Stanley Milgram Experiment

Stanley Milgram, a famous psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment to see how far people would go when being directed by an authoritative figure. This experiment focused on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Milgram's reasoning behind this experiment was to examine the justifications for acts of genocide and answer his question, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?" (Milgram, 1974). Milgram gathered participants by putting an advertisement in the newspaper. The procedure was that the participant was paired with another person and they drew lots to find out who would be the ‘learner’ and who would be the ‘teacher’. The draw was fixed so that the …show more content…
Milgram found that 65% of the participants shocked the learner to the maximum 450 volts. Benefits of this experiment include Stanley Milgram's ethos because he was apart of a very well-respected university. Downsides of Milgram's experiment includes how biased his sample was. Since all of his participants were males, how do we know if his findings transfer to females? Another downside is how deceiving the experiment was. It made the participants or teachers believe that they were harming, almost killing the learner. Although the results may have been shocking to learn that more than half of the participants would harm someone just to obey the authoritative figure that was telling them to do so, I believe that this experiment should have been conducted. I think Milgram had a genius idea to help others understand some reasoning behind the acts of genocide. His experiment portrays that ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human. Milgram states, "Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought