Obedience

Jessica Power
Assignment #3
Pgs 358-370
4/16/07

Summary of Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience”

In Stanley Milgram’s article “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram tries to show to what extent people will obey authority, even if it means hurting or potentially killing someone. In his opening paragraph, Milgram states that “obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct.” Even so, Milgram and his fellow colleagues believed that when an ordinary person has to choose between hurting someone and obeying authority he or she would take control and stand up to the authority figure. To test their theory, Milgram set up an experiment that would eventually become one of the most famous and controversial studies ever made.
The experiment involved three people. The subject or participant was called “teacher”, the second subject (who was really an actor) was called “learner”, and the third person involved was an experimenter who would study the experiments results. The subject was told that the experiment was a study on “the effects of punishment on learning”. The “teacher” was to read a list of words to the “learner”, who would then remember the second word from the list after the first word was said again. When the “learner” gave an incorrect answer, he would receive a voltage shock of increasing degrees. The volts went up from 15 to 450 (from “Slight Shock” to “Danger: Severe Shock”) and were administered by the “teacher”. All subjects believed the shocks to be authentic, though in reality there were no shocks involved. When the “learner” received 75 volts he would “grunt”, 120 volts he would “complain loudly”, and at 150 volts he would ask to end the experiment while often refusing to continue.
For most subjects, after the “learner” started to complain and yell out in pain the “teacher” would turn to the experimenter and say things like “I don’t want to shock him anymore if it’s hurting him”, “I don’t want to be responsible if anything happens to him”, or “Are you sure he’s alright?”. The experimenter would then urge them on and say that he was responsible if anything happened to the “learner” and that it was part of the experiment. The first subjects of the experiment were Yale undergraduates. “About 60 percent of them were fully obedient”. The second group of subjects came from New Haven and had varying jobs like professionals, unemployed, industrial workers, and white-collar workers. During the intense experiments subjects would get very nervous and show strange acts of behavior such as laughing violently, having seizures, and sweating. A few subjects had no reaction at all to sending high voltage shocks to the “learner” and barely acknowledged him as a person.
The experiment showed that 30 percent of the subjects were willing to administer 450 volts and even forcefully hold “learner’s” hands down to receive them. This experiment received much fame and criticism, not just because of the results of the findings, but for the way the subjects themselves were treated. The experiment, did however lend itself well to helping people explain the events of the Holocaust and how people could easily harm others under the pressure of authority. As Milgram puts it, “ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.” Milgram explains that the
reason people can “carry out another person’s wishes” is because they no longer feel they are held “responsible for his actions”. He also argues that morals are not altogether lost in the subjects during the experiment, but are switched into ones such as “loyalty, duty, and discipline” to justify the subject’s actions.
This experiment, which was done in 1963, may show different results if it was recreated today. However, because of the amount of stress placed o the subjects, the experiment can not be legally done again. Although it was done long ago, the experiment still shows that under authority people are capable of causing great harm to others, even if they don’t wish to.