In his article he hypothesizes, “The point of the experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measurable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim” (Milgram63). This experiment was inspired by WW2, which had just roughly ended. Milgram saw the Nazis fulfill orders without any questions to carry out horrific acts. This made Milgram question just how far the average citizen would go in order to obey. In the first execution of the experiment Milgram randomly selected Yale students to use for the experiment.
Stanley Milgram had a fascination with human obedience patterns. His experiment derived from the question of why the Nazis in Germany so willingly obeyed Adolf Hitler and assisted in the attempted extermination of the Jewish population. He wondered if it was simply Germany and other Eastern European countries that had a higher obedience levels than other countries such as America. This led to his idea of the famous Milgram Experiment. His idea consisted of having an uninformed subject that would be the “teacher,” and two confederates: an actor to be the “learner” and the experimenter, a man in a white lab coat.
Each time the learner is wrong the shock will get stronger. In reality, the learner receives no shock because he is just pretending to be in pain so the teachers will stop. In most cases the teachers continues to increase the voltage up to 450 volts to the learner even though the learner refuses the answer the question. Milgram's experiment was set up to determine how people in a psychology laboratory would react to authority. Since more than half of the subjects in the first experiment administered the shock to the end,
In “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram was trying to prove a point that shows how far someone will go to be obedient to the authority. He began this experiment using three subjects: the experimenter, the teacher, and the learner, but only the teacher was clueless about what they were about to partake in. The teacher would read out a series of words, and the learner, who was strapped to an electric chair, was required to remember the words that were associated to each other (Milgram 215). When asked, if the learner gave the wrong answer, the teacher was required to give them an electric shock of “fifteen to four hundred fifty volts” (215). Although the teacher did not know it, the learner was actually an actor pretending to be in extreme pain when given the electrical shock to persuade the teacher to want to discontinue the experiment (215).
Describe and evaluate Milgram’s original experiment. The Germans are different hypothesis (GADH) stated that the destruction of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and many others was made possible because of some sort of character defect which makes Germans more obedient, which therefore made them more likely to follow Hitler’s orders and commit the heinous crimes. Milgram’s ‘Behavioural study of obedience to malevolent authority’ in 1963 set out to test this theory as well as to see if participants in his experiment would obey orders to administer electric shocks to someone they thought was another participant and also to see how far the participants would go when they thought they were hurting someone else due to an authoritative individual. To carry out this procedure he used a standardized procedure and repeated measures design using a sample of 40 male volunteers by advertising participation locally in a newspaper for an experiment on human memory, in this advert he stated that the participants would be paid $4.00. The experiment was held at the prestigious university; Yale.
His work is considered fundamentally important and helps to understand how unremarkable people can do works of sickening cruelty. Milgram and obedience In his most noted experiment the volunteers thought that they 'take part in a study on memory' (Banyard, 2012, p. 67). The participants were called 'teacher' in this experiment. The 'teachers' were told by a fake scientist to administer electric shocks to a 'learner', who was sitting in another room, if the 'learner' forgets certain words he learned before. For every incorrect answer the 'teacher' had to increase the level of shock.
* For every incorrect answer the experimenter would order the ‘teacher’ to administer a shock increasing with every wrong answer. Even though the ‘learner’ complained of pain and demanded to be released the experimenter would insist the ‘teacher’ continue. * The learner was not being shocked, and his voice only a recording. * Results: Before his study Milgram asked a group of students to predict the result, he also introduced
All students must pass the teachers class in order for them to receive their incentives, so teachers are doing whatever it takes to allow their students to pass, even if it means cheating for their students. Research was conducted on the tests, and suspicious groups of correct answers were found. A retest was administered to the students to determine whether or not they really knew the answers, and the teachers who were found to be cheaters were terminated. Another research study was on the scores of top Sumo
What Arendt is inherently saying about Eichmann when she states that he acted out of sheer thoughtlessness is that he is not thinking or what can also be said is that he suffers from lack of thought. Eichmann was thoughtful as an administrator to which it’s true that he could deal with lots of complicated details, but overall to her, Eichmann is not thinking. For Arendt, thinking involves on the spot judgment and the ability to take another’s viewpoint into consideration. This is something that she thinks Eichmann lacks. For instance, in her book she states that this is a flaw where he, Eichmann, cannot take another fellow’s point of view and her example is in relation to when he was working in Vienna.
The “teacher” would receive orders from the “experimenter” to give an electric shock to the “learner” after every question they got incorrect and the “experimenter” would demand the “teacher” to up the voltage after every mistake. The “teacher” could either obey the orders given by the “experimenter”, or refuse to continue in the experiment. In conducting this test, it became evident that people had no trouble obeying a higher authority, particularly when told they would not be held responsible for the fate of the subject. Obedience tends to increase with the prestige of the authority figure. Since the study was done by an undergraduate research assistant posing as a Yale professor, the participants were definitely more willing to comply with the orders they were given because they felt more obligated to impress and seek recognition