How have Milgram's studies on obedience helped us to understand this topic?

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Lucy Kyle

How have Milgram’s studies on obedience helped us to understand this topic?

Some of the most horrific violations on human life occurred during the 2nd World War. These shocking atrocities were carried out by fellow human beings who, afterwards attempted to justify themselves by declaring that they had only been following orders. It is difficult to imagine these people as anything other than sadistic psychopaths, yet it seems impossible that they were all like that. It is clear that personality does not always explain how people act.

It was these appalling persecutions which ordinary people willingly carried out during the 2nd world war which influenced Stanley Milgram (1963; cited in The Perils of Obedience, , 23/10/02) to investigate the possibility that normal people would readily administer pain onto another person when instructed to by a figure of authority in controlled settings. His experiment produced intriguing results and is widely considered to be the greatest research in modern social psychology. Throughout this essay I hope to explore how Milgram conducted his experiments and what his findings mean to social psychology.

 The initial obedience experiment was carried out on men in New Haven, Connecticut. It was not until later that it was carried out on women, mainly because of Milgram’s original interest in what motivated the ‘war criminals’ (who were largely male) during the 2nd world war. Volunteers who took part were selected from a range of lifestyles and ages and given $4.50 as payment for taking part in what they believed to be a ‘study of memory’. It is important to add that before the research started they were told that they could keep the money even if they decided to leave at any point during the experiment. Consequently, this eliminates the possibility of a volunteer carrying on for purely monetary reasons.

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The research involved three key people, an actual volunteer who would become the teacher, a fake volunteer who would become the learner and a fake scientist who would become the figure of authority. However the real volunteer did not know that the other subject and the scientist were impostors.

To make the experiment seem as genuine as possible, the subjects were taken to a laboratory in Yale University where they were introduced to the supposed scientist. He then explained that the experiment was about punishment and learning and instructed the volunteers to decide who would become the ‘learner’ and ...

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