Question

Describe Milgram's obedience study in 300 words

Answer 1

Milgram's study's aim was to evaluate the conflict between obedience to authority and individual conscience. In this experiment, 40 males ages ranged between 20-50 years turned up after seeing the advertisement for the same. They're paid 4.50 dollars to participate in the experiment. With the help of the lottery, the participants were given the role of either learner or teacher although the participants were always deliberately given the role of the teacher and learner was a confederate of the experimenter.

After the roles were established, the learner was strapped to a chair attached with electrodes in a room and in the adjacent room divided by a glass window with the previous room, the teacher (the participant) was situated with the presence of experimenter (an actor) and an electric shock generator with the voltage of shock was ranged from 15 volts to 450 volts.

The role of the learner was to learner had to learn pairs of words and the teacher had to test his learning/memory by telling him a word and asking him its partner word when failed to recall, the teacher gave an electric shock to the learner while increasing voltage with increasing mistakes till 450 volts. When the participants asked to stop the experiment, they were asked to continue.

The result of this experiment showed that even though the learner (the confederate) kept on showcasing he's getting hurt by the shock, 65% of the teachers (the participants) continued to the highest level i.e 450 volts and all the participants continued till 300 volts signifying obedience to the authority.

Conclusion: This study concluded that common people have a tendency to follow the orders from the authoritative figures even though sometimes it means to compromise one's conscience. It's human nature to obey high order figures. We can also see this in everyday life, people tend to show such type of behaviour very often in the workplace, in educational settings etc.