The Perils of stanley Milgram
"The Perils of Obedience" was written by Stanley Milgram to convey the results of a psychological experiment. Milgram went to great lengths to design an experiment to see if people would disregard their conscience to obey corrupt demands of authority. First, two people were chosen to participate in a study of the effects of punishment on memory and learning. One person is the "teacher" while the other is the "learner". The teacher is given a very simple set of instructions. A list of word pairs is to be read aloud. The learner is to recall the second word of the pair from memory when the first is recited. If the learner is incorrect, the learner is given an electric shock with increased intensity as the experiment continues. The label on t
The obedient teacher saw himself not as a cruel and mean person but simply as "the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes". Humans are very cruel people and throughout history that has been proven time and time again. (326) Milgram gives several examples of the teacher's personas before, during, and after the experiment. A modest person contains these feelings awaiting release. The atrocities of the Holocaust to the war of today in Iraq prove that people still seem themselves as obeying the orders issued therefore accepting no responsibility for the consequences of the actions carried out by them. I think his use of pain rather than a reward system helped prove his point. The inserts of conversation gave the reader an understanding of tension between the teacher and the experimenter. The objective is to see how much pain human beings inflict on another to obey an authority figure. It's pushed onto another and disregarded. Milgram proved that obedience is in all human beings to the point of extreme cruelty. Milgram also states that many teachers saw themselves as "just doing their job". The learner isn't really going to receive a shock and he isn't the focus of the experiment. The chair is in a separate room than the teacher. he shock generator has a voltage from 15 to 450 volts.
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