Milgram's Instructions

Milgram's research produced shocking results. It actually makes me sad to realize that an authority figure can have that much influence over someone and make a human being physically hurt another human being.

I think the portion of the test that I found most interesting was that if the experimenter was not perceived as an authority figure the teachers would disobey sooner but that as long as the experimenter was assumed to a person in a position of power people seemed to blindly obey (Warren, 2011, p. 342). The only ray of hope I saw was that if other people participated as the teachers and they suggested disobedience that as a group they stopped shocking the person sooner. Social influence to do the right thing makes me hopeful.

This experiment caused me to think of social situations that exist today. We see senseless killings by gangs and we wonder how someone can be influenced to act so violently, but then you realize that other members of his gang, his social family, were urging him to commit violence. It even causes me to wonder about situations like we see today in Libya and how it took over 40 years for the people of Libya to realize that maybe they should not be obeying their leader.

I am not surprised by the number of people who followed Milgram's instructions, as it is seems to simply be human nature to want to be accepted. We see the things that people do in an attempt to be accepted or to gain approval on a daily basis. The news has traditionally been sprinkled with stories of conformity and obedience. Our society is filled with groups, cliques, committees and cults because everyone has this deep desire to "fit in". We hear stories about nearly everything, from teens with packs to get pregnant to assaults on individuals while crowds watch. "Group think" seems to be the norm in so many situations. Why? Are people so desensitized by the cruelty in the world that they fail to identify with the humanity you might expect in many of these situations? Could the answer to these questions be simple? Could it all boil down to a lack of self-esteem or a lack of self-worth?

Stanley Milgram was a Yale psychologist, that alone may allow some to see him as an authority figure. His experiment was designed to "force participants either to violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands". In most instances, participants made the choice to obey and cited that they were "doing their jobs". Milgram had an electro-shock generator and instructed participants to shock another individual as a learning process. Milgram wrote a book discussing his findings and won an award for his book, but his ethics only seemed to come into question, post experiment. Why is that? Milgram's experiment showed how ordinary people would carry out some particularly heinous instructions, simply