Milgrams Obedience to Authority.docx

1、Milgrams Obedience to AuthorityObedience to AuthorityThe experiment by Stanley MilgramStanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted a study focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by thos

2、e accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Crimes trials. Their defence often was based on obedience - - that they were just obeying orders whilst under the authority of their superiors. The experiment began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the e

3、xperiment to answer the question Could it be that Eichmann, and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices? The results of the study were made known in Milgrams Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974). So-called teachers (who w

4、ere actually the unknowing subjects of the experiment) were recruited by Milgram in response to a newspaper ad offering $4.50 for one hours work. Individual subjects thus recruited turned up to take part in a Psychology experiment investigating memory and learning at Linsly-Chittenden Hall on Yale U

5、niversitys old campus. He or she was introduced to a stern looking experimenter in a white coat and to a rather pleasant and friendly co-subject who was also presumably recruited via the newspaper ad. The experimenter explained that one subject would be assigned the role of teacher and the other wou

6、ld be assigned the role of learner. Two slips of paper marked teacher were handed to the subject and to the co-subject. The co-subject was actually an actor who, in posing as a subject to the experiment, subsequently claimed that his slip said learner such that the unknowing subject was inevitably l

7、ed to believe that his role as teacher had been chosen randomly. Both learner and teacher were then given a sample 45-volt electric shock from an apparatus attached to a chair into which the actor-learner was to be strapped. The fictitious story given to the teachers was that the experiment was inte

8、nded to explore the effects of punishment for incorrect responses on learning behavior. A succession of unknowing subjects in their roles as teacher were given simple memory tasks in the form of reading lists of two word pairs and asking the learner to read them back and were instructed to administe

9、r a shock by pressing a button each time the learner made a mistake. It was understood that the electric shocks were to be of increased by 15 volts in intensity for each mistake the learner made during the experiment. The shock generator that the teacher was told to operate had 30 switches in 15 vol

10、t increments, each switch was labeled with a voltage ranging from 15 up to 450 volts. Each switch also had a rating, ranging from slight shock to danger: severe shock. The final two switches being labeled XXX. The experiment was conducted in a scenario where the learner was in another room but the t

11、eacher was made aware of the actor-learners discomfort by poundings on the wall. No further shocks were actually delivered - the teacher was not aware that the learner in the study was actually an actor who was intended, by the requirements of the experiment, to use his talents to indicate increasin

12、g levels of discomfort as the teacher administered increasingly severe electric shocks in response to the mistakes made by the learner. The experimenter was present in the same room as the teacher and whenever teachers asked whether increased shocks should be given he or she was verbally encouraged

13、by the experimenter to continue. In this scenario 65% of the teachers obeyed orders to punish the learner to the very end of the 450-volt scale! No subject stopped before reaching 300 volts! At times, the worried teachers questioned the experimenter, asking who was responsible for any harmful effect

14、s resulting from shocking the learner at such a high level. Upon receiving the answer that the experimenter assumed full responsibility, teachers seemed to accept the response and continue shocking, even though some were obviously extremely uncomfortable in doing so. In an article entitled The Peril

15、s of Obedience (1974) Stanley Milgram wrote:- Before the experiments, I sought predictions about the outcome from various kinds of people - psychiatrists, college sophomores, middle-class adults, graduate students and faculty in the behavioral sciences. With remarkable similarity, they predicted tha

16、t virtually all the subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter. The psychiatrist, specifically, predicted that most subjects would not go beyond 150 volts, when the victim makes his first explicit demand to be freed. They expected that only 4 percent would reach 300 volts, and that only a pathol

17、ogical fringe of about one in a thousand would administer the highest shock on the board. The Obedience to Authority experiment was continued by Milgram over a number of other scenarios such as where the learner could indicate discomfort by way of voice feedback - at 150 volts, the actor-learner req

18、uested that the experiment end, and was consistently told by the experimenter that - The experiment requires that you continue. Please go on. or similar words. In this scenarion the percentage of subjects who were prepared to administer the maximum 450 volts dropped slightly to 62.5%Where the experi

19、ment was conducted in a nondescript office building rather than within the walls of a prestigiously ornate hall on Yales old campus the percentage of subjects who were prepared to administer the maximum voltage dropped to 47.5%. Where the teacher had to physically place the learners hand on a shock

20、plate in order to give him shocks above 150 volts the percentage of subjects who were prepared to administer the maximum voltage dropped to 30.0% and where the experimenter was at end of a phone line rather than being in the same room the percentage of subjects who were prepared to administer 450 vo

21、lts dropped to 20.5% and where the teacher could himself nominate the shock level the percentage of subjects who were prepared to continue to the end of the scale dropped to 2.5% Milgram summed up his findings in relation to the main experiment in The Perils of Obedience (1974):- The legal and philo

22、sophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimen

23、tal scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of a

24、n authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. The experiment has been repeated by other psychologists around the world with similar results. Variations have been performed to test for variables in the experimental setup. For example, subject

25、s are much more likely to be obedient when the experimenter is physically present than when the instructions are given over telephone.The Perils of Obedienceby Stanley Milgram - 1974Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Some system of authority is a re

26、quirement of all communal living, and it is only the person dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, with defiance or submission, to the commands of others. For many people, obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy,

27、 and moral conduct.The dilemma inherent in submission to authority is ancient, as old as the story of Abraham, and the question of whether one should obey when commands conflict with conscience has been argued by Plato, dramatized in Antigone, and treated to philosophic analysis in almost every hist

28、orical epoch. Conservative philosophers argue that the very fabric of society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the primacy of the individual conscience.The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in

29、 concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects strongest moral imperatives against hurting o

30、thers, and, with the subjects ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.In t

31、ile basic experimental designs two people come to a psychology laboratory to take part in a study of memory and learning. One of them is designated a teacher and the other a learner. The experimenter explains that the study is concerned with the effects of punishment on learning. The learner is cond

32、ucted into a room, seated in a kind of miniature electric chair, his arms are strapped to prevent excessive movement, and an electrode is attached to his wrist. He is told that he will be read lists of simple word pairs, and that he will then be tested on his ability to remember the second word of a pair when he hears the first one again. whenever he makes an error, he will receive electric shocks of increasing intensity. The real focus of the experiment is the teacher. After watching the learner being strapped i