Milgram's Obedience Experiment

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Section 1 Introduction To what extent do consequences limit or curb the practice of evil behavior? This question is exploring how removing consequences can result in malicious behavior from individuals. This research question is worthy of studying because behavior and the questioning behind the actions that individuals commit can be answered. There is always controversy among those who decide to act a certain way due to their position and others do not understand that it’s all a psychological process that runs in each mind set. Evil is considered a trait that, given the right circumstances, can be easily adapted into mankind. But the only way to prove the theory is by observing different occasions in which it fits in. This research question…show more content…
The individuals did not know the other person that they were potentially going to harm. Milgram’s objective was to reproduce and help understand the obedience during World War II, that caused destruction and various forms of mass murder (Navarick, D. J. 2009). In order to conduct the experiment, Milgram recruited paid participants, by announcing occupations, through the newspaper and direct mail, to serve in an hour experiment that explored memory and learning at Yale University. They were ordinary people: teachers, accountants, clerks and etc. In each session, there was going to be two participants, in which one was collaborator of the researcher. One of the participants was assigned the role of the teacher. The accomplice was assigned the role of the student/learner, in which their task involved them to memorize word pairs. The participant given the role of the teacher, was instructed to press the levers of a shock console, which would increase over every time, if the student selected the wrong answer. If the teacher was to refuse, they would be told that there was no other alternative (Navarick, D. J. 2009). The punishment consisted of being shocked with fifteen volts, and kept adding 15 volts for every other wrong answer. The highest…show more content…
He started his profession at Stanford since 1968, with previous experience at New York Unitary and Yale University, and Columbia University. He has been awarded many awards and honors due to his experience as an educator, researcher and writer. He is mostly known for his 1971, Stanford Prison Experiment. In 1917, Zimbardo was aiming to investigate how individuals would conform to different assigned roles, acknowledging that there would not be given any consequences. He was very interested in exploring the theory if brutality was dispositional or situational. As mentioned on the Stanford Prison Experiment website, the main purpose of this exploration was “to understand the development go norm and the effects of roles, labels and social expectations”. In order to proceed with the experiment, the research team, recruited by Zimbardo, prodded advertisements in local Palo Alto newspapers, that offered a salary to male college students. There was a response of about more than seventy applications, but in order to minimize the selection, the team gave diagnostic interviews and personality tests. Any individual that was phycological portables,, mental disabilities and a history of crime or drug use was immediately eliminated. At the end, the experiment only included about twenty four college
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