The Milgram Experiment

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The Milgram Experiment The Milgram experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that ordinary people in certain situations could be motivated by authority to do very bad things. (McArther, 2008 p71) Obedience is the compliance with a person’s orders or acknowledgment of their authority. The Milgram experiment tested people’s obedience levels and how far a person would follow orders which would cause harm to another person. While obedience is often a good thing, following orders from a police officer or complying with orders from a doctor, for example, it can also be a bad thing, Hitler commanding Nazi troops to perform atrocities during the Second World War. Milgram took a small sample of men from a small town in America to test his theory of obedience by having a volunteer administer increasingly strong electrical shocks to another person through the influence of an authority figure. In 1961, Stanley Milgram, an American psychologist, conducted an experiment that would test how obedient people can be under certain conditions. The study was designed to understand the reasons behind the atrocities of the Nazis during World War II and to see how obedience to an authority figure played in the situation. Forty male volunteers answered an advertisement for a study of memory at Yale University that would take up to one hour and each volunteer would be compensated with a payment of $4.50. On arrival, the participant would meet the experimenter and another participant. Both would draw lots to determine who would be the ‘teacher’ and who would be the ‘learner’. Once the role had been determined, the teacher would witness the experimenter strapping the learner to a chair and attaching electrodes to his wrists followed by a small ‘test’ shock to prove its validity. The experimenter and the teacher would then go into the adjoining room and the test
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