Stanley Milgrams study on the effect of authority on obedience was shocking. Most of us consider ourselves moral citizens, people who wouldn’t hurt another human being intentionally. But what if you were told to do it? Would you or I act against our own better moral judgment if told to do so? If you were told to give someone else a 400 volt electrical shock would you do it? I would answer no, I wouldn’t. Shortly after the trial of World War II criminals, Milgram started his experiments. The Nazis had blamed their superiors for the deaths of millions, saying they were simply following orders. I was asked as a psychology student to decide if I felt that Stanley Milgram’s experiment succeeded in explaining how a tragedy such as the holocaust could happen, more so, how an entire group of people could allow the torture and death of a race. Did none of them have a conscious?
Before conducting his experiment, Stanley asked a group of Yale University students how far they thought most participants were willing to go. The students predicted that no more than 3 out of 100 would deliver the maximum shock. The actual results were “shocking”. Sixty-five percent of the participants delivered the maximum shock to the ‘learner”. Although some “teachers” became upset at the experimenter they still continued. Fourteen stopped just short of the highest levels.
Why did so many go along with the experiment, delivering shocks that were rated above dangerous? According to Milgram there are a few reasons: the shocks were said to be painful and not dangerous. If this is true then when the teachers heard the learner scream and beg for them to stop, why did they continue? Is it because the experiment was held at Yale University, a school with a very prestigious reputation? Was it because the authority, the experimenter, was in the room or that they thought he was competent in what he was doing?
I think the experiment did prove how the holocaust could happen. One thing to remember is that is wasn’t every German who went along with the Nazis. There were thousands who tried to hide and help the Jews escape. The group of people responsible was the military. In the military you are broken down and taught to obey orders from a superior. You are no longer an individual, but one member of a larger, more important group. There is a lot of time spent being disciplined in the military. Following orders is the basis of actions for a solider. Your feelings between duty and your personal emotions are separated. Responsibility shifts in the mind from you to the authority figure. I was only following orders. In Milgrams experiment, he repeatedly told the teachers that he would take all responsibility if anything happened to the learners. In their minds it wasn’t going to be their fault if the outcome was bad. The Nazi soldiers were following orders. Milgram points out, "The results, as seen and felt in the laboratory, are to this author disturbing. They raise the possibility that human nature, or -more specifically-the kind of character produced in American society, cannot be counted on to insulate the citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authority." Simply put, we don’t have the character or morals to stand up to a bad leader?
There is an example of this happening more recently. During the Viet Nam war, there was a massacre in My Lai. My Lai was a small village in Viet Nam. Three-hundred and fifty men, women, and children were killed by U.S. soldiers under the direction of “authority”. This is the only incident like this that the American people were informed of, but does that mean that this was the only time something like this has happened? Most likely not. Are the leaders solely to blame? I think no. Just because you were told to do something by someone else doesn’t exonerate you of any wrong doing. The soldiers became criminals by participating. I feel that his experiments do a shift in blame, from the person committing the act to the person that told them to do it.
I think that this study takes away the idea of free will. Making us as humans look a little like mindless robots who will do anything we are told to do by some authority figure. After researching a little, were the people in his experiment not very smart in the ways of science and were they manipulated by Milgram? Clearly outside of the military, people knew that what was going on during the holocaust was wrong. Also, the Nazis lied to the German people; how many knew what was actually happening, and to the extent that it was happening. Milgram did the same thing to the participants in his study, he lied to them, which is why this study couldn’t be performed now. It has been deemed unethical.
It is a scary prospect. We see in the news how some crazy person had convinced others that he is Jesus. In some cases these people have sacrificed everything they own for this new leader and even killed for them. Were those followers just weak minded? Or were they like the 65% of the people in Milgrams experiment?
One thing I have come to understand about myself is that I have done things I didn’t think were right because I was told to. I hope that humans aren’t born with some type of hardwiring that makes us obey-maybe it is environmental. Because we come from parents who don’t explain why, but tell their children to just do as you’re told because I am in charge. In the future, I will use my morality in making decisions. After learning about Milgram, I won’t hesitate if my moral alarms are going off. So many times while watching the video of his experiment I was saying to myself, “stop, just stop”. How hard would it have been to walk out?
I have learned many things over the course of my summer semester in psych 101. Even things that seem simple, there is psychological reason for everything we do. I look deeper into emotions now. I have realized that just because I perceive something to be a certain way doesn’t mean that’s how it is. The whys have become more important. When I started this paper, I was in agreement with Milgram. I thought that his study explained human behavior when it came to authority. But the more I wrote the more I thought. There are two sides to every issue. Especially in psychology, there are a lot of grey areas. Human behavior is a very hard thing to explain. We should remember that we are individuals, born of free will. We should live and act as our morals dictate.
References:
Introducing Psychology; Schacter, Gilbert, Wegner. 2011
http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/milgram.htm
http://www.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/milgram.htm
http://www.experiment-resources.com/stanley-milgram-experiment.html
http://www.google.com/search?aq=1&oq=utube+milg&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=youtube+milgram+experiments