1. Over 50 years ago, Stanley Milgram conducted some of the most influential and

Question

1. Over 50 years ago, Stanley Milgram conducted some of the most influential and controversial research on the Social psychological concept of obedience. Milgram found that over 65% of the subjects in his study willingly delivered highly dangerous shock levels to another person, simple because they were told to do so by someone in authority. The lessons most people drew from his research was that ordinary people could be convinced to commit acts of cruelty simply because they were told to do it by a person in a position of authority. However, recently psychologists have suggested that the behavior of Milgram’s research participants may not have been due to their blindly obeying an authority figure.

In paragraph form answer the following questions: (Minimum 100 words, include word count)

b. Describe 3 of the 4 primary ways that the conditions of the Milgram’s studies differed from that of real-life mass-killing in wartime. (6 pts)

Explanation / Answer

Stanley Milgram conducted his research on the concept of obedience to someone in authority during the time of the Nazi War. When the results of his experimental research confirmed that more than 65% of individuals succumbed to obeying another person in authority, it became a general notion that 'people are likely to do what they were told to do by a person in a position of authority'.

However, recently there are various reasons suggested by psychologists for the participants conforming to an authority figure. Firstly, the subject obeyed to the person in authority because he thought of the experimenter to be an 'expert' and assumed he would be knowing what he is doing and thus did not think twice before obeying his instructions. The other possible reason behind obeying is that, the subject trusted the person in authority and did not think that it would do any harm to another person receiving dangerous shocks.

There are multiple ways that the conditions of the Milgram's differed from that of real-life mass-killing in wartime. One of the conditions being, the subject knew that the other person was not being harmed. They took that fact for granted. Whereas in the war, they knew that they were killing people and hurting them intentionally. Also, the subjects were not too happy about giving dangerous shock levels to another person. However during wartime, they were killing innocent people and gained saddistical pleasure out of the same.

The condition of the Milgram studies differed in many ways from that of real-life mass-killing during the war. Most importantly, the experiment lasted only for an hour whereas the war lasted for several years.

(Word count: 274 words)

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