REGENT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND

TECHNOLOGY

Discussing Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority Experiments on

the assumption that Human is Natural Violent

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Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist.
He served on the faculty at Yale University, Harvard University, and the City University of New
York. While at Yale, he conducted a seminal series of experiments on obedience to authority,
which have come to be known simply as the infamous "Milgram experiment." Milgram
conducted a number of other studies, including the small-world experiment (the source of the six
degrees of separation concept), and also introduced the concept of familiar strangers. IN August
7th, 1961, through to the end of May 1962, in the basement of a classroom building at Yale
University, Stanley Milgram conducted more than 20 variations of his infamous obedience to
authority experiments. He shocked the world with data on how readily people would punish
others when cajoled or intimidated by an experimenter. This was a pivotal point in psychology
because it was empirical evidence of mans inhumanity to man something no one, then or
now, really wanted to hear.
In fact, the classic electric shock experiment by social psychologist Dr tanley Milgram, , showed
that when given an order by someone in authority, people would deliver what they believed to be
extreme levels of electrical shock to other study participants who answered questions incorrectly.
The experiment provides several lessons about how situations can foster evil: provide people
with an ideology to justify beliefs for actions.

Make people take a small first step toward a harmful act with a minor, trivial action and

then gradually increase those small actions.

Make those in charge seem like a "just authority."
Transform a once compassionate leader into a dictatorial figure.
Provide people with vague and ever-changing rules.
Relabel the situation's actors and their actions to legitimize the ideology.
Provide people with social models of compliance.
Allow dissent, but only if people continue to comply with orders.

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Make exiting the situation difficult.

In Milgram's work, Milgram (1963), Milgram (1974), members of the general public
(predominantly men) volunteered to take part in a scientific study of memory. They found
themselves cast in the role of a Teacher with the task of administering shocks of increasing
magnitude (from 15 V to 450 V in 15-V increments) to another man (the Learner) every time
he failed to recall the correct word in a previously learned pair. Unbeknown to the Teacher, the
Learner was Milgram's confederate, and the shocks were not real. Moreover, rather than being
interested in memory, Milgram was actually interested in seeing how far the men would go in
carrying out the task. To hisand everyone elses Blass (2004) shock, the answer was very far.
In what came to be termed the baseline study Russell (2011) all participants proved willing to
administer shocks of 300 V and 65% went all the way to 450 V. This appeared to provide
compelling evidence that normal well-adjusted men would be willing to kill a complete stranger
simply because they were ordered to do so by an authority.
Much of the power of Milgrams research derives from the fact that it appears to give empirical
substance to this claim that evil is banal (Novick 1999). It seems to show that tyranny is a natural
and unavoidable consequence of humans' inherent motivation to bend to the wishes of those in
authoritywhoever they may be and whatever it is that they want us to do. Put slightly
differently, it operationalizes an apparent tragedy of the human condition: our desire to be good
subjects is stronger than our desire to be subjects who do good.
This experiment has been extensively written about, reproduced across cultures, and has used
both male and female subjects. Nearly 3,000 subjects in at least 11 other countries have
participated. It is always about the same: Two thirds to three quarters of the subjects deliver all
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the shocks. Each new crop of psychology students is incredulous. It boggles them to know
someone could shock and perhaps kill someone for a few dollars in the interest of science.
Milgram elaborated two theories explaining his results:

The first is the theory of conformism, based on Solomon Asch's work, describing the
fundamental relationship between the group of reference and the individual person. A
subject who has neither ability nor expertise to make decisions, especially in a crisis, will
leave decision making to the group and its hierarchy. The group is the person's behavioral

model.
The second is the agentic state theory, wherein the essence of obedience consists in the
fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another
person's wishes, and he therefore no longer sees himself as responsible for his actions.
Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the person, all of the essential
features of obedience follow.

His conclusion was that ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular
hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when
the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out
actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the
resources needed to resist authority.
Taking personal responsibility for your actions, whether through moral reasoning or proximity,
seems a promising start to understanding the nature of those in the minority. Positive psychology
has often derived profound understanding from the outliers, from those whose natural gift is to
have such qualities as resilience, emotional intelligence, or optimism. Milgrim himself was an

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outlier and certainly didnt follow the crowd. Were he alive today there is a good chance hed be
studying disobedience. He might even be inspired by a quote from the very origin that piqued his
interest in the first place.
Generaloberst Ludwig Beck (1880-1944) quoted A soldiers obedience finds its limits where his
knowledge, his conscience, and his responsibility forbid to obey orders. This means that a
person has the knowledge, responsibility and the conscience not to do something he/she is not
ready.
A study nu Miller (2004, p. 196) pointed out: Milgrams results could be likened to the
Holocaust itself. Both scenarios revealed ordinary people willing to treat other people with
unimaginable cruelty Extending upon this, it could also be argued that another commonality
between the OTA experiments and the Holocaust is that both proved capable of rapidly
transforming large proportions of ordinary (Browning, 1992, pp. 47-48; Milgram, 1974, p. 6),
and arguably indifferent people into willing inflictors of harm. People are willing to violent or
inflict harm without any superior authority instructions.
Milgram's studies further specifies the first point to note is that the primary dependent measure
(flicking a switch) offers few opportunities for creativity in carrying out the task. Nevertheless,
several of Milgram's findings typically escape standard reviews in which the paradigm is
portrayed as only yielding up evidence of obedience. Initially, it is clear that the baseline study
is not especially typical of the 30 or so variants of the paradigm that Milgram conducted. Here
the percentage of participants going to 450 V varied from 0% to nearly 100%, but across the
studies as a whole, a majority of participants chose not to go this far Milgram (1974) Milgram
(1965), Reicher et al. (2012)

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Furthermore, close analysis of the experimental sessions shows that participants are attentive to
the demands made on them by the Learner as well as the Experimenter (Packer, 2008). They are
torn between two voices confronting them with irreconcilable moral imperatives, and the fact
that they have to choose between them is a source of considerable anguish. They sweat, they
laugh, they try to talk and argue their way out of the situation. But the experimental set-up does
not allow them to do so. Ultimately, they tend to go along with the Experimenter if he justifies
their actions in terms of the scientific benefits of the study (as he does with the prod The
experiment requires that you continue) Burger JM, (Girgis and Manning, 2011). But if he gives
them a direct order (You have no other choice, you must go on) participants typically refuse.
Once again, received wisdom proves questionable. The Milgram studies seem to be less about
people blindly conforming to orders than about getting people to believe in the importance of
what they are doing. (Reicher and Haslam, 2011).
Milgram's experiments shocked people with their implications about the dark aspects of human
nature, especially since they showed that apparently normal people would behave in inhumane
ways. For Milgram, however, they were more about the influence of the group on the individual
than individual nature itself. He had begun his research asking whether it could be that those on
trial as war criminals were just following orders, and would others have done the same. When
the My Lai Massacre occurred in Vietnam in 1968, his work was used to explain the behavior of
those involved
Milgram showed that human beings, people who one would not expect to behave inhumanely,
are nonetheless capable of acting in inhumane ways when ordered to do so by an authority figure
and when their peers also acted in the same way. Such obedience and conformity, Milgram
noted, are essential aspects of social behaviour, allowing society to function in an organized
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fashion. The problem, obviously, comes when authority is wrong. Milgram's solution, based on
his research, was that people of conscience would find strength in numbers to resist misguided
authority. Thus, although shocking, Milgram's contribution to our understanding of human nature
gives much hope for a better world.
In conclusion, based on the Milgrams Experiment one can say that a man is naturally violent
and does not have to controlled or directed from an authority before he/she commits a crime or
inflict pain.

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References
Blass T (2004) The man who shocked the world: the life and legacy of Stanley Milgram.
New
York, NY: Basic Books.
Milgram S (1963) Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal Sociology and
Psychology.
67: 371378 [PubMed]
Milgram S (1965) Some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority. Hum Relations
18: 5776
Milgram S (1974) Obedience to authority: an experimental view. New York: Harper & Row.
Novick P (1999) The Holocaust in American life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Packer D (2008) Identifying systematic disobedience in Milgram's obedience experiments: a
metaanalytic review. Perspect Psychology Science. 3: 301304 [PubMed]
Reicher S.D., Haslam S.A. (2011) After shock? Towards a social identity explanation of the
Milgram obedience studies. Brit J Soc Psychol 50: 163169 [PubMed]
Reicher SD, Haslam SA, Smith JR (2012) Working towards the experimenter: reconceptualising

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obedience within the Milgram paradigm as identification-based followership. Perspect

Psychology Science. 7: 315324 [PubMed]
Russell NJ (2011) Milgram's obedience to authority experiments: origins and early evolution. Br
Journal of Social Psychology. 50: 140162 [PubMed]

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