Obedience

Obedience: To Choose or Not To Choose

In “The Perils of Obedience,” Stanley Milgram believes the general population will blindly obey authority even when their actions may or may not cause harm to individuals. Milgram states obedience is an internal habit. He assumes when someone is directed by an authority figure to perform an act, they will do so out of blindness. Responsibility and free will both play a key role in his experiments.

The internal workings of the equipment include an authority figure, the “experimenter,” a “teacher,” the subject of the experiment, and a “student”, the actor. The experimenter instructs the teacher to read the student word pairs, and the student is to remember the second word and recite it after he hears the first word of the pair. If the student does not remember, he will be “shocked” by the teacher while increasing voltage every time.

The main focus is on the teacher. While watching the student strapped into place, the teacher is put into a room adjacent to that of the student. The teacher is then placed in front of a shock generator, used to punish the student in the case of a wrong answer. The experiment is designed to force the teacher to want to stop shocking the student, and then test their obedience when told to continue by the experimenter.

In this first version of the experiment, the results show the teacher continuously obeys the experimenter, even though the teacher is aware the students are in immense pain and discomfort. This conclusion even rivals the predictions of a professional psychiatrist. Before the experiments took place, Milgram asked for the opinion of all kinds of people. They all predicted the teacher would refuse to obey the experimenter before any real pain was inflicted on the student.

Milgram, however, wanted to test another theory. He wanted to know if people had a desire to hurt others. In this rendition of the experiment, Milgram is testing the theory that when the teacher is left with the...