learntoquestion ltq discussions

Questions to Consider:

Please use the following quote and questions as a guide for your post. You should also refer directly to the documentary of the Milgram experiment as well. You can choose to focus on one of the question sets, or to incorporate several of them into your response.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes: “The most frightening news brought about by the Holocaust and by what we learned of its perpetrators was not the likelihood that ‘this’ could be done to us, but the idea that we could do it.”

1. Do you think that everyone has the potential to become a perpetrator of violence against others? What do the Milgram experiments suggest about the aspects of human behavior that could make it possible for us to willingly inflict pain on others?

2. Do you think that experiments like Milgram’s actually explain ordinary people’s active participation in violence, mass atrocities and genocide? What are the other factors that may come into play? What else, beside the blind following of authority, contributes to some people's willingness to inflict pain on others?

3. What are some of the important factors and perhaps even personality traits that led the ‘teachers’ in the Milgram experiment to disobey the ‘experimenters’ commands to continue to shock the ‘learner’? Can we, and should we, attempt to create societies that value and encourage the traits of people who disobey unethical authority figures?

Word Count Requirement: 500-750 words

Readings to Reference:

Please refer to the ideas, either using a quote or paraphrasing, from at least one of the readings in your response.

Rethinking one of Psychology’s most infamous experiments (Cari Romm, 2015)

How the Nazi’s Defense of “Just Following Orders” Plays Out in the Mind (Joshua Barajas, 2016)

The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment (Maria Korrinkova, 2015)

Rubrics to Review:

LTQ Rubric

Milgram’s experiment goes way further than shocking a stranger. We all love to think that we’re nice people and that we wouldn’t go to 450 volts, but the truth is, we don’t know ourselves as well as we think we do. There are so many components that go into our decisions. What’s the prize, who am I hurting, what will they think of me if I stop, what will they think if I go on? The factors are infinite. We have lived in a tragic world for a while now. It has now become normal to think of an escape plan wherever we are just in case something happens. I know that all of us have at least thought “Why do people do this? How can they live with themselves after hurting people?” Milgram showed us how they live with themselves. In the experiment, those who went all the way to 450 only did it because they knew the responsibility wouldn’t be on them. When we are hidden from responsibility, obedience of the law looks like a suggestion. It’s like when your mom tells you not to take a cookie from a cookie jar and you take one anyway because you know that you’ll never get caught. Or you know that you can blame it on another sibling and get off the hook.

Other factors might include who you do it to. You would never even participate in the experiment if you knew it was your grandfather on the other side. There is something so important about emotional distance and who you see as an “us” and “them.” There are many different circumstances but usually a criminal wouldn’t rob their mother or key their dad’s car. They do it to people who don’t know them because they will never have another encounter with them again and they won’t have to relive the guilt every time they’re around them. Physical distance is also a related factor for obedience. Your parents go on a trip together and tell you not to invite anyone over. Since you know they’re far away, you disobey them and have the biggest rager you could ever imagine. You wouldn’t do that if your parents were down the street or in their room. Something about the distance between people will determine how they act.

During the Holocaust, many Nazi’s acted due to their orders. It is to be made clear that following orders is never a reason to do cruel things. We always have choices, we just hate the consequences. So when the consequences don’t affect us, we don’t care as much. This might potentially be one of the greatest factors because “ ‘If people acting under orders really do feel reduced responsibility, this seems important to understand’ ” (Barajas). During the Holocaust we know that being physically close was a must, but being emotionally close or being able to take responsibility was a great factor. As said before, you wouldn’t do these inhumane acts to your family. Put a paper bag on their face or close your eyes before you pull the trigger but it won’t take away the importance of their lives to you. During the Holocaust, they simply did not care. It was not their mother, cousin, dog, or sister. It was someone they could easily depict as unimportant and at the end of the day they would have blamed Hitler. But just as in the experiment when the “teacher” blamed the experimenter, who pulled those triggers, picked up the weapons, and saluted that monster. Whether you are caught or not, you will always emotionally be responsible for your actions.

Although we all say that we would never go to 450 volts, we should not be so sure. There are hundreds of factors that go into experiments such as the Milgram experiment, and even though it has been repeated over and over again, the similarity of the results is terrifying. I believe that everyone has the potential to harm others, but I also think the opposite - everyone is born with a sense of right and wrong, and most people would not willingly inflict harm upon others. We can think of it this way: if the learner was the teacher’s child, there is no way they would hurt them after hearing them scream, but if the teacher’s child got beaten every time the teacher failed to press the switch, it is almost guaranteed that they would go to 450 with little to no question. Another factor that the documentary highlighted was where the experiment was held, for example if it was in a small store, then people were less likely to continue than they were when it occurred at Yale. The prestige of the university made people believe in the experiment easily. It also depends on who is giving orders, if they are in the room with you, and if you are close in emotional or physical distance to the learner. If you are given little instructions before being told to go to 450, such as “state your name,” “read the words,” “give a little shock,” then you are already accustomed to listening to this person and you become more willing to do what they say.

There is so much to think about when analyzing these experiments, but the takeaway is always the same - people will hurt other people when they are told to do so and that they won’t have to take responsibility. We see this in historical circumstances, such as the Holocaust. Hitler rose to power, and he did not just immediately start killing people. He gained people’s trust, then he began the process of dehumanization. By convincing people that Jewish people were “animals” and not of any value, his supporters were willing to hurt them. People also were willing to become Nazis because everyone was doing it. They were seeing their friends, neighbors, and people they cared about becoming Nazis, and they were inclined to do the same. Hitler used their groupthink in order to kill millions of Jewish people.

“He was just following orders,” we’ve all heard it before, and it was one of the most common defenses during trials of Nazis after the war. In “How Nazi's Defense of "Just Following Orders" Plays Out in the Mind,” Barajas dives into the idea that these people were making passive movements and not voluntary actions. Are our people monsters, or are they just brainwashed to listen to authority? I would hope that they are not monsters, but the true answer is that I don’t know. How can someone create a mass genocide, and how could people just go along with it? We see it in China today with Uighur Muslims, where they are kidnapped from their homes and enslaved, and everyone goes along with it because “that is just the way it is.” I liked what xoxogossipgirl said, that we never lose our ability to make a choice, but once the consequences don’t affect us anymore, we are willing to advance with orders. We are conditioned to believe that the government always does the right thing, but that is far from true and learning about experiments such as the Milgram experiment, and having discussions about the history, is the first step into making sure history doesn’t repeat itself, and making us more aware of the ability of power.

Many people were saying that they probably would have continued the experiment, but I have strong feelings that most of our generation would not. We have seen the effects of groupthink, and we are a lot less mind-melded. We push against the government when we see something that isn’t fair, and we are not willing to listen just because an authoritative figure tells us to do something. This is seen as troubling to older generations, but if you really think about it, our will and strength to be our own person is a trait that might be the solution to our failing government.

I believe that everyone has the capacity to hurt another person within them, somewhere. As we all hold something in our lives to value, put that value under threat and people will come out to defend it. Now, many of us in modern society have been educated in such a way to obey authority with the utmost resolution, and we all fear what will happen should we disobey authority because of how the consequences could pose a threat to one value or another, such as getting into college, losing a job, etc. The Milgram experiments also highlight that one, the more we distance ourselves from the victim of such cruelty, the more capable we are of continuing a torture of sorts. Two, it becomes easier to follow the orders when we are told that the consequences are not our personal responsibility. This is likely related to my personal hypothesis above. These people do not wish to have their identity damaged by the label such as “murderer”, but as soon as that possibility is thrown to the wayside, they will keep going without complaint, even if they actually end up killing somebody.

In fact, this lack of responsibility historically can be viewed as one of the most powerful tools in self-defense to justify a horrid act. Take for example, the Nuremberg Trials. Joshua Barajas writes about the common defense used by the German military of “just following orders” to justify the entirety of the holocaust:

“In a 1962 letter, as a last-ditch effort for clemency, Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann wrote that he and other low-level officers were “forced to serve as mere instruments,” shifting the responsibility for the deaths of millions of Jews to his superiors. The “just following orders” defense,”

This seemed to work as a scapegoat for many of those involved in the trials. While at first it might seem a sensible enough excuse, there is still a fundamental problem. If commoners will go along with the authorities no matter what they ask of them, it is all too easy for someone with malicious intentions to seize power through false promises and turn an entire nation of people on each other’s backs.

Okay, but even still there are those who would not hurt another human being even if they were ordered to do so by an authority figure. Well, it turns out that even still there are ways to bypass the moral compass. Many of history’s most infamous leaders for carrying out genocide are also incredibly manipulative. They employed a strategy in which they would demonize a specific group of people, dehumanize them, and then blame them for the shortcomings of the current regime. With this explanation, people would be much more compliant with the mandates of the leader.

We can see this in Turkey with the Armenian genocide, in Germany with the Holocaust, and even in the United States multiple times. During Prohibition and WW1 there was an explosion of anti-German sentiment. Then in WW2, anti-Asian sentiment, with people not being able to tell a Japanese American from a Chinese or Korean American. Again in the Cold war there was anti-communist sentiment. This last one being the strangest of all since you could not tell if someone was communist or not by looking at them. Many excuses were made by those in power or seeking it to exile a group of people for alleged communist activity.

Thus, as we can see from Milgram’s experiment and all throughout history, it is clear that any human can become a devil with the right tricks and motivations. The question now is, will we fall for the same trick again?

I think that most people have the potential to become a perpetrator of violence against others, after watching the documentary of the Milgram Experiment. The documentary essentially demonstrated the unbelievable decisions that people make when under an authority figure’s control, whether they know the figure of authority or not. The test subjects in the Milgram Experiment were under the impression that the actor was being actually shocked with electric currents, and heard the “pain” of the actor when being shocked, yet continued to follow through with the experiment. The Milgram Experiment suggests that humans will do anything to be perceived as “good,” or “obedient,” even if it is at the cost of others. In the article Rethinking One of Psychology’s Most Infamous Experiments by Cari Romm, obedience to authority is contextualized with the Holocaust, reflecting how German soldiers were obedient, and turned a blind eye to what they were actually doing. The article discusses a paper that Milgram wrote in 1963, stating, “‘Obedience, as a determinant of behavior, is of particular relevance to our time…These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders.’” Milgram’s paper proves his theory on obedience, signifying that anyone will be obedient to an authority figure, giving insight on the human’s internalized idea of obedience to be a “good” person, even if they are doing something that is morally wrong.

I think that the Milgram Experiment, and similar experiments, somewhat explain ordinary people’s active participation in violence, mass atrocities, and genocide, because it shows how easily people lose their sense of common sense when they are under the impression that they are being “morally obedient,” as well as how different people feel when they think that the blame is not on them. Throughout the Milgram Experiment documentary, we saw people try to justify their actions of continuing the experiment, though the actor was in “pain.” In the article How Nazi’s Defense of “Just Following Orders” Plays Out in the Mind by Joshua Barajas, it touches base upon how in the Nuremberg Trials, the common statement of the, “‘just following orders’ defense” was an attempt of justification that people of the Nazi Party tried to use to reason as to why they committed the horrible acts that they did. In addition to the blind following of authority, the idea of being “on the correct side of the conflict” comes into play, for people who were of the Nazi Party believed that what they were doing was morally just, even though it was most certainly not.

Some important factors, or traits, that led the “Teachers” in the Milgram Experiment to disobey the “Experimenter’s” commands to continue to shock the “Learner” could be the way in which they were raised, and their morals regarding obedience, and kindness towards others. I feel that the ways in which we are raised has an enormous factor into how we behave, as well as how we treat others. People who were raised on the morals of being kind to others, and treating others with respect are more likely to disobey an authority figure’s commands, if they know that they are not morally just. Another personality trait that may have played a role in the “Teacher’s” decisions to continue to shock the “Learner” could be the feeling of insecurity, for when people are insecure, they tend to act blindly towards their actions. It is possible to create a society that values and encourages the traits of people who disobey unethical authority figures, but it would be incredibly difficult to create a society like this. From the time that we are little, we are told to obey any figure of authority, no matter what they say, which leads to people making poor decisions, because they did not consider their own morals when making those decisions. People’s childhoods play into their personalities and traits as an individual, which determines how they go about making decisions based upon morality, and things that are “morally just,” or not.

Bauman’s quote means he is terrified not of the idea that we could be so severely tortured, but that we would commit the act of torturing to such a degree. If we are terrified of acts that we ourselves commit, that raises the question of where our code of morals and ethics lie. It indicates that something about the way we raise our children and the way we teach our students is “wrong” or unethical.

I think everyone has the potential to become a perpetrator of violence against others, but it partly depends on your predisposition; your genetics, the way you were raised, the environment you grew up in, and your culture. Some people are genetically predisposed to be more aggressive and violent than others, so they are more likely to be perpetrators of violence given the “right” tools and circumstances. If someone grew up in a household witnessing or participating in things like domestic abuse, that would also greatly affect their potential to inflict pain on others. In addition, if someone grows up in an environment where violent behavior is the “norm,” they would be desensitized to violence and therefore may be more obedient when told to hurt other people. In contrast, if parents lead by example and preach messages such as “violence is never the answer” and demonstrate ways punishment can be administered without physically hurting someone, then the child is more likely to follow their example and develop a corresponding code of morals and ethics. Also, if corporal punishment is common in the culture a child grows up in, then they are conditioned to believe that it is right to inflict pain on “bad” people. So then, the perpetrators of violence feel better about themselves because they are treating “bad” people the way they deserve to be treated.

Pigeondrivesabus said “I believe that everyone has the potential to harm others, but I also think the opposite - everyone is born with a sense of right and wrong, and most people would not willingly inflict harm upon others.” This was interesting to me because it helped me recognize that this topic is extremely nuanced and there is a duality to it. The ideas of good vs bad and right vs wrong are subjective, and we need to keep that in mind when we think about these topics.

The Milgram experiment highlights a key aspect of human behavior that makes it possible for us to willingly hurt others, which is that (almost) everything we do is to avoid pain and/or feel better. As we saw in the video, both men become more uncomfortable with giving shocks as they increase in intensity. The first man became so uncomfortable that he refused to obey and completely stopped the experiment. This relieved his stress and guilt the fastest way he thought possible. The second man would repeatedly seek reassurance that what he was doing was right, and when he was given the green light, he would continue administering the shocks. As he was nearing the max voltage of the machine, he picked up speed in giving the shocks. The reason he continued to obey was to get himself out of the stressful situation as fast as possible. In both scenarios, each man did what he thought would get him out of the stressful situation and help him feel better.

The idea of passivity versus voluntary action, discussed in Joshua Barajas’ How the Nazi’s Defense of “Just Following Orders” Plays Out in the Mind, also influences the men’s decisions in the experiment, as well as in historical examples, such as the Holocaust. Barajas states that “people actually feel disconnected from their actions when they comply with orders, even though they’re the ones committing the act.” Why does coercion change one’s sense of agency over their actions? As we covered in class, it is because from a young age, we are influenced to believe that what we are told to do is right because the people we are obeying are always right. So when people were commanded to kill the Jewish people in the Holocaust, it makes sense why they obeyed. As long as we are not held responsible for the consequences of our actions and we are told that what we are doing is right, then of course most of us will obey. These ideas are slowly but surely being changed and unearthed, as we hear that our superiors can be wrong and do make mistakes, and the reason for this is because we are human. We are becoming more conscious, more self-aware, and more willing to question the ideas and rules that society has tried to impose on us, which I think is a really good thing.

Experiments such as Milgrams can explain why people participate in violence so blindly, but they do not excuse it whatsoever. While his experiments show many different levels of empathy incorporating the factor of distance and awareness, it is also demonstrated that some have less empathy than others even when put in the same situations, and that people are willing to blindly follow orders even when they are unsure or weary of the directions they are given, based on their morality. When one of the participants of the Milgram experiments were asked why he did not just refuse to continue with the test, he responded that the experimenter told him he had to continue, when the other participant who did not continue was asked the same question he said they he knew it was wrong to continue after he heard the actors yelling.

In Joshua Baraja’s “How Nazi's Defense of ‘Just Following Orders’ Plays Out in the Mind” it is mentioned that coercion can change a persons “sense of agency,” which refers to their lack of awareness of their actions, which start to feel more passive when under coercion. When a person is told to perform an action by someone who has made their position as a place of authority very clear, people under that authority will feel a sense of obligation to complete their given task. However, this does not justify any cruel or immoral actions done under this coercion; members of the Nazi party that admintistered terrible acts towardss Jewish people tried to exuse those actions by stating that they were just following the orders they were given by their superiors, but fundamentally the terrible acts were still committed by that person and they should be held responsible for them.

There are other factors that could be considered in these situations. The factor of fear that perpetrators could have had about what could happen if they defied orders, the factor of conforming and being a part of an in-group; in the case of the Holocaust, there were many Nazi supporters which would have been the majority group (in-group), people would conform to those ideas and ideals if they see everyone else doing it, this way of thinking brings a sense of justification for conforming person “if everyone is doing these things, how bad can it be if I do it too.” This also brings the factor of groupthink into play, there is strength in numbers and if the large majority of the people around you are all acting on the same ideas, and all thinking the same way, people are far less inclined to stand out and be a non-conformist because in a way you will gaslight yourself into thinking what you are doing is okay because it is what everyone is doing.

Other than blindly following authority I believe that the feeling of thinking you are doing something right, or for the greater good contributes to peoples willingness to follow through with inflicting pain on others. It can also be said that if the perpetrator does not feel any responsibility for their actions, and they do not have it on the conscience they will be more willing to participate.

Do people have control over their own actions? This may seem like an easy answer, of course people have control over what they do. The Milgram experiment shows the disgusting reality of what people have the ability to do whether they want to or not. The power of manipulation is so dangerous, but no one acknowledges this. What makes people dangerous? Guns, power, and money, but also the ability to paint the truth in a completely different light.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s quote, “The most frightening news brought about by the Holocaust and by what we learned of its perpetrators was not the likelihood that ‘this’ could be done to us, but the idea that we could do it.” Hitler had the power to portray the atrocities he and the Nazi Party were doing as good for the German people. The power Hitler had led to people obeying him which is referenced in the Milgram Experiment. The experimenter had control over most of the men just because he was viewed as more intelligent. Hitler stated that the Jewish were not human and should be removed from society and everyone blindly followed. It is scary how easily people can be manipulated into committing acts that they do not fully understand. The movie Jojo Rabbit by Taika Waititi really depicts how badly the Germans’ minds were under control by the Nazi Party. The film is about a German boy whose imaginary friend is Hitler. The boy is part of the Hitler Youth and is blind in his love for his leader. After discovering that his mother was hiding a Jewish girl in their house, Jojo realizes how evil the Nazi Party truly is and how much he dehumanized a group of innocent people. This movie is a prime example of how easy it is for humanity to be cruel even if the intentions are not malicious. Jojo did not want to hurt Jewish people, he wanted to harm the version of the Jewish people told by the Nazi Party. The Holocaust is one of the worst genocides in human history. People should not be afraid of being killed, but if they will be the ones supporting it.

Everyone has the ability to perpetrate violence against another person. This is due to the fact that humans have the innate need to obey authority. People grow up learning to listen to authority such as parents, teachers, and bosses, but when does this become a bad thing? It is dangerous to follow the directions of a person without fully grasping the consequences. This is exhibited directly in the Milgram experiment. This quote from Rethinking one of Psychology’s most infamous experiments by Cari Romm, “In the most well-known variation of the experiment, a full 65 percent of people went all the way.” emphasizes how the majority of people in the experiment continued to obey the experimenter and shock a person a dangerous 450 volts. These people who were experimented on were not sociopaths or psychopaths, but normal people. Like everyone they have been conditioned to listen to the person that appears to know more than them. One’s sense of self is the only savior of this awful phenomenon. If a person trusts their own instincts they will be like those who, “horrified at what they were being asked to do, stopped the experiment early…” If something feels wrong then that should be taken into account no matter how powerful the person who is conducting this behavior is.

After watching and reading the Milgram experiments there were a lot of things to say. The test results were surprising, and they say a lot about human nature. We would all like to think that we wouldn't be able to do something as horrible as shock someone with 450 volts, but for many it got to that point. The findings in the Milgram experiment spark many questions. “What are we truly capable of when obeying authority figures?”. “Why do we continue obeying even though it might hurt people?”. I think the Milgram experiments answered these questions. Having an authority figure that looks and sounds like they know what they're doing plays a huge role in this. The person running the experiment kept telling the subjects “Keep going, the shocks may be painful but they aren't dangerous.” The leader of the experiment also said he'd take responsibility for whatever happened to the subject being shocked, and this also made the person keep going. When we are presented with intelligence and authority we do what we're told, partly because we don't know any better. The subject continued shocking the person after the experimenter said he would take full responsibility for any complications. So, are we really more likely to obey when the responsibility is not on us? How far are we really willing to go? This phenomenon gives a great explanation and reasoning to the violence that was shown to the victims of the holocaust by regular people.

Milgram’s experiments definitely explain factors that lead people to obey and participate in acts of violence. I’m going to focus on the factor of education. A true education gives people tools to resist obeying harmful commands because it forces people to explore different viewpoints, acknowledge that no one is completely correct, and that truth lies in the gray areas. Without these tools, Milgram’s directions were very hard to resist because everything felt very intelligent and correct. From the experimenter’s sterile attitude, to the location (Yale university) to the plethora of technical terms thrown around, lacking a formal education caused many of the teachers to trust that the experimenter knew what he was doing and doubt their gut. Of course uneducated people are just as smart, loving, and caring. But they might lack the confidence to say no in a very visibly “educated” setting. On the flip side, more educated people are very comfortable with the lab coat, the machines, and the language; they maintained a sense of agency and felt responsible for discerning whether their actions were good. This combats the phenomenon Patrick Haggard describes, which is “when people act “under orders,” they seem to experience less agency over their actions and outcomes than when they choose for themselves" (Barajas). The man who went up to 450 volts seemed less educated. He kept mentioning how he wanted to stop but “the guy forced me too”, indicating how he had lost a sense of agency and responsibility. He clearly was flustered and probably felt out of place, making him abandon his moral qualms and just get through the assignment. The man who refused to continue seemed more educated. He seemed comfortable and coolheaded, probably because he’d been in similar settings, perhaps in college, and therefore never lost sight of what exactly he was being asked to do and coming to the understanding that it was cruel and wrong.

So how do we explain the very highly educated folks who were high up Nazi officials? Well, it’s because education doesn’t always make people more empathetic and open minded. Oftentimes it does the opposite, by indoctrinating people in schools of prejudiced thought. In Nazi Germany, teachers would present issues seemingly very scientifically and unbiased, using eugenics and pseudoscience to convince smart people Jewish people needed to be killed. Similarly, scientific racism heavily influenced American education and Christianity, teaching white Americans that Black people were “naturally and divinely fit” to be enslaved. I believe since Milgram’s experiments involved all white men, these prejudices didn’t really alter educated “teachers' ' judgements. Therefore, in Milgram’s experiments, a pattern did emerge that educated people refused to obey more than non-educated people. But if the learner was Black, educated white people might be more likely to shock them. On the flip side, if the experimenter had a foreign accent, the more educated “teachers” might be less likely to obey commands due to the assumption that they weren’t as knowledgeable.

Martin Luther King Jr. said that, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” We saw how the teachers in the Milgram experiment were relieved of their distress after being assured that they would not be responsible for hurting the learners. They knew they were harming someone. They knew they were causing someone pain. But they continued to administer shocks because they told themselves that they weren’t responsible. This quote from MLK tells us that even if you see the teachers in the Milgram experiment as bystanders instead of perpetrators, they are still guilty.

Xoxogossipgirl’s cookie jar analogy made me think about how the self-monitoring and lack of responsibility theories clash. The idea that we feel we can do whatever if we aren’t held responsible contradicts the point that the Panopticon makes: that we will self-monitor our behavior. If we stop at a stop sign, even though we know that we won’t be held responsible for going through it, why can we justify continuing to harm another person?

If we are all taught since childhood to treat others with kindness, to follow the golden rule, what is the difference between the nature of those who stopped before 450 and those who continued? Carri Romm of The Atlantic writes in her article about identification. Are we going to identify with the learner as a human being, or with the instructor as an authoritative person of science? Are there differences between those who identify with the learner versus the instructor? For example, would a scientist be more likely to identify with the instructor as a fellow scientist? Or, as bumblebeetuna said, would they be more likely to identify with the learner, because they aren’t intimidated by the instructor’s education level?

I think that it also comes down to obedience, selfishness, and self preservation. If a person was an independent thinker, someone who was willing to go against the norm and disobey immoral rules, they were less likely to follow through. But for those who did follow through, it didn’t just come down to blindly following orders. Self-preservation is part of human nature that probably goes back to our origins as primates. If they didn’t do what they were told, what would happen to them? They put themselves over the learners, even though there was no reason to believe that they would be punished for disobedience.

I think that we already encourage selflessness and we wouldn’t want to discourage self-preservation. So if the main difference between those who carried on to 450 volts and those who didn’t was disobedience, how do we teach that? Or, how do we stop teaching obedience? While there are many things in this world that contribute to society’s value in obedience, the common saying, ‘respect your elders’ pops out to me. It promotes the idea that those older and apparently wiser than us are always right and that we must always do what they say. But not only are they not always right, disobeying someone is not disrespecting someone.

In contrast with the Milgram experiment, the Stanford experiment illustrates the dangers of the established prison system and power more than obedience. Maria Korrinkova discusses this in her article. The prison system has been established as very violent and unjust. Because of this precedent, the guards fulfilled this harsh role. I think that these were people who also had a tendency to be violent. I honestly don’t think that the average person would behave that harshly, but these were men who took an interest in the subject and probably not from a prison reform perspective. As someone said in class, I think it would be really interesting to see what the difference would be with women. Also (and I’m not suggesting that this study be conducted again) it would be interesting to see how the rise of violent video games affects the average person’s ability to physically harm others.

Everyone has the potential to be a perpetrator of violence against others. Even the most pure and innocent are capable, if put in the right situation. It is not about us being bad or good that we choose to commit acts of violence against others, but rather the pressure put on us that in a way forces us to. “In the minds of a lot of people, it tends to excuse the bad behavior … it’s not the person’s fault for doing the bad thing, it’s the situation they were put in.” (Romm 5). Looking at this quote, we can apply this to real life and the Milgram experiment. For example, looking at the video, we can clearly see that there are a number of people who want to stop the experiment. They want to stop so that they don't inflict pain on another person rather than because of morality, or simply because they do not want to look like a bad person; they still want to put it to an end. However, even though they want to stop, the situation that they have been put in does not allow them to do so. Even though they have a “choice”, the experiment conductors make it seem as if they don’t, thus causing them to comply. This behavior that we see in the Milgram experiment can be applied to the Holocaust as well. Even though people have some kind of choice, the dictatorship of Hitler and the propaganda makes it seem like they do not have a choice, that if they do not comply with their surroundings and do what they are told then they will be punished in some kind of way. I believe that the Milgram experiment explains human behavior very well. To me, it’s not about doing the right or the wrong thing, rather it is about how we react to being put under extreme pressure. Many learners chose to stop even though they were constantly told that the experiment must go on.

The experiment also shows how gullible or malleable people are. You can turn someone who knows their rights and wrongs into someone with no morality if you put them in a situation where they feel like they have no other choice but to do the wrong thing. I think it is very common to think that people that have committed mass genocide, violence, or atrocities do so because they want to, but the Milgram experiment shows that its not because they want to, they have no other choice but to. People like that, similar to the experiment, are fed false information and what they are told is basically propaganda. They are told things like the machine hurts but it’s not dangerous, and a bunch of scientific technical terms that make them feel like what they are doing is okay. They try to justify themselves by saying that they’re not doing this because they want to, but they are forced to. They try to tell themselves things like to convince themself to feel better about their actions, I think this is exactly how some people who were active participants in the Holocaust, violence, or mass atrocities felt. When you are fed this false information, and then put in a situation where you are forced to do something even though you do not want to, it is very easy to succumb to the dictatorship and directions of others. I think it is human nature to do so.