Summary Of The Perils Of Obedience By Stanley Milgram

"Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to," says Stanley Milgram in his essay, "The Perils of Obedience" (Milgram 78). As he prepared to conduct a more extreme case of analyzing obedience in which test subjects would read off a group of words while the "learner," who was an actor, would have to pair the two correct words together, only to be shocked in an electric chair if they failed, Milgram hypothesized that the test subjects would listen to their conscience and disobey the immoral orders to continue the experiment (Milgram 79). After testing forty original subjects, Milgram was rather surprised at the outcome: although many subjects argued about continuing, when given the satisfaction that the outcome of the learner was not the subject's responsibility but the …show more content…
One particular author that analyzes Milgram's experiment and his lack of consideration for his subjects is Diana Baumrind in her article, "Review of Stanley Milgram's Experiments on Obedience." Baumrind describes the futile effects of Milgram's experiments and the traumatic, emotional disturbances as unnecessary and harmful toward the test subjects (Baumrind 92). She also includes how Milgram's experiment is not an accurate model to any real-life situations, let alone have any comparative connection to Hitler's German Officers and the Holocaust (Baumrind 93). She concludes with how she believes in the experiment that the subjects should have been fully informed of the emotional and psychological dangers before involving themselves to be apart of the test (Baumrind 94). While Baumrind strongly persuades the objective that the subjects deserved to understand the experiment's motives beforehand, Milgram's results compel that the subjects needed to be blind to the experiment in order to collect effective