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Obedience to Authority.. Milgram experiment

Obedience is a form of social influence where an individual acts in response to a direct order from another individual, who is usually an authority figure. It is assumed that without such an order the person would not have acted in this way.



But this obedience can be harmful in some situations. The most famous example of this can be the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. Do we believe that all of the people in Nazi Germany wanted to kill those six million European Jew? No, but they were bound and ordered by the authorities to do so. This obedience to authority figures is in our nature. This can happen to all of us. 

In one of the famous experiment, the nurses were told by the doctor to give a certain medicine to the patients which the nurses didn't know about. Out of 22 nurses which participated 21 gave those medicines to the patients.

Now let's talk about the Milgram experiment. It was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, men from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience.

The experiments began in June 1961. Three types of individuals took part in each session of the experiment:
  • The "experimenter", who was in charge of the session.
  • The "teacher", a volunteer for a single session. The "teacher" was led to believe that they were merely assisting, whereas they were actually the subject of the experiment.
  • The "learner", an actor and a confederate of the experimenter, who pretended to be a volunteer.
Now the learner was connected to a machine which will give them shocks (At least they pretended that they were connected to the machine). The teachers will tell the learner few pairs of words and then tell the learner to select the right answer from the 4 choices. If the learner answers correct, the teacher moved on to the next question otherwise he was given a shock with increased voltage.

But the actual experiment was to check the obedience of the teacher to the experimenter. Before starting the experiment the teacher was told that the learner had a heart condition but the shocks will not be harmful to him. Now when the experiment began the learner deliberately answered the questions wrong and was given the shock. When the shock of about 150V was given the learner would say that he is having some issue with his heart but the experimenter being the authority insisted the teacher to continue. You can read more about the experiment on Wikipedia Milgram experiment.

In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 per cent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment's final massive 450-volt shock, and all administered shocks of at least 300 volts. These people were obeying to the experimenter blindly. This showed that the people are very susceptible to the order given by an authority figure (In this case the experimenter).

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