Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s Conclusion Essay

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From Milgram to Abu Ghraib
The prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq have been compared to a number of studies on the lessons in depravity, peer pressure, and the power of authority. The question to be asked is whether the abuse should be explained as expected behavior or deviant behavior. A number of famous experiments by highly respected researchers in the United States have provided some interesting material for the future court martial proceedings one such example is the Milgram Experiment. This research reports on how certain people react when placed in positions of authority over others. Milgram preformed a series of studies on "Obedience to Authority," which began at Yale University. Milgram’s experiment proved how people will obey authority even when it violates their core values and leads them to harm others. According to Milgram in “The Perils of Obedience,” “For many people, obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct” (Milgram 693). Although the Milgram experiment was done in the lab, the tortures at Abu Ghraib proved that Milgram’s conclusion can occur in real life settings involving authority and obedience. Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale University, conducted a test to see how readily people obeyed authority figures (Milgram 692). He experimented with many different kinds of people – psychiatrists, college sophomores, middle-class adults, graduate students, and faculty in the behavioral sciences. The experiment was to reveal the willingness of common people to follow orders while causing extreme pain to other people. The experiment consisted of three individuals, an experimenter, a teacher, and a learner. The experimenter and the learner are carefully contrived roles with set responses and actions. The teacher is the only true subject of the experiment. The teacher is in charge of asking some word-pairs. If the learner misses any of questions the teacher will administer a shock by a generator (shocks start at a mild 15 volts and gradually increase to an extremely painful 450 volts) to punish the learner. The point of experiment is to see how far a person will obey authority to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim. In his research Milgram explains about one of his teachers who is a medical technician. She is one of the teachers which after a certain level of voltage, when she sees the suffering of the learner, she refuses to continue. Despite the experimenter’s insistence, she makes a clear break with authority. In his essay Milgram emphasize that, “the woman’s straightforward, courteous behavior, lack of tension, and total control of her own action seem to make disobedience a simple and rational deed” (Milgram 696).
Milgram made many predictions, before running the experiment. Milgram believed that most people, except for an aberrant few, would not obey the experimenter once they realized they were causing the learner pain. Moreover the various kinds of people who Milgram interviewed also predicted that only four percent of the subjects would reach 300 voltages before they would disobey the experimenter and the rest would not go beyond 150 voltages. Unfortunately the results of the experiment were disturbing: 60 percent of the “teachers” who were ordinary people continued to give the electric shocks up to the maximum level of 450 volts, with only a little bit of coaxing from the psychologist. Moreover, when the experiment was repeated in other countries the level of obedience was as high as 85 percent.
This essay gives the best examples of how people are so scared of authority that they would kill another person just because they were told to do so. This can help one to figure out why people actually do this and how one can stop something like the Holocaust or the torture at Abu Ghraib from happening again. American soldiers and their tortures in Abu Ghraib toward Iraqi prisoners
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