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Obedience Studies

Jaclyn Messmer
September 23, 2008
Essay #1

Essay 1
“Perhaps the most fundamental lesson of our study [is that] ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process” stated Stanley Milgram, an experimental scientist.   Milgram’s statement was a thought of many psychologists who believed individuals are greatly influenced by thoughts of authority and will abide to authoritarian command even when the act is immoral.   Along with Milgram, psychologists such as Asch, Zimbardo, and Fromm, experimented and analyzed the extent individuals go to to obey authoritarian figures. Stanley Migram, a Yale psychologist, conducted a classic study observing obedience.  
Milgram developed a series of experiments that forced the participants to either violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands (Milgram, 358).   Milgram designed a simple experiment to determine the degree of pain a normal individual would impose on another person simply because he was obeying the immoral orders of an authority figure.   In his experiment he has two subjects, the “teacher” and the “learner” (Milgram, 358).   The learner is strapped into a miniature electric chair and the teacher is placed in front of a shock generator.   It is explained that the learner must memorize a set of word pairs, and for any incorrect answers the learner gives, the teacher must give the learner a shock.   The shock power increases for each wrong answer from fifteen to four hundred and fifty volts.   The teacher is a naïve subject who has come for the experiment while the learner is an actor who receives no shock at all.
Milgram conducted the experiment with several different types of subjects, and first sought predictions that virtually all subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter.   His predictions were undeniably wrong.     In his first trial 60% of the subjects were...