Essay Example on Stanley Milgram's most famous experiment and how it can help Humanity

Stanley Milgram's most famous experiment and how it can help humanity in 1963 one of the most famous studies of obedience in psychology was carried out Stanley Milgram was a psychologist at Yale university He was conducting an experiment focusing on the relationship between obedience and authority Milgram s experiments examined justification for acts of genocide when war criminals claimed they where following orders and instructions from their superiors those with more authority The experiment was created to explain the horrors of world war two where enemies of the sate were brutally slaughtered by Nazis He sought to answer the question could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices these where simply following orders During this essay I will be trying to answer this question by looking at the results of Milgram s experiment and seeing how we could potentially use them to help humanity The experiment Milgram selected the participants at random simply by putting an advertisement out in the newspaper and they would be paid a fee of 4 50 for turning up regardless 40 males between ages 20 50 where recruited 

Three individuals took part in the experiment The experimenter the person in charge the teacher the volunteer who was made to believe they were assisting in the experiment however where actually the subject the learner an actor pretending to be a volunteer who the teacher would believe was the subject of the experiment The experiment Itself started with the drawing of slips The slips would determine who would be the teacher and who would be the learner however it was actually fixed so that the volunteer would receive the title of teacher automatically The teacher and learner where taken into a room where the learner was strapped to what appeared to be an electric chair The teacher and learner where then separated and the teacher was given word pairs to teach the learner The teacher would follow by testing him naming a word and asking the learner to recall its pair The learner would then indicate his response by pressing a possible of four buttons Unknown to the teacher the learner would purposely answer mostly wrong With each wrong answer the teacher had to administer a shock to the learner with a 15 volt increment each time The voltage started at 15 volts labelled as mild shock and increased to 450 volts labelled as a simple but horrifying XXX The learner was actually an actor and was not shocked but made the teacher believe he was receiving shocks This causes varying levels of distress for each participant if the teacher wished to halter the experiment or discontinue at any time the experimenter was instructed to give successions of prods 1 Please continue 2 the experiment requires you to continue 3 it is absolutely essential that you continue 4 you have no other choice you must go on the aim of the experiment was to see how far ordinary people would go in obeying an instruction and if they could be convinced to do atrocities like the Nazis in WW2 results 

This can be shown in practise when a parent tells their noncompliant child to don t do x or I will insert consequence The consequence could be informing the child's disobedience to a more authoritative figure removing the child's possessions for a set amount of time phone toys belongs etc or taking away something they would normally be able to do Overall it does not matter what the consequence would be as long the child believes it is legitimate and would prefer for it not too happen they will generally comply Of course there are exceptions but this is expected Milgram found after repeated experiments that obedience was highest when the learner was in another room the commands from the experimenter where given by a seemingly high authority figure instead of another volunteer the experiment was repeated with this change