Milgrams The Perils of Obedience Essay -- Psychology

Milgram's The Perils of Obedience Obedience is the requirement of all mutual living and is the basic element of the structure of social life. Conservative philosophers argue that society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the priority of the individuals' conscience. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, designed an experiment that forced participants to either violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands. Milgram's study, reported in "The Perils of Obedience" suggested that under a special set of circumstances the obedience we naturally show authority figures can transform us into agents of terror or monsters towards humanity. The experiment consists of two people that take part in a study of memory learning, one of them referred to as the "Teacher" and the other as the "Learner." The experimenter explains that the study's main goal is to observe the effect of punishment on learning. The learner will be seated in something similar to the electric chair, his arms will be strapped and an electrode will be attached to his wrist. The learner will be told that he will be tested on his ability to remember the second word of a pair when he hears the first one again. If he makes a mistake, he will then receive electric shocks of increasing intensity. The real focus of the experiment is the teacher. He will be in charge of a shock generator. The teacher does not know that the learner, supposedly the victim, is actually an actor who receives no shock whatsoever. Again this experiment is to see if the teacher proceeds with the shocks that are ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim. Milgram's first subject, Gretchen Brant showed th... ...enter. Although Bruno Batta had some difficulty understanding what to do, he after showed that he indeed appreciated help and was then willing to do what was required from the experimenter. When the learner in this case complained, Mr. Batta showed no signs of attention or disturbance whatsoever. At the end of the experiment he told the experimenter that he had been honored to be part of it. He showed no remorse. Milgram answers the question of why this problem occurred in our pasts, for example during the Holocaust, and still occurs within ourselves. The experiment unfortunately illustrates that it is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only a link in a chain of action in a multifaceted society. People feel is their duty or their job to obey an authority figure without realizing that nobody can make another individual do something they feel is not right.