumanize a group of people.
They demanded ever greater obedience from the prisoners.” . Having power isn’t always a good thing. Having power can turn a person from good to bad. Having can make you not be aware of how you are treating people. Having power really corrupts you.