Perils of Obediance

A Summary of “The Perils of Obedience” by Stanley Milgram

In Stanley Milgram’s article, “The Perils of Obedience”, Milgram describes the impacts of obedience on society with an experiment, and he claims that obedience plays a large effect on many people and causes many negative situations by discovering that people willingly follow harmful instructions.

Milgram’s basic experiment was performed at Yale University. It included two individuals, a “teacher” and a “learner”, to participate in the study, and the experimenter, an actor dressed as a scientist to give the “teacher” instructions. The “learner” was also an actor for this experiment, and the “teacher” was the one truly being observed. It was explained that the “teacher” would read off a list of paired words for the “learner” to attempt to memorize them. If the “learner” responded with an incorrect answer, the “teacher” was obligated to administer electric shocks from 15 to 450 volts. The “teacher” was unaware that the “learner” did not receive any shocks, because the point of the experiment was to see how far the “teacher” would administer pain on an innocent victim, not how well the “learner” remembered word pairs. A variety of people were set as the “teacher”, and their reactions were observed. All subjects delivered shocks, but the level of voltage varied depending on the subjects vulnerability to obedience.

In one of Milgram’s trials a woman defended the “learner” and demanded that the experiment stop. She understood that with each incorrect answer the other participant was being tortured. In other trials, several subjects did not have the confidence or drive to go against the experimenter. One man, knowing it was wrong to apply higher voltages, continued to obey the experimenter who was instructing him to proceed with the experiment. Another trial took psychologists by surprise when the subject laughed after applying voltages on the “learner”. Milgram made a last variation of this experiment and...