After World War II, several of the Nazi soldiers were questioned about their reasoning behind the corrupt actions they were guilty of---killing hundreds of thousands of men and women, destroying families in the process, and marking their time as a dark part of history. Who on earth would do such a thing? What could their excuse possibly be? Well, to them, they were simply following orders. It’s obvious to believe that the soldiers would find their humanity and resist their commands, but they didn't. This concept sparked a curiosity in psychologist Stanley Milgram to discover how authoritative figures influence a person's decision making---which soon led him to conduct his most famous experiments known today. After watching Nazi generals, one after the other, plead they were only following orders during the Nuremberg trials he took away one main concept; people can, and will blindly follow authority. To test this idea, …show more content…
Yes, they all continued the experiment, but each and every one put up a fight (Milgram's Experiment on Obedience to Authority , n.d.). Each volunteer sensed that what they were doing was wrong, and after battling themselves internally as to whether or not they should continue, did they finally speak up. The teacher was constantly fighting, constantly at war with what he thought he should do over what he was being commanded to do. Disobedience takes courage, whether it’s stealing a cookie out of the cookie jar, coming home past curfew, or failing to follow through the commands of a superior. It’s not in human nature to flow upstream----it’s not natural for people to rebel against authority. This explains why the volunteers continued to follow the directions in spite of the fact that the commands ran contrary to their moral compass. That’s why it was so difficult for them to defy the experimenter. Yes, they obeyed…but they didn’t do so
The change in their behavior and personality led to the prisoners having mental breakdowns eventually leading to the extermination of the experiment after six days. The experiment which was supposed to last two weeks only lasted six days because of the responses and reactions from the prisoners as a result of
Christopher Browning believes it to be highly unlikely that Nazi officials could have predicted the men of the Reserve Police Battalion would become so equipped to carryout mass genocide do to the fact that the men in the battalion hoped to pursue a career in the Hamburg Police to avoid being drafted into the Army. They were specifically attempting to avoid participating in the atrocities of war. Although the answer may forever be without doubt, Browning argues that the men of the Reserve Police Battalion didn’t want to be rejected, isolated or have the reputation of weak within the battalion. Thus, around 80% of the men successfully carried out their orders, developing brutal tactics and getting more and more comfortable with murder each and every
In the book “Opening Skinner’s Box”, Lauren Slater discusses many complicated ideas relating to certain experiments of recent times. In every chapter, she focuses on one specific experiment and poses many controversial thoughts. One of the chapters I found most interesting was the second chapter titled “Obscura”. In it she walks readers through the experiments of Stanley Milgram and questions the purpose, results, usefulness, and morality of the experiments. To begin, the purpose of the experiments seem to be off to me.
In “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn,” Jonathan Bennett presents the difficulty between sympathy and morality. Although the fictional story "Huckleberry Finn" is in the title, Bennett uses also uses Heinrich Himmler, Jonathan Edwards, Wilfred Owen. Bennett described their morality as "bad" assuming the readers would agree with him. Most of the time the person does not realize their morality is bad because of social norms.
The student and teacher were placed in separate rooms and an instructor was placed in the same room as the teacher. He would then attempt to convince the teacher to continue the experiment even if the student starts crying out or wanting to leave. The teacher was required to “shock” the student if they said an incorrect answer. However, the ‘shocks’ became more intense and came with each incorrect answer. They eventually started getting very dangerous and potentially life threatening.
Within 24 hours of the experiment, the prison guards began to humiliate and mentally abuse the prisoners. The prison guards were given little instructions about how to treat the prisoners, except that there was not to be any physical force used on the prisoners. The lack of instructions that
In the experiment, Milgram uses purposeful deception as the teacher is the naive subject and is told they are participating in a memory and learner psychology experiment and are in charge of delivering shocks to the learner, who, in fact, is an actor. The majority of the participants in the study were obedient to the experimenter even though the experimenter "did not threaten the subjects with punishments such as loss of income, community ostracism or jail for failure to obey. Neither could he offer incentives" (Milgram 651). Despite having nothing to gain, the subjects continued participating in the experiment. The participants continued to administer shocks to the student because they were instructed to
However, if they were informed of the experiment there is always the chance that the participants would have change their mind and not participate in this
The Milgram experiment was an experiment that tested an individual's willingness to follow the instructions of an authority figure. Subjects were told to shock a person, who they believed to also be a subject, if they answered a question wrong. The people getting shocked were actors and were not actually receiving electrical shocks. Many of the subjects continued to give high voltage shocks because they were told to. This proves that in high-stress situations people are willingly listen to authority figures despite what the say to do.
Although the conductors of the experiment had an impact they chose to let the prisoners handle themselves
The Milgram experiment was conducted to analyze obedience to authority figures. The experiment was conducted on men from varying ages and varying levels of education. The participants were told that they would be teaching other participants to memorize a pair of words. They believed that this was an experiment that was being conducted to measure the effect that punishment has on learning, because of this they were told they had to electric shock the learner every time that they answered a question wrong. The experiment then sought out to measure with what willingness the participants obeyed the authority figure, even when they were instructed to commit actions which they seemed uncomfortable with.
Name : Muhammed Irshad Madonna ID : 250509 Subject : Medical Ethics Due Date : 8/01/2018 Paper : 1-The Milgram Experiment The Stanley Milgram Experiment is a famous study about obedience in psychology which has been carried out by a Psychologist at the Yale University named, Stanley Milgram. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In July 1961 the experiment was started for researching that how long a person can harm another person by obeying an instructor.
His experiment was all a hoax. The shock machine was fake. All he wanted was to know how many people would be obedient and how many would be defiant. Much to Milgram’s surprise sixty-five percent of people did what were told of them, and only thirty-five percent were
The Nuremberg Trials began three years later after the most relevant Nazi authorities were convicted of war crimes for four judges, who took legal decisions that previewed sterilization policies and ethnic cleansing in Hitler 's Germany. Judgement at Nuremberg, based on the real Case Katzenberger, is a demonstration of the efforts of a judge at the tribunal to determine how the defendants, and even also the German themselves, could have been involved in the Holocaust’s atrocities. Judgment at Nuremberg is a representation of the first trial, that is mainly based on justice principles and international law, of the country leaders that pursued threatening battles and were involved in crimes against humanity. This film is an overview of real events that highlights the conflict between morality enclosing both the behaviour of the defendants and the process of providing them with justice (Teach With Movies, 2015). These processes offered the opportunity of enhancing the debate between positivism and natural law, highlighting that the position taken would have significant consequences
"Obedience is behavior that complies with the explicit demands of the individual in authority." (King, 448) If a store manager tells you to put a shirt on before entering the store, you're more than likely going to comply due to their request due to their authority over the store. You might fear that if you do not comply, you won't be permitted inside or even police being called. That is simple obedience, but what if an authority figure asked you to inflict pain on another person?