Obedience

Obedience

“The Perils of Obedience”

      Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist conducted one of the classic studies on obedience where he authorized an experiment that forced participants either to violate their conscience by obeying the immoral demands of an authority figure or to refuse those demands
      According to Milgram obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. For many people, obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, a potent impulse overriding training in ethnics, sympathy, and moral conduct. Milgram added that conservative philosophers argued that the very fabric of society is threatened by disobedience, while humanist stress the primacy of the individual conscience (344).
      Milgram says that a simple experiment at Yale University was set up to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because someone ordered him. In the experiment, two people asked to come to psychological laboratory to take part of study of memory and learning. One of them the designated as a “teacher” and the other a “learner.” the experimenter explains that the study is concerned with the effect of punishment on learning.
      According to Milgram the learner was isolated into a room, seated in a kind of miniature electric chair; arms are strapped to prevent excessive movements, and an electrode attached to his wrist. The learner was instructed to read list of simple word pairs, and that he will be tested on his ability to recognize the second word of a pair when he hears the first one. Whenever he makes an error, he will receive an electric shock of increasing intensity (345).
      According to Milgram the real focus of the experiment is the teacher. After watching the learner being strapped into place, the teacher was instructed to be seated before a shock generator with a panel consists of thirty level switches clearly labeled with a voltage designation ranging 15 to 450 volts (345)....