Milgram Experiment Research Paper

The Milgram Experiment

Stanley Milgram's experiments with obedience to authority are arguably the most controversial and influencial in modern social psychology. In the early 1960s he designed a series of experiments, known as the Milgram experiments, to understand the issues involved in obedience to authority. His experiments began in 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram wanted to investigate if Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders, as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II. His experiments mesured the willingness of the study's participants to obey an authority figure, who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with there …show more content…
Order 4: You have no other choice but to continue. The results of this experiment was that 65% of participants continued to the highest level of 450 volts, and nearly all participants coninued to 300 volts. Milgram explained the behavior of these participants by suggesting that people have two states of behavior when in social situations. (1) The autonomous state: people direct their own actions and take responsibility for the consequences of those actions. (2) The agentic state: people allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving the orders. Milgram's research sparked many debates about the ethics of psychological research of this type. Although the shocks administered to the learners were not real, the teachers were told, and believed, they were real at the time. The study was criticized for exposing the participants to psychological distress, embarrassment, and loss of dignity.
Nevertheless, the participants were not physically forced to administered the shocks, but chose to do so. If the participants were to obey there own personal concious, and not pass off the responsibility of there actions, the end of the experiment would have brought contentment, rather than psychological distress to these

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