Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments

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The obedience study was first tested out in May 1962. Stanley Milgram’s sole purpose for doing this test was to see how German people could permit the extermination of the Jews. He wanted to understand in what conditions a person would obey authority that commanded actions that went against their conscious. Not only did he test his obedience study one way he used eighteen different variation studies to prove his point that the Germans weren’t crazy or insane. The test was that one man would be hooked up to a shock chair that went from 15 volts to 450 volts, a lethal shock. Then there was another man who gave the man in the chair the shocks every time the man in the chair got it an answer wrong. The test was to see if the man giving the shocks would obey the professor ordering him to keep going all the way up to 450 volts. His test showed…show more content…
(2010, September 25) states with this experiment some phycologist were troubled by the ethics of it many if not most subjects found it to be a highly stress conflicted experience. People were stammering stuttering laughing historically inappropriately. They weren’t going blithely or sadistically people would stop and go stop and go. They were in the state of conflict witch created stress. One of the things that is a prerequisite for carrying out acts that are evil is to shed responsibility from your shoulders and to hand it over to someone in charge. Milgram never held a gun to anyone’s head. Just the fact that he conveyed a sense of authority roughly 60 to 65 percent of the people went all to 450 volts. Milgram learned that people have two states of behavior when they are in a social situation. They have the autonomies state and argentic state. The agency theory says, “People will obey an authority when they believe the authority will take responsibility for consequences for their actions.” When people are reminded that they have responsibility for their own action, almost no one will
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