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 attempt to create societies that value and encourage the traits of people who disobey unethical authority figures? Is there danger in that as well?

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:

Milgrims experiments do not only go as far to show the effect of authority, and how far some people are willing to abide by it, but the influence people have on others. The small idea of a person being smarter, or higher up in authority can change the way you view and do everything. While I do believe everyone has the potential to go through hurtful orders due to blindly following obedience, but I also believe everyone is capable of defying authority and saying no. It can be hard but it can be done. It was seen in the Milgram experiment, where the first teacher refused to go on with the test once he heard that the student was being harmed. This is an example of how people can stand up and realize that what they are being told to do is wrong, and that it’s not impossible to defy orders. While I do think Milgram's experiments show how people were able to be ordered to do atrocious things, it doesn’t excuse the actions. At the end of the day, everyone has free will. Or do they? It’s not all one thing, but a multitude of layers I would play devils advocate to say that some people can be forced/threatened to do something they know is wrong. An example could be authority threatening the lives of someone they love to make them do what they want. In Nazis Defense, they argue that “If people acting under orders really do feel reduced responsibility, this seems important to understand. For a start, people who give orders should perhaps be held more responsible for the actions and outcomes of those they coerce,”. Meaning we should focus more on prosecuting the authority and not the people who commit the actions. While it is important to recognize that we need to hold the people who give the orders accountable, we also must hold the people doing the orders accountable as well. While they might have been coerced into doing the actions, it still doesn’t excuse it. As humans, we need to be able to realize when to follow orders and when not to. In order to avoid blindly following orders and then committing crimes. As well as people could simply deep down enjoy what they are doing, they could be narcissistic, psychotic, un-empathetic, etc. In class, a point was made that similar people are naturally drawn together, while we were watching the video about Kash. While this certainly doesn’t apply to all people, it could to some, and thats enough. When analyzing who should be prosectuted, it is important to factor in personality traits. They play such a big factor in how we act, and we can use them to explain why we do the things we do. In the Real Lesson of the Standford experiment they talk about how sometimes we get so attacted to our label in society, that we lose all our values and independence. As seen from the text; ““majority” of participants found themselves “no longer able to clearly differentiate between role-playing and self,” …experience of imprisonment undid, although temporarily, a lifetime of learning; human values were suspended, self-concepts were challenged…ugliest, most base, pathological side of human nature surfaced.”” It rings the question, are we naturally good or bad? Orders sometimes allow us to do things without consequence, and people love being able to do things without punishment. For a kid, this could be as simple as being allowed to eat extra candy before bed, or a grownup that gets to skip work for a week without any faults. So, this way of thinking could explain why people do such horrible things, because they know they won’t be punished for them. However, all of this, the experiments and the research, shouldn’t excuse someone from punishment for committing a crime.

The Milgram experiment is a psychological experiment meant to trick the participant into believing not only that they are harming someone else, but that it is imperative to. While some people attempt to disobey authority, many more feel obligated to, and begin to twist the idea in their mind that the responsibility is not theirs but the examineers. Some important factors as to why a teacher would disobey the experimenter include hearing the learner scream or complaining of a heart condition. These are people that most likely have a deeper sense of understanding and empathy, and stopped the experiment to make sure the learner was okay. Cari Romm explains this idea in “Rethinking One of Psychology’s Most Infamous Experiments” and states, “The ability to disobey toxic orders, Hollander said, is a skill that can be taught like any other—all a person needs to learn is what to say and how to say it.” This evaluation of people shows that disobedience can occur, it just takes specific measures to do so. On the flip side, this experiment says a lot about obedience, and how people may act on something if they believe they can shift the responsibility onto someone else.

This experiment seems as though it can be a good mirror to real life. The teachers were all ordinary people, and when faced with someone of prestige, in this example a Yale experimenter, it can seem as though there is no way out. In the Milgram experiment video, one man who went all the way through stopped and questioned the experiment many times, threatening to leave. Yet it’s important to note that he never did. His lack of action to help the learner reflects to real life atrocities, and can be connected to soldiers. People will sign up believing they are going in for glory, and leave having committed atrocities. The outside threat in this scenario is much more real as it is their life on the line with those in authority, but it can still explain why people may go through with it. When feeling threatened in a group, often the best thing to do in order to maintain status is to follow the orders of the one in lead. In a way, this can be connected to conformity, and how people will do anything in order to fit in with the status quo. “If everyone else is doing it, why shouldn’t I?” is a mentality adopted in these scenarios.

The lack of conformity is where this idea changes. Those who feel more comfortable with themselves, or have a high esteem will probably be the ones to disobey authority because they wish to do what they believe is right, not what others want them to do. Building up this confidence to speak up for what is right is difficult, but it goes all the way back to prehuman times, when social animals would need to work together to survive. This may explain why so many people are willing to follow authority, because it’s all they know.

I think that experiments like Milgram’s do explain ordinary people’s active response in violence, mass atrocities and genocide. In Milgram’s study in particular, it showed that even when they know that they are actively harming somebody else, they will still continue to participate in the act. They might turn around and question the orders and show concern for the person, but more often than not, they still defer to the perceived authority figure and commit harm towards the other person. However there is a part that the Milgram experiment did not touch on, another factor that comes into play, the brain. In the article “How Nazi's Defense of "Just Following Orders" Plays Out in the Mind” written by Joshua Barajas there was a second experiment that they mentioned by Patrick Haggard which was written in the journal “Current Biology” they studied the effect coercion had on the brain when following orders that could harm others. What they found was that there was a disconnect between the person and the action that they were doing so they felt that as long as they were not the one actively causing the harm, they were “just following orders”. What they also found was that while receiving the orders, brain activity was dampened which also correlates to the disconnect that the participants felt. What does this mean? It means that people aren’t thinking clearly when obeying orders. They’re doing rather than thinking and when they come to they will actually realize what they have done. I’ve seen this happen in many psychological thriller movies or crime shows where somebody does harm to someone else without thinking and when they come to, they start to have a mental breakdown or try to rationalize what they’ve done because they can’t comprehend that they actually did that to someone else. Some people simply block it from their memory which is their brain's way of protecting themself.

And there are other factors that come into play: fear, self-preservation, and power. Like my classmates pointed out yesterday, the tone of the “experimenter” in Milgram's experiment was a bit strange. It was monotonous and devoid of emotion which I feel, elicits a kind of fear in the “teacher”, fear of disappointing the “experimenter” thinking that they may ruin the experiment or in other cases where this tone is used fear of being harmed if they were to disobey the command. This ties into the next factor: self-preservation. When it comes to their life and someone else's, people are more likely to choose their life because who in their right mind would want to be harmed while trying to save others? Whether we like it or not, many of us will choose the self-preservation route, because we all want to live. The last factor that I came up with is power. Many of the people that obeyed Hitler’s commands during the Holocaust had nothing to lose and were just obeying the orders because they craved power. They craved the feeling of inflicting fear and pain on others because it made them feel like they were “above” the people that they were harming. That, I feel, is the scariest one because how do we prevent that?

I believe that everyone, to some capacity, does have the potential to become a perpetrator of violence against others, although it takes different levels of coercion or psychological torture to get people to submit to following violent orders. I think that one of the biggest factors that goes into this is if the people asked to commit these actions have had experience with similar acts committed to themselves. For example, systematically marginalized groups are more likely to understand the effects of persecution or mass atrocities, and therefore likely have less emotional disconnect from the victims. However, under the right conditions, it’s possible for anyone to give in to authority figures for the sake of their own self preservation or interest. In Joshua Barajas’s article How Nazi’s Defense of “Just Following Orders Plays Out in the Mind, in explaining the results of Haggard's experiment to see what lengths normal people will go to when “following orders,” Joshua claims “Haggard’s team found that brain activity in response to this tone is indeed dampened when being coerced” (Barajas, 2). Another psychological reason that we can use for why human minds can be manipulated to carry out these orders is that discussed in Rethinking One of Psychology's Most Infamous Experiments, “...situationism: the idea that people’s behavior is determined largely by what’s happening around them” (Romm, 4). Essentially, even good people, with strong morals, can be coerced into doing abhorrent things, if their morals are artificially dampened by lack of responsibility and the presence of a powerful authority figure, and their peers or environment suggest that their actions are not extreme and outlandish, but rather a justified norm for the time and place. Based on the findings of Milgram’s experiments, we also learn that in general people tend to trust themselves less than they trust people in power, especially when they are confused or unsure about what exactly is going on. In the Milgram experiment, even when they believed they were hurting the ‘learner,’ the ‘teachers’ often differed to the head of the experiment to get guidance on what to do, as many of them believed that there was absolutely no way that they could know better than a trained professional in the situation. This demonstrates that in fact it does not take torture or physical coercion to get someone to obey, it only takes repetitive and unfaltering confidence that convinces them that their morals or beliefs are insignificant and unworthy of attention. Another thing that the Milgram experiment suggests is that people are much more likely to inflict pain on others if they know that they will not be held responsible for their actions. While delivering the electric shocks, test subjects were significantly more willing to shock the ‘learner’ with dangerous and even life threatening shocks after being told that the experimenter would take full responsibility for any harm that was caused. So, with the physiological human desire for self preservation, along with trust in a credible-appearing authority figure and the reassurance that they would not be held accountable, as well as an environment that bends their perception of what classifies as a ‘moral decision,’ the Milgram experiment suggests that anyone is capable of committing acts against fellow human beings that seem nearly impossible.

I don’t think that everyone has the potential to become a perpetrator of violence against others because some people have a strong moral compass and wouldn’t hurt another person without them feeling like they are in danger. However I do think that even people with strong moral compasses, when they face a situation where they are punished or face consequences for not completing the tasks given to them they may complete the order out of fear for what would happen to them. This connects to the Milgram experiment in which the person feels as if they have no choice but to follow the order that was given to them. This tells us that we feel obligated to follow orders from people that we perceive to have authority over us. Also the feeling of getting orders to inflict pain can make people feel guilty but as long as the person feels as if they are not responsible for what happens to other people they will follow the order. With the absence of responsibility they are able to justify to themselves that they are nice people and that they are not the reason behind the violence even if they are the direct cause of it.

I don’t think that the Milgram experiment actually explains ordinary people’s active participation in mass atrocities and genocides because in most cases there is some type of bias or mass agenda that the government and citizen both believe in. In these cases the people carrying the murder don’t have remorse or guilt for their actions because they actually believe in what they are doing. Unlike the candidates in the Milgram experiment they didn’t really know what they were doing and they felt a lot of guilt for the their actions. They even multiple times throughout the experiment question what they are doing and try to stop. There are the rare occasions where the people actually do stop inflicting the pain to the learner. This isn’t the case in mass atrocities and genocide, the people are so motivated by their cause that they continue to murder and cause other pain until they view the job as complete. Bias is a huge determiner for people to be willing to inflict pain on others. If they have some reason for them to believe that the people they are hurting are bad people such as murders, rapists and etc. people would be more likely to think that they deserve it it makes it easier for people to decide to cause them pain.

The people that decided to disobey the experimenters and decided to no longer shock the learner are people that have a strong moral compass and are people who are very empathetic towards others. Knowing that what they were doing was wrong since they were hurting him and that the person back there didn’t deserve to experience the pain because they had done nothing wrong. We can attempt to create societies that value and encourage the traits of people who disobey unethical authority figures by introducing a curriculum into schools that can keep kids engaged and actually learning how to be empathetic towards others. We had these type of classes at my elementary school but kids weren’t really interested because the styles of the video were like videos for 5 and 6 year olds while we were like 10 and 11 years old. There is a danger in that because kids can be taught this in school and decide that they don’t care to learn about being empathetic and that idea of empathy may be stupid. Children and teenagers have dumb thoughts all the time and if those were to develop on the topic of empathy that would be terrible.

In the Milgram experiment, distance played a huge factor in the obedience of the teacher to continuing causing perceived harm to the learner. If the learner was forced to hold the hand of the learner onto the shock plate, few went all the way to 450 volts. But, if the teacher was not next door to the learner and therefore the screams and protests of the learner could not be heard, obedience soared to almost 100%. On the other hand, when the experimenter was no longer in the same room as the teacher, almost nobody went all the way.

In society, this distance can be emotional. Atrocities are easier to rationalize in the minds of the perpetrators if the victims can be alienated and subsequently dehumanized. Cultural gaps create a sense of otherness that makes these types of horrible things easier. This is multiplied when authority is present as the perpetrators feel less responsible as they follow orders.

To create a society where this can’t happen, we would need to either bring ourselves closer with outside groups or farther from authority. Bringing ourselves closer together eliminates the ability to rationalize following orders to harm others, since there is no “other” being harmed---only someone we identify as being among our own. However, this creates a strange paradox: in order to see outside societies as part of the ingroup, we need to have a diverse society. This creates a problem, though, because now the group lines are defined within our society; we create infighting and hierarchies of discrimination. Completely homogenizing our own society to solve this new problem socially separates us from other societies once again.

It’s a good thing, then, that we can instead separate ourselves from authority to also reduce the urge to obey. If those giving orders are seen as alien or untrustworthy to our society, we can more easily disregard them. Once again, though, this isn’t without its consequences. If the gaps were too large between us and our superiority---such as in a physical gap across a country, a gap in age, or an exorbitant gap in wealth (sound familiar?)---we would begin to lose faith in our leaders (again…sound familiar?). This can lead to the collapse of a society or social hierarchy, at least in its current form---though sometimes this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That’s part of how this country was created, after all. But the cycle seems to inevitably repeat.

Does this mean we are doomed to endlessly repeat the violence of history’s darkest atrocities over and over again? I don’t think so. As the saying goes, “Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it.” This suggests that we can avoid repeating history simply by learning about it---though this is not convincing either. Learning why the Holocaust happened is so much more crucial than learning what happened during the Holocaust.“Why?” has always been a better question than “What?” The result of cognitive dissonance when it comes to harming others results from a disconnect from who we perceive ourselves to be. The people we think we are wouldn’t shock a man to death. The people we think we are wouldn’t participate in the Holocaust. Yet, as the Milgram experiment suggests, the deflection of responsibility alleviates this dissonance: “I’m not responsible; the experimenter is.”

We keep committing these atrocities because we are sure we never would. But as the Milgram experiment shows and as Bauman writes, we could. We have to understand that it could be us. People read this and feel the dissonance without even having done the action. “I would never commit genocide” is dissonant with “I am capable of committing genocide.” Therefore we seek to justify this dissonance before any action has been committed. We absolve ourselves of blame before we are even put into a situation where we could be at fault. Thus we condition ourselves---doom ourselves---to obey, when the situation demands we fight back. In our heads, we already aren’t responsible. By learning to examine these processes in our minds, we can learn to sit with our dissonance. If we learn to take responsibility and come to terms with the idea that, under the right circumstances, we could be coerced into committing terrible deeds, then maybe, just maybe, we would be able to make the right choice when the time actually comes.

While the Milgram experiment does give insight into the effect of orders on an individual, thus shedding insight into a possible factor of the Nuremberg Defense, there are many holes in the study. The study suggests that over half of people would carry out orders and inflict pain upon other people to extremely devastating results. It seems like when humans follow orders, they dissociate themselves from the action both emotionally and neurologically. A follow up study to the Milgram experiment was conducted by Patrick Haggard which backed this idea. In his study, he looked at brain activity in response to willingly giving electric shocks to a “victim” compared to how they responded to doing it under orders. He indeed found that brain activity was “indeed dampened when being coerced.” (Barajas 3) The Milgram experiment, however, didn’t measure for other factors that lead people to act on violence. A large aspect that allowed the Nazi regime to rise to power and indoctrinate so many people was their use of fear and racism. They convinced millions that Jews were going to take their jobs and ruin their livelihoods. If the Milgram experiments had tested situations in which the “teacher” felt to be under threat by either the “learner” and/or the “experimenter,” the amount of people who continued all the way to 450 volts would likely go up significantly. On top of that, the amount of brainwashing and propaganda used by the Nazi regime made it even easier for regular people to dehumanize their victims and do such awful things. The west’s response of villainizing the entire German population, including those regular people who found themselves living under Nazi control, is a way for the people of the west to themselves dehumanize and separate the Germans from themselves because, as Zygmunt Bauman said, The most frightening thing we could imagine is that we could do what they did too. We as humans are hardwired to value ourselves over others, leading to anyone having the ability to harm others if it protects our social or physical safety.

To try and prevent atrocities like the Holocaust from happening again, it is important to not simply villainize the German populous and throw them out as the epitome of evil, but to understand how they could get to a point where such a thing happens and recognize how we could do it too. Creating a society that is vigilant towards our own psychological weaknesses and aware of the ability of charismatic leaders to convince us to do bad things is the best way to protect from genocide. Education is probably the only real solution to create such a society, however, the studies have shown that people are willing to follow orders at roughly the same rates regardless of education level. Fundamentally it seems as if we as humans are hardwired to follow orders even if we don’t want to be doing what we are ordered to do. We don’t want to disappoint or fail others, so our brains work to reduce the dissonance we feel when following bad orders by shifting blame to the leader and psychologically removing ourselves from the action. Because humans are so good at shifting responsibility, it is extremely difficult to change society enough to prevent mass atrocities.

I believe that everyone has the potential to become a perpetrator of violence against others, depending on how strong their self morals are. If one feels against something strongly enough, they will do everything in their power to stop doing it. They will reflect back on their self morals and realize that these actions do not align with who they are. The action they were completing will then come to a halt. Although, in some situations there are many key factors that could alter this decision to stop. For example, in the Milgram experiment as the shock levels began to increase due to the amount of questions that the ¨learner¨ was getting wrong, the second ¨teacher¨ began to question himself on what he was doing. Every time he had to increase the shock, he would turn to the experimenter looking for reassurance to keep going. He repeatedly asked if anything that happened to the ¨learner¨ would be his responsibility. Every time the experimenter would reply with no and would encourage the ¨teacher¨ to keep assessing the ¨learner¨. After knowing that no responsibility would fall onto him, the ¨teacher¨ continued on with the experiment. Learning that he would not be held accountable for the condition of the ¨learner¨, drove the teacher to keep going. When questioned after the experiment on why he never decided to stop he kept repeating that he was told to keep going and that he had to continue the assessment. The ¨teacher¨ knew what he was doing was wrong and he did not enjoy what he was doing. But it was the fact that he was told to keep going and that it technically wasn't his ¨fault¨ if anything happened to the ¨learner¨ was what didn't stop him. Whereas with the first ¨teacher¨ within first levels of shock immediately stopped. He kept demanding the experimenter to check on the ¨leaner¨. The ¨teacher¨ refused to continue with the experiment even while the experimenters were repeatedly telling him to continue. In this situation we see the ¨teacher's¨ strong morals come through and stop him from completing an action against his morals. In contrast, the second ¨teacher¨ disregarded his morals and was ultimately blinded by the experimenter's commands. The sole fact that the experimenter was in some form of power made the ¨teacher¨ obey his directions. If the experimenter did not express his power, the ¨teacher¨ may not have felt as obligated to listen to him. The ¨teacher¨ justified his actions by reasoning that the experimenters were the ones telling him to keep going with the experiment. I believe that throughout our history there are a multitude of examples portraying the experimenter to ¨teacher¨ to ¨learner¨ relationships. For example in an article written by Joshua Barajas, he discusses authority and how big of a role it plays in the infliction of harm onto others. He begins the article with discussing holocaust organizers and guards, and the measures they went through trying to not be blamed for their cruel actions. Barajas states that these folks were arguing that they were ¨forced to serve as mere instruments¨ during the war. In other words, they were just doing what they were being told to do. It was not their idea nor their fault. They had completely shifted their responsibilities of their heinous actions onto their superiors. All these men were arguing that they were instructed to do these things and that it was really the person instructing them that was mainly at fault. This is not the only example seen in our history of people acting out based on authoritative instruction. Overall, a person with power is most likely going to always be listened to. What matters is that we briefly reflect on the instructions and/or commands and question if they are moral. From this we can make a better and all around safer decision on whether or not to act upon the superiors demands.

Milgram’s experiment demonstrates only that a significant number of people will inflict damage on another person if ordered to do so, at least if the person causing harm believes that someone above them, the authority figure, is responsible for the harm and will take responsibility for it. However, this psychological phenomenon does not explain the root causes of hateful or harmful acts in a society because it does not explain how hierarchical institutions are formed with members who believe in the hierarchy enough to trust those with authority over them and abandon their own decisions making power. It also does not tell us about what a society can do to educate citizens to be more likely to question authority and resist immoral orders.

The “Fundamental Attribution Error” says that one tends to overstate a trait to explain an action, and a person can reflexively use this to dull the cognitive dissonance, or guilt, of doing harm to another person. In this experiment the trait is that the “teacher” is not responsible because they are simply doing what the “experimenter” told them to do and the overstatement is the use of that to neglect their own critical thinking. That said, at least one of the “teachers” we saw refused to continue giving shocks. That person seemed to think the orders were unethical because the harm being inflicted was so great just for not learning the words. It was not clear why some people made their own decision and others did not.

I believe that inherently people do not want to hurt other people because of simple self preservation, they do not want to be harmed themselves and therefore do not want to live in a society where it is alright to harm another person. However when people form into groups we often see hierarchies form and those hierarchies seem to let people feel off the hook for following orders. Other times people at the bottom continue to make their own decisions. It is not clear what makes the difference. Milgram had to justify to the “teacher” the shocks. For at least some of the teachers, the experimenter also had to say he was “responsible” for the harm that might be inflicted. This suggests to me that Milgram believed people would cause harm only where they believe the justification or reason why the harm was being caused and also that the authority figure would take responsibility for the action.

Matthew Hollander’s thesis about Milgram’s experiment was summarized by Carri Romm that, “people in both categories (obedient and disobedient) tried several forms of protest – those who successfully ended the experiment early were simply better at resisting than those that continued,” (Romm 4). This suggests the experiment is a measurement of obedience. The experiment was also only done with one person and one authority figure. How this would function if there were two “teachers” or several authority figures is unknown. It is also not clear what would have happened if the “teacher” was instructed to stop or protest if the harm seemed too great or seemed unreasonable.

Where does authority come from? For the experiment, authority was given to the “experimenter” by their lab coat, payment to the subject, and by the fact that the experiment was conducted at a prestigious and well known institution, Yale. In society, authority can be given by age, degrees held and the institutions that granted them, public opinion, law, governments, religion, wealth, physical power, and more. A society can influence which institutions continue to have authority by deciding which institutions have or keep physical power (access to force or military, financial power (access to resources), legal authority (granted by governments and courts), and moral authority (which may be granted by the public or in a grass roots way). Maybe a society can reduce the likelihood of mass atrocities by granting power only to institutions that require members to use individual agency to follow only just orders, or by having some other check on the continued power of the institution.

All in all, I think the human tendency to obey proven in Milgram’s experiment can contribute to but not cause mass atrocities. I think the real cause is a mix of this tendency and a society creating institutions that limit or even punish human tendencies to protest injustice and harm. We might be able to limit mass atrocities by learning how to create societies that encourage protest of immoral orders as well as obedience to just orders.

From watching the Milgram experiments, I think I learned a lot about society. I was upset to see the “teacher’s” willingness and refusal to disobey the experimenter, even though he clearly understood what he was doing was wrong. The teacher is an everyday man who signed up for an experiment. He did not go into the experiment intending to harm someone, yet in 65% of cases he was willing to give the learner, a complete stranger, a fatal shock. This is a powerful and scary trend. Yet there are multiple ways to explain the phenomenon. One is the pressure and closeness of the experimenter to the teacher, and the lack of connection between the teacher and the learner. Even when the teacher expressed serious qualms about continuing to shock the learner, the experimenter would brush them aside, saying nothing would happen, even when something clearly was happening (the man was screaming, even saying that more shocks would kill him.) By the end, the learner fell completely silent and didn’t answer the questions. The experimenter would tell the teacher to keep going, and the majority of the time, the teacher would oblige, even though he knew he may have just killed a man, or was about to kill him with more. In one example we watched, the teacher repeatedly asked the experimenter if he would take any responsibility for the consequences of the experiment. After the experimenter said that he would assume all of the blame, the teacher had little trouble continuing the experiment, despite it having not changed that he may administer a fatal shock to the man. This shows a high level of dissonance; if the man felt no responsibility, he would not have an issue doing something morally wrong. However, it appears that a major cause of the heavy influence of the experimenter on the teacher is their close proximity. The experimenter would be upset with the teacher if they did not continue the experiment; meanwhile, the learner was distant, and that made the teacher more likely not feel sympathy, compassion, or a connection with the learner. If the roles were reversed, and the experimenter was giving instructions on the intercom while the learner was in the room with the teacher, I believe that the experiment would have gone very differently. The teacher would have been able to feel the learner’s pain, and relate to him more having had a face to face interaction. However, this still says many bad things about people’s tendencies to inflict pain on others without a justifiable reason.

Additionally, there are more shortcomings within Milgram’s experiment. The subjects were all men, middle aged, and working class. From what I could see, the men were all or mostly white. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, this experiment took place over 50 years ago. Australian author Gina Perry wrote a book in which she criticized the experiment, saying some of the data was untrue and that the experimenters went off script. She also claimed that some participants knew that the experiment wasn’t real. This would lead to the experiment being discredited. These are issues in the experiment, but they still do not change the fact that a person will still inflict pain on someone. For this reason, the experiment shows how people are willing to comply with societal pressure and do something they normally would not support under the smallest amount of pressure.

Obedience is one of the fundamental pillars of psychology, and for many has been ingrained in them through different power imbalances, such as a boss to his employee, a teacher to student, or parent to child. It is known that authority or appearance of authority is very persuasive in getting people to obey, and the Milgram experiment set out to see just how far someone would obey an experimenter who has no inherent authority over the subject. However, the experiment showed that over fifty percent of subjects will administer a deadly shock at the expense of being obedient to the experimenter. However, I do not believe that this can be adequate evidence of why soldiers of the holocaust and other mass atrocities throughout world history. This is because I believe soldiers are very influenced by the “mob theory” which says that behavior is more exaggerated and undisciplined in a group of many. For example, there were millions of nazi soldiers during the holocaust, which may have caused them to act purely evil. Sure, Adolf Hitler was seen as a very authoritative figure, which caused nationwide obedience to his horrific policies, but since there were so many soldiers, it could’ve prompted them to act so unhinged. In addition to this, there was also some social conformity involved, as, since the soldiers were in a group, might’ve not been prompter to stand up as everyone else was doing it. Another angle of this is described in How Nazi's Defense of "Just Following Orders" Plays Out in the Mind, where it says “The study, published in the journal Current Biology, described this distance as people experiencing their actions more as ‘passive movements than fully voluntary actions’ when they follow orders.” This is another thing that is contrary to the Milgram experiment, as the subjects of the milgram experiment were very present and the experiment lasted minutes, while the Holocaust lasted years.

I think that the Milgram experiment has very interesting and enticing results, but it is not a direct parallel or explanation of the decision making of the nazi soldiers. This is in part due to the feeling of a crowd, whereas the Milgram experiment is very much individual. However, the Milgram experiment is definitely a baseline for the behavior seen during the holocaust and other mass atrocities, as if subjects are willing to go to that extent of harm by themselves, they would do so much worse when in a crowd, as they have much less responsibility for their actions and can hide in the crowd of people. Also, the commands given during the experiment were very similar to that of a war official, in its “matter-of-fact” and urgent tone. All in all, although many nazis experienced many of the thoughts as the teachers in the MIlgram experiment, but since the were in a crowd and surrounded by more authoritative figures who seemed to be much more intelligent than the soldiers themselves, it could have prompted them to commit such heinous atrocities.