Summary- Response: The Perils of Obedience
In 1963, Stanley Milgram a Yale psychologists held a classic study on obedience, Milgram designed the experiment to force participants to violate their own conscience by following instructions given regardless of stressful circumstances, or to refuse the demands. Most communal living has a system that needs structure, or authority. The basic experiment consisted of two people testing the study of memory and learning, or so they were told. Randomly selected each member was assigned a role “teacher” or “learner” then each was separated accordingly. The “teacher” was given a set of words to read aloud to the “learner”, while they sat at a switch board controlling electric shocks from 15 volts to 450 volts, that were administered whenever the “learner” got…show more content… In this experiment there were two control groups, officers and prisoners, prisoners were stripped of their control, while officers were given complete control. Zimbardo makes some fine points in his presentation stating that evil is not something that manifests, but merely lays under the surface of the human conscience. It only takes the right circumstances, the wrong decisions, and the wrong actions to display “evil”. When encouraged to be authority figures the “officers” enforced their power, which inconsequently made them corrupt. With encouragement the experiment, turned into something that was out of control, and immoral. Zimbardo explains his state of mind at the time, now knowing that his experiment although informative wasn’t exactly ethically moral. Almost all of the “prisoners” suffered mental breakdowns, withdrawing from the experiment within the first week of a two-week experiment. Zimbardo asserts his findings that regardless of who you are, where you’re from, what you do for a living, or what province you reside, we are all capable of
