REGENT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

[Date]

Discussing Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority Experiments on

the assumption that Human is Natural Violent

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Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist.

He served on the faculty at Yale University, Harvard University, and the City University of New

York. While at Yale, he conducted a seminal series of experiments on obedience to authority,

which have come to be known simply as the infamous "Milgram experiment." Milgram

conducted a number of other studies, including the small-world experiment (the source of the six

degrees of separation concept), and also introduced the concept of familiar strangers. IN August

7th, 1961, through to the end of May 1962, in the basement of a classroom building at Yale

University, Stanley Milgram conducted more than 20 variations of his infamous obedience to

authority experiments. He shocked the world with data on how readily people would punish

others when cajoled or intimidated by an experimenter. This was a pivotal point in psychology

because it was empirical evidence of man’s inhumanity to man — something no one, then or

now, really wanted to hear.

In fact, the classic electric shock experiment by social psychologist Dr tanley Milgram, , showed

that when given an order by someone in authority, people would deliver what they believed to be

extreme levels of electrical shock to other study participants who answered questions incorrectly.

The experiment provides several lessons about how situations can foster evil: provide people

with an ideology to justify beliefs for actions.

Make people take a small first step toward a harmful act with a minor, trivial action and

then gradually increase those small actions.

Make those in charge seem like a "just authority."

Transform a once compassionate leader into a dictatorial figure.

Provide people with vague and ever-changing rules.

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Relabel the situation's actors and their actions to legitimize the ideology.

Provide people with social models of compliance.

Allow dissent, but only if people continue to comply with orders.

Make exiting the situation difficult.

In Milgram's work, Milgram (1963), Milgram (1974), members of the general public

(predominantly men) volunteered to take part in a scientific study of memory. They found

themselves cast in the role of a “Teacher” with the task of administering shocks of increasing

magnitude (from 15 V to 450 V in 15-V increments) to another man (the “Learner”) every time

he failed to recall the correct word in a previously learned pair. Unbeknown to the Teacher, the

Learner was Milgram's confederate, and the shocks were not real. Moreover, rather than being

interested in memory, Milgram was actually interested in seeing how far the men would go in

carrying out the task. To his—and everyone else’s Blass (2004) shock, the answer was “very

far.” In what came to be termed the “baseline” study Russell (2011) all participants proved

willing to administer shocks of 300 V and 65% went all the way to 450 V. This appeared to

provide compelling evidence that normal well-adjusted men would be willing to kill a complete

stranger simply because they were ordered to do so by an authority.

Much of the power of Milgram’s research derives from the fact that it appears to give empirical

substance to this claim that evil is banal (Novick 1999). It seems to show that tyranny is a natural

and unavoidable consequence of humans' inherent motivation to bend to the wishes of those in

authority—whoever they may be and whatever it is that they want us to do. Put slightly

differently, it operationalizes an apparent tragedy of the human condition: our desire to be good

subjects is stronger than our desire to be subjects who do good.

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This experiment has been extensively written about, reproduced across cultures, and has used

both male and female subjects. Nearly 3,000 subjects in at least 11 other countries have

participated. It is always about the same: Two thirds to three quarters of the subjects deliver all

the shocks. Each new crop of psychology students is incredulous. It boggles them to know

someone could shock and perhaps kill someone for a few dollars in the interest of science.

Milgram elaborated two theories explaining his results:

The first is the theory of conformism, based on Solomon Asch's work, describing the

fundamental relationship between the group of reference and the individual person. A

subject who has neither ability nor expertise to make decisions, especially in a crisis, will

leave decision making to the group and its hierarchy. The group is the person's behavioral

model.

The second is the agentic state theory, wherein the essence of obedience consists in the

fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another

person's wishes, and he therefore no longer sees himself as responsible for his actions.

Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential

features of obedience follow.

His conclusion was that ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular

hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when

the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out

actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the

resources needed to resist authority.

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Taking personal responsibility for your actions, whether through moral reasoning or proximity,

seems a promising start to understanding the nature of those in the minority. Positive psychology

has often derived profound understanding from the outliers, from those whose natural gift is to

have such qualities as resilience, emotional intelligence, or optimism. Milgrim himself was an

outlier and certainly didn’t follow the crowd. Were he alive today there is a good chance he’d be

studying disobedience. He might even be inspired by a quote from the very origin that piqued his

interest in the first place.

Generaloberst Ludwig Beck (1880-1944) quoted “A soldier’s obedience finds its limits where his

knowledge, his conscience, and his responsibility forbid to obey orders.” This means that a

person has the knowledge, responsibility and the conscience not to do something he/she is not

ready.

A study nu Miller (2004, p. 196) pointed out: “Milgram’s results could be likened to the

Holocaust itself. Both scenarios revealed ordinary people willing to treat other people with

unimaginable cruelty” Extending upon this, it could also be argued that another commonality

between the OTA experiments and the Holocaust is that both proved capable of rapidly

transforming large proportions of ordinary (Browning, 1992, pp. 47-48; Milgram, 1974, p. 6),

and arguably indifferent people into willing inflictors of harm. People are willing to violent or

inflict harm without any superior authority instructions.

Milgram's studies further specifies the first point to note is that the primary dependent measure

(flicking a switch) offers few opportunities for creativity in carrying out the task. Nevertheless,

several of Milgram's findings typically escape standard reviews in which the paradigm is

portrayed as only yielding up evidence of obedience. Initially, it is clear that the “baseline study”

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is not especially typical of the 30 or so variants of the paradigm that Milgram conducted. Here

the percentage of participants going to 450 V varied from 0% to nearly 100%, but across the

studies as a whole, a majority of participants chose not to go this far Milgram (1974) Milgram

(1965), Reicher et al. (2012)

Furthermore, close analysis of the experimental sessions shows that participants are attentive to

the demands made on them by the Learner as well as the Experimenter (Packer, 2008). They are

torn between two voices confronting them with irreconcilable moral imperatives, and the fact

that they have to choose between them is a source of considerable anguish. They sweat, they

laugh, they try to talk and argue their way out of the situation. But the experimental set-up does

not allow them to do so. Ultimately, they tend to go along with the Experimenter if he justifies

their actions in terms of the scientific benefits of the study (as he does with the prod “The

experiment requires that you continue”) Burger JM, (Girgis and Manning, 2011). But if he gives

them a direct order (“You have no other choice, you must go on”) participants typically refuse.

Once again, received wisdom proves questionable. The Milgram studies seem to be less about

people blindly conforming to orders than about getting people to believe in the importance of

what they are doing. (Reicher and Haslam, 2011).

Milgram's experiments shocked people with their implications about the dark aspects of human

nature, especially since they showed that apparently normal people would behave in inhumane

ways. For Milgram, however, they were more about the influence of the group on the individual

than individual nature itself. He had begun his research asking whether it could be that those on

trial as war criminals were just following orders, and would others have done the same. When

the My Lai Massacre occurred in Vietnam in 1968, his work was used to explain the behavior of

those involved

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Milgram showed that human beings, people who one would not expect to behave inhumanely,

are nonetheless capable of acting in inhumane ways when ordered to do so by an authority figure

and when their peers also acted in the same way. Such obedience and conformity, Milgram

noted, are essential aspects of social behaviour, allowing society to function in an organized

fashion. The problem, obviously, comes when authority is wrong. Milgram's solution, based on

his research, was that people of conscience would find strength in numbers to resist misguided

authority. Thus, although shocking, Milgram's contribution to our understanding of human

nature gives much hope for a better world.

In conclusion, based on the Milgram’s Experiment one can say that a man is naturally violent

and does not have to controlled or directed from an authority before he/she commits a crime or

inflict pain.

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References

Blass T (2004) The man who shocked the world: the life and legacy of Stanley Milgram.

New

York, NY: Basic Books.

Milgram S (1963) Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal Sociology and

Psychology.

67: 371–378 [PubMed]

Milgram S (1965) Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority. Hum Relations

18: 57–76

Milgram S (1974) Obedience to authority: an experimental view. New York: Harper & Row.

Novick P (1999) The Holocaust in American life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Packer D (2008) Identifying systematic disobedience in Milgram's obedience experiments: a

meta-

analytic review. Perspect Psychology Science. 3: 301–304 [PubMed]

Reicher S.D., Haslam S.A. (2011) After shock? Towards a social identity explanation of the

Milgram ‘obedience’ studies. Brit J Soc Psychol 50: 163–169 [PubMed]

Reicher SD, Haslam SA, Smith JR (2012) Working towards the experimenter: reconceptualising

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obedience within the Milgram paradigm as identification-based followership. Perspect

Psychology Science. 7: 315–324 [PubMed]

Russell NJ (2011) Milgram's obedience to authority experiments: origins and early evolution. Br

Journal of Social Psychology. 50: 140–162 [PubMed]

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