Sunday, May 9, 2010

Stanley Milgram

#13

Stanley Milgram was born on August 15, 1933 and he is best known for the Milgram Experiment that he did in the 1960’s. The point of his experiment was to measure the willingness of participants to obey an authority figure that instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience.
There were three people that took part in each round of his experiment. One person was the “experimenter” and was played by a stern biology teacher wearing a gray technician’s coat. Another person was the “learner” and lastly there was the “teacher” who was the actual participant because the other two were really actors. The teacher and learner were told that the experiment was a study of memory and learning in different situations. They both took a slip of paper to see who would get which job. Both pieces of paper said teacher so the actor pretended that his paper said learner.
The learner was put in one room and the teacher was put in the next room so they could communicate but not see each other. The teacher was also told that the learner had a heart condition. The teacher was then given an electric shock as an example of what the learner would be getting later. Then the teacher was given a list of word pairs that they had to teach to the learner. The teacher (or participant) then had to read of one word and the learner (or actor) had to guess which word went with it. If the answer was wrong the teacher would have to give a shock to the learner. The shock would increase at a rate of 15 volts for each wrong answer. The teacher believed that the learner was actually receiving the shocks but in reality the learner was not receiving any shocks at all. They would continue answering the questions and with each wrong answer the voltage was increased. After a few shocks the learner would bang on the wall complaining about his heart condition. If the teacher said anything about stopping the experimenter would say things like, 1.“Please continue”, 2.“The experiment requires that you continue”, 3.“It is absolutely essential that you continue,” and 4.“You have no other choice, you must go on.” After many complaints, and a lot of yelling and pleading for the teacher to quit, the learner would stop making all noises and at this point many people would try to stop “teaching.” After being told to continue most people would because they believed they would not be held responsible for whatever happened to the learner. If the participant gave the maximum shock of 450 volts three times then the experiment was over.
When Milgram gathered all of his data he realized that 37 of the 40 participants gave the full 450-volt shock. Since they were not going to be held responsible for the welfare of the learner, very few people actually stopped.
Although this experiment raised a lot of questions about the ethics of scientific experiments Milgram wanted to see if the average citizen, would do harm to another “average citizen” if someone of higher authority told them to. Overall Milgram was trying to prove whether or not war criminals from world war two could be held responsible for all of the awful things that happened in concentration camps. Was it really their fault or were they only following orders?


Stanley Milgram, Wikipedia, 2010-05-09
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Milgram

Milgram Experiment, Wikipedia, 2010-05-09
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Stanley Milgram Experiment (1961), 2010-05-09
http://www.experiment-resources.com/stanley-milgram-experiment.html

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