Analysis Of Stanley Milgram s The Perils Of Obedience

Essay #4 – Obedience and Defiance Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment, which later wrote about it in â€Å"The Perils of Obedience† in 1963 to research how people obey authoritative figures and what extent a person would go inflicting pain onto an innocent person. The study involved a teacher (subject), learner (actor), and an experimenter (authoritative figure). The teacher was placed in front of a control panel labeled with electrical shocks ranging from 15 to 450 volts and instructed to shock the learner incrementally if they gave a wrong answer when asked questions with word associations. Switches corresponded with the voltage ranging from â€Å"Slight Shock† to â€Å"Danger: Severe Shock† followed by†¦show more content†¦The study was observing how far a person would go inflicting pain onto another person. According to Milgram’s study, the subjects would rather please the experimenter and show him or her they can do the job rather than take on the responsibility that they are harming another human being. â€Å"The essence of obedience† as Milgram says is when the person follows orders for another person and is not held responsible for his or her own actions. It is much easier to do a task even if it means harming someone as in the experiment if the subject is not held liable for anyone. â€Å"The experimenter did not threaten the subjects with punishment-such as loss of income, community ostracism, or jail-for failure to obey† (Milgram 181). The subject did not really have a choice in the experiment, they were compliant, and when they expressed signs of tension or anxiety or even voiced their concerns, they were told to â€Å"continue† and that â€Å"the experiment must go on.† Obedience to authority is generally, what most people, as proven in Milgram’s experiment, tend to follow. Nevertheless, is obeying authority always the â€Å"right† thing to do? A great example is while at work, an employer who gives demands or orders to his or her employee and since it is their job to follow directions from theirShow MoreRelatedAnalysis Of Stanley Milgram s Perils Of Obedience Essay1709 Words   |  7 PagesStill, many questions still remain prevalent as to how an individual reaches his or her decision on obedience in a distressing environment. Inspired by Nazi trials, Stanley Milgram, an American psychologist, questions the social norm in â€Å"Perils of Obedience† (1964), where he conducted a study to test how far the average American was willing to for under the pressures of an authority figure. 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