The Milgram Experiment – it is one of the most famous psychological experiments of obedience conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1963. Stanley Milgram, who was a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment in order to study the connection between the power of authority and obedience. The aim of Miligram was to study the justifications for the Genocide actions conducted by Germans during the Second World War, who were simply following orders from the authority figures. The aim of the experiment was to find out how far people could go by harming other people, if it is ordered by a powerful person. The psychologist chose 40 men from the New Haven area. Each time three individuals participated in the experiment: one of them is a participant, who became a teacher, a confederate invited by Milgram, Milgram himself and experimented played by an actor. A learner was asked to learn the list of words, and after he did it, a teacher played by one of the participants had to test him by naming one of words from the list and asking the learned to recall it. Every time when the learner made a mistake, he received an electric shock of 15 volts from the teacher, and each mistakes increased the level of shock. If the teacher refused to give a shock, the experimented ordered to continue. The experiment showed that 65% of participants continued to the highest level of 450 volts, while 100% continued to the level of 300 volts. The experiment showed that people used to continue orders if it is ordered by a powerful person, even if it might cause a death of an innocent person. (Clarkson)
My point of view is that this experiment is very interesting and its results are useful because the experiment allowed seeing real people’s nature and to explain, why people sometimes might act in a particular way without thinking about consequences and harm to other people. Though the experiment was not completely fair since the participants played learners were confederates of Milgram, I believe that it was justified, because otherwise the results of the experiments would not have been accurate. Moreover, if the participant played leaders had not known about the experiment and of the level of electric shocked had been really increased each time, it would have caused a serious physical harm or even death of the learners. Furthermore, even though the participants played teacher later found out from Milgram that it was the deception, most of them felt relief and were happy that they had not harmed innocent people.
It is also interesting to note that though the experiment is quite old and it was conducted half a century ago and was more related to the actions of German genocide, it is still relevant nowadays because people are used to obey orders by authorities in many different areas of our life. For example, there are still wars and conflict, in which people kill each other by following orders of their leaders. This people’s nature to obey rules also relates to the situations, when physical harm is not involved but other people are still harmed. For example, many employees are used to follow orders of their employers even if it might lead to dismissal of their colleagues, for example.
Works Cited
Clarkson, Petruska. Counselling Psychology. Integrating theory, research and supervised practice.New York: Routledge. 1998. Print
