Milgrams Shock Experiment

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Obediance To Authority: Milgrams shock Experiment Conformity: Person changes attitude or behavior on his/her own to fulfill social norms Compliance: Person changes attitude or behavior in response to another's direct request Obedience: Person obeys a direct order from another to perform an action One of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology was carried out by Stanley Milgram (1963). He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience Aim: Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing crime Milgram selected participants for his experiment by advertising for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University. The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher’. The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher, and the learner was one of Milgram’s confederates (pretending to be a real participant). The learner (a confederate) was taken into a room and had electrodes attached to his arms, and the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX). The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose) and for each of these the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock and turned to the experimenter for guidance, he was given the standard instruction /order (consisting of 4 prods): Prod 1: please continue. Prod 2: the experiment requires you to continue. Prod 3: It is

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