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 that we viewed as a class 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.

A Matter of Obedience? (Facing History and Ourselves)

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:

The obedience theory depicts how humans have an extreme tendency to follow orders when received from a person in authority. The Milgram experiment, conducted at Yale in 1962, tests this. It puts humans in a position to inflict pain and cause harm to another stranger, it was looking for a boundary and testing when the person would actually resist an authority figure with actions. It did not take a lot for the people to question their actions and object with words, however when it came to bringing the harm to a stop, it took significantly longer. Most people had to get 85% of the way through the experiment, knowing they are causing direct harm, before stopping. In my opinion, everyone has the potential to commit violence until their brain is fully developed at around 25. Young people, under the age of 25, are flooded with hormones and have not developed emotional regulation skills because their brains were developing. However when someone who is above that age commits a violent act, they are piercing and permanently damaging any type of moral foundation they might have had. It defines someone's character, which has been well established. Therefore if it is a defining feature of someone, not everyone is capable of committing these acts. People can train themselves to react to situations in different ways and it takes a unique type of emotional immaturity to commit acts of violence.

While that point remains true, after reading the first article, I began to question the validity of the experiment. The article dives into the archives of the experiment that paint Milgram to be a liar. Within the archives, researchers found accusations of volunteers knowing it was a “hoax” and of the teacher characters going off script. If this experiment is not real, how much of what is stated above can actually be proved. However I have one main concern with the questioning of Milgram's experiment, are people trying to disprove the test because of the human tendency of justification. Does the very question of the test prove his point? Especially given the fact that all that was found in the archives themselves, were solely accusations. There are so many layers to this experiment and it leads in circles. I don't think there is a way to undoubtedly prove the theory one way or the other using Milgram’s technique.

Another aspect that is intriguing to think about is the value in the “disobeyers”. To disobey an educated person in a position of power who is giving you simple commands that do not harm oneself, characterizes a person greatly. Creating a boundary in a place where one lacks support can be a very difficult thing to do. Therefore, while expected and anticipated, in order to do the right thing the person must possess courage, the ability for rebellion, and persistence. Those qualities are highly valued and they are not all seen in every individual, yet this would then defy the expectation. This is because of empathy. The foundation of this layer is the fact that at a certain point, causing someone else harm, inflicts mental suffering on the individual. The expectation is that a person's empathy should make up for each individual's lack of other qualities (if applicable).

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman warned that “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.” This leads us to doubt whether everyone could possibly be a violator of peace. The findings of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments suggest that on certain conditions, normal people can be led to inflict harm. In Milgram's Yale study, subjects believed they were administering increasingly intense electrons shocks to a “learner” for every wrong answer. Although the “learner” was an actor and no shocks were ever delivered, 62.5% of participants went through to the highest voltage just because an authority figure instructed them to. Milgram found physical and effective distancing was also a determining factor, when the test subject could not see or hear the learner near 100% of people would administer the strongest voltage, but when the test subject had to touch the actor in order to shock them the rate fell to around 30%. This is a demonstration that dehumanization and distance can annihilate empathy and make people cruel. Bauman himself observed that if you had to touch someone it forced you to actually see them as someone you were harming, making it much more difficult, but when you only see someone from a distance or not at all it removed the part of you that actually saw yourself as harming another person.

However, Milgram's findings do not fully explain events like the holocaust. The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971, is another example of how easily individuals who would normally be kind, caring, or completely average people easily acquire abusive behavior when placed within authoritarian structures of hierarchy. College students who were tasked with being guards in a mock prison very quickly started mistreating the “prisoners” despite the fact that they knew it was an experiment and these were not real criminals who they could claim deserved it. Similar to Milgram's experiment, the guards were not inherently sadistic people, but in the situation, having the ability to exercise power, and the absence of supervision bred cruelty. Likewise, at the Nuremberg trials, Nazis testified that they were “just following orders” mirroring the dynamic of Milgram's experiment. However historian Daniel Goldhagen argues that blind obedience does not explain the Holocaust. Perpetrators went beyond their instructions on many occasions, driven by deeply ingrained antisemitism, ideology, or hate. Germany's military and bureaucracy often worked on their own, past what they were ordered to do, in order to achieve the goals Hitler stated, developing more efficient forms of persecution without official instructions. This confirms that propaganda, peer pressure, and ingrained hate can drive violence past obedience.

Milligrams' experiment did also record a significant minority of participants that refused to go on shocking the actor. This disobedience was driven by many variables, the strongest of which were strong moral convictions, emotional responses, independent thinking, and the willingness to challenge authority in the face of social pressure. These traits are necessary for a society to have in order to avoid the beginning stages of a genocide similar to the holocaust, which will in the future lead to people going beyond obedience and into belief, as seen in the holocaust. A society instilled with critical thinking, civic responsibility, and moral courage can empower individuals to disobey invalid orders, but, as Bauman warned, instilling relentless distrust of authority can have its own risks: if everyone believes it is valid to ignore legitimate authority, then societies will fall into widespread anarchy, mob mentality, and misplaced vigilantism. The goal is to produce citizens who can tell right from wrong, and are willing to stand up for moral justice when it is applicable.

The Milgram Experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the nazi defense of “just following orders” all suggest that violence is not a monopoly of sociopaths, those who enjoy what they are doing, and “bad samaritans” but has its potential within all of us, waiting to be unleashed by the right set of conditions. Dehumanization, physical or emotional disconnect, hierarchal coercion, and eventually complete indoctrination have the ability to completely overwhelm the empathy and morality we would normally display. To understand the possibility of such an occurrence is not to accept the inevitable, instead it is necessary in order to build a society that can instill the right empathy, moral resistance to obedience, and responsibility. Bauman's observations are unsettling because they are true, the greatest danger is not that just we will be harmed, but that given the right pressures we will be the ones doing the harm.

The Milgram experiment is a brilliant example of how easy it is to manipulate others into actions, and explains many patterns that we’ve seen throughout history. While there are differences between the intensity of the experiment and different genocides, there were many similar patterns found. The immediate denial of any wrongdoing, the attempts to rewrite history, and the shift of blame onto another party can be found in both tragic events in history and this experiment. The Milgram experiment helps to highlight the areas where we as humans are naturally flawed. I found the experiment to be very interesting, and I think that it shows that anybody has the potential to hurt others, under certain circumstances. Two of the men in the video were very polite, and showed a lot of respect to the scientists, yet those men still actively made the decision to hurt someone. While you can argue that it was passive, that they were being forced into continuing the experiment, nobody threatened them with a punishment, and one of the men was successful in his attempt to stop the experiment. I believe that when these men were asking to stop the experiment, they were just looking for guidance, and weren’t actually pushing for the experiment to end. This was demonstrated with the second man in the video, who said many times that he wanted to stop the experiment, yet even after the “learner” stopped responding, he continued on when the scientist pushed him on. This man was also told that he would not be held responsible for his actions, which we learned yesterday is a common reason why men like this one continue taking harmful orders and continue to hurt others. This mirrors the claims that were made by many members of the Nazi regime. In Joshua Barajas’ essay, he explained how many officers claimed that they were “forced to serve as mere instruments” for Hitler, and claimed that they were “just following orders”, which was an attempt to shift the blame off of them. This experiment clearly shows why regular people get involved in dangerous and harmful groups. When there is a presence of authority in a group, others tend to follow that person and obey their commands. The participants of the experiment followed the orders of the scientist, who to them was more confident and knowledgeable. Because of this view of the scientist, they quickly trusted him, which made it easier for him to manipulate the participants into hurt others. Similarly, the citizens of Germany who struggled after the First World War were quick to trust a seemingly innocent man to lead them back to glory. As they put all of their trust in him, Hitler found it would be easy to manipulate these followers into carrying out his orders. An interesting contrast that I noticed between this experiment and major atrocities in the world is that this experiment wasn’t fueled by hate. While the Germans were told to hate Jews and outsiders, these innocent men weren’t given a reason to hate the learner. So did German soldiers who carried out these atrocities really hate those people that they hurt, or were they just following orders? There is a disconnect that Barajas mentions in his writing, where he explained how people can feel “disconnected from their actions when they comply with orders”, which can explain how genocides still continue to happen. While I do believe that many people who carry out these types of vile actions truly do enjoy seeing others suffer, I also think that most of these people are good in their heart, and this disconnect and the coercion to commit these actions are what push people to do terrible things. I think the only way to prevent these acts of obedience is to show these kinds of experiments and cut out ignorance that some people will have about how easily they can be convinced to hurt others.

Through careful analysis of the Milgram experiments, I think that Milgram explains ordinary people’s participation in violence to a certain extent. In certain situations, people naturally look for an authoritative figure. This helps them find a sense of certainty and command that is easy to obey, regardless of how harmful that action is. The idea that humans are socialized to obey authority and internalize it is known as the obedience theory. One of the many notorious examples of this theory is Adolf Eichmann, the organizer of the holocaust, who wrote that he was “forced to serve as mere instruments” to Hitler’s extremist ideas. Milgram’s experiment showed just how impactful positions in charge can be on a person’s decisiveness and mindset. I do think that the extent to which that person goes to obey that authoritative figure depends on their own accord. In Joshua Barajas’s article, "How Nazi’s Defense of “Just Following Orders” Plays Out In the Mind,” he describes a sense of disconnection from one’s actions when complying with orders given by another person, specifically that of authority. When thinking of Adolf Eichmann, the article emphasizes a reduced sense of responsibility because the action becomes more passive than it is direct. The extent to which Eichmann’s actions go is questionable. I believe that there are outside factors that contribute to just how much a person is willing to obey a position in charge. However, when a person of power is persistent and monotone with the way they command orders, it naturally gives our minds the sense that they know what they’re doing. The rationality of our decisions begin to fog, prioritizing the order in our heads. Eichmann’s decisions to kill millions of innocent lives simply cannot be attributed to the passiveness of Hitler’s orders but the lack of sympathy he held. I think there is a certain line for one to obey orders that lie beyond direct authority. As humans we should be aware and conscious of our actions. I do also think it is difficult to grasp the scope of pressure each individual faces from an authoritative figure. On the other hand, humans are always given a choice whether to commit an action or not. The externalities of our decisions matter just as much as the order given. I personally believe that with the right social conditions and authoritative pressure, anyone can be a perpetrator of violence. On the other hand, I think the lengths to which they execute that violence differentiates from each person. The Milgram experiments showed that most subjects had sympathy but they lacked decisiveness. I always say, “to each their own,” and in reality it is ultimately up to the mental fortitude of the individual that influences their obedience to an authoritative figure. Often we struggle to create a society that values and encourages the traits of people who disobey unethical authority figures. Part of the struggle is the diversity of beliefs in each society. Factors such as individual identity, family traditions, and internalized values prevent that sort of movement. I think on one hand that is what makes society so unique. The individualistic beliefs of each person add a new perspective because not everyone comes from the same background. On the other hand, it only takes a person to create significant influence on others.

The Milgram experiments are a showcase of the natural human tendency to conform to authoritative figures. However it does not justify in any way the mass violence of many figures such as Adolf Eichmann. Humans lose a sense of responsibility when given the opportunity to unintentionally pass the blame onto others. Furthermore, the action of inflicting pain on someone becomes more passive when under the directions of someone else. On the other hand, this idea contradicts the actions of mass violence because of the scale in which those actions were committed.

Being a perpetrator of violence against others is not an inherent trait of people. I do think people can be convinced to commit violent acts if they think they are doing something in the name of good but I do think some with strong moral conscience are exempt from this influence. The Milgram experiment shows how under authority we commit acts against our morals because we feel like we must listen. I think overall respect for authority is over emphasized in our society and we are raised our whole lives having to listen to others; our parents, teachers, bosses, anyone above us. It is not something we know how to break out of or stand up against. So when we are told others did something wrong we believe they are more deserving of what punishment they will receive. The Milgram experiment includes this as the teacher justifies the shocks they are delivering as earned for getting the question wrong. Similarly shown in the Stanford Prison experiment, the guards think the people who are going against the rules are criminals who have done bad things so therefore their punishments are also deserved as they are bad people. So both experiments do show people in power think violence is okay when it feels warranted for the most part due to the fact we are taught to obey authority. One quote I found interesting pertaining to this is from the last article about the Stanford Prison Experiment which is “The lesson of Stanford isn’t that any random human being is capable of descending into sadism and tyranny. It’s that certain institutions and environments demand those behaviors—and, perhaps, can change them.” We aren’t inherently able to commit bad actions however we are born into a society that teaches us we must obey all authority and either you fall into the safety of protection from authority or you are outcast for speaking against bad.

I do think Milgram’s experiment explains why people commit these atrocities but not how our system fails us by forcing us into a position where we must participate. It is not people doing bad things because they think it is okay in that situation but rather higher systems of authority teach us we must obey no matter what. People will do whatever they can justify is the main source of these actions. I think teachers who did not proceed to punish the learner despite the experimenter’s commands have a better sense of self and stronger moral compass. When you possess critical thinking skills you are better at determining safety and when to get involved and argue back. We need to as a society work on bettering ourselves as people, finding our own opinions, and deciding what is right. This doesn’t abolish all violence as some leaders with bad ideals will still exist however in general we prevent more bad if we allow more sense of self. We can not continue to allow ourselves to be controlled so strongly if we want to prevent violence.

There are many people that look at the Holocaust and believe that the perpetrators of the excessive violence were simply evil or sociopathic, but in reality there was far more at play that made those people do what they did. In fact, a lot of it had to do with the historical developments of the early/mid 1900’s, in particular Hitler’s rise to power. Hitler rose to power at a vulnerable time in German history, when the economic state of Germany was in shambles after the first World War. The question that many people have about Hitler’s rise to power is how it even happened in the first place if what he advocated for was so violent and abhorrent? Even some may agree (in retrospect) that Hitler was able to take advantage of the people’s impressionable minds with his skills as an orator, and the fact that he was able to offer the people an opportunity to both reestablish Germanies power and economy. “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, made famous in the post-WWII Nuremberg trials, featured heavily in Eichmann’s court hearings” (Barajas 1). As stated by Barajas in his article, he states that there are ordinary people who are capable of performing horrific acts, and the Nazi’s are not an exception. Although there were probably some sociopathic people who carried out the acts of the Holocaust, the majority of the people were simply “following orders”. Following orders was the main justification for many of the people that contributed to the Holocaust, and they use this form of cognitive dissonance to escape any form of wrongdoing that they are responsible for. This is often an issue that comes with groupthink because of the fact that oftentimes humans have a harder time making the distinction between right and wrong when it comes to the majority and minority. If hundreds of thousands of people supported Hitler, and were loud and voca about how Hitler would have a positive impact on Germany as a whole, then it’s only natural that people who were initially skeptical may be swayed into the majority. Now this doesn’t mean that everybody who supported Hitler, or even carried out these actions were “bad people”, but it does show how groupthink can be dangerous and incite mass violence. Another issue with the Holocaust that relates to the Milgram experiment is the idea that an authority figure can incite violence as well. The Nazi party was brutally oppressive in the sense that when anybody was not in support of the Nazi’s, then they were viewed as acting against the Nazi’s and their beliefs. Even something as miniscule as a photo of you refusing to salute to Hitler could be viewed as grounds for imprisonment or worse. This proved to be true for August Landmesser (and likely many others) as he was imprisoned after he was investigated for having not saluted during a Nazi parade, with their only evidence being this photo. This oppressiveness greatly contributed to the groupthink that influenced so many of the people that contributed to the Holocaust, and anybody who had a differing opinion that could’ve possibly swayed people’s opinions were silenced. Lastly, something like the Stanford prison experiment can give a slight insight as to how people justified their actions during the Holocaust. Jews were persecuted and labeled as less than human, and that was a way in which they could justify the mass slaughter of millions, because they were “inferior”. This was similar to the mistreatment of the “prisoners” in the Stanford prison experiment, as they were simply given a label that theorectically should not change their value as a person, but it still gave the “guards” the idea that they were inferior. In general, I would say that a mixture of psychological factors as well as historical factors were the main drivers of Nazi Germany’s initial rise to power, and the actions committed suring the Holocaust by seemingly normal people were due to fear of an authority figure, groupthink, and dehumanization.

After watching the Milgram experiment video and seeing how it was set up and run, I do think that some people who might be seen as normal do have the potential to inflict violence and pain on others. Most people in the experiment stopped before the fake shocks got too strong, but some people kept going, which was interesting to me. One person they showed seemed to know the shocks were inflicting pain, but kept going and was chuckling at some points. I think the biggest thing that caused him to keep going was the presence of an authoritative figure. The lead psychologist kept saying it would be his fault if something went wrong, and that it was very important that he kept going. Every time the man stopped and questioned what he was doing, the lead psychologist used more pressuring language to get him to continue. After reading the article on the Stanford Prison experiment, my thoughts on whether ordinary people could inflict violence and mental pain on others. The 24 male participants were screened and deemed “normal,” split up into guards and prisoners. They were given loose guidelines, and very quickly they started to be very violent and tortured the prisoners physically and mentally. It was interesting to me that they weren’t given directions to be violent, but immediately started to do horrible things to the prisoners, and I wondered why these ordinary people started to do that. In the Stanford Prison Experiment article, it stated, “To many, the Stanford experiment underscored those findings, revealing the ease with which regular people, if given too much power, could transform into ruthless oppressors…. It’s said to show that, with a little nudge, we could all become tyrants”(Korrinkova 1). Although there are some doubts about how it was run, I do think it shows that ordinary people are capable of doing horrible things, especially because they weren’t directly told to hurt people, like the Milgram experiment. Besides the presence of an authoritative figure, I think some people, like David Cash, are sociopaths and don’t feel remorse for what they do, and that can drive them to inflict suffering and pain on others. I also think some people believe they won’t be blindly led by an authority figure to do things they normally wouldn’t do, but this clearly isn’t the case, as shown by the Milgram experiments. I found this quote from How the Nazi’s Defense of “Just Following Orders interesting. Haggard’s team found that brain activity in response to this tone is indeed dampened when being coerced. Haggard’s team also used a questionnaire in the second experiment to get explicit judgments from the volunteers, who explained they felt less responsible when they acted under orders”(Barajas 3). This shows that our brain activity isn’t as strong, and we aren’t thinking as clearly when being forced, which shows why some people act the way they do when being coerced into doing something by an authority figure. In conclusion, after reading these two articles and watching the video, I think that people are more likely to do something bad if they are being pressured by a person in power.

I truly believe that everyone has the potential to become a perpetrator of violence against others. As much as we believe we wouldn’t do it, we have never been in the position where we have all the power and with no consequences. From the Milgram experiment you can see how even though some people are hesitant, ultimately in the end they end up following through with their orders. This is mainly for the reason that they are unsure and will follow orders from someone with higher authority, as long as they sound like they know what they’re saying. I believe this connects all the way back to the Holocaust where people are “just taking orders” since they’re actions will have no effect on their own life. I think we underestimate how we would feel given all that power, which is why some people are willing to take it to an extreme level. In the article I read about the Milgram experiment titled, A Matter of Obedience, an interesting quote on perpetrators in the Holocaust states, “While many acted in response to orders from authority figures, some perpetrators chose to go beyond the orders they were given. Others chose to act out of their own hatred for their own material gain without being asked to do so (page 4).” What I think of this is that when given this great power, we no longer feel any remorse for the innocent people as we can just do whatever we want with no consequences. Like I mentioned before, if we were actually in their shoes, maybe we would have done the same thing. Going back to the Milgram experiment, we see how some people went on with the shocks regarding how they thought the other person's health was. Although some were hesitant to move on, when the instructor said “you are required to continue” or “I will take full responsibility,” the person immediately goes back to the experiment because his actions no longer affect him and only the person on the other side. There is another quote I found interesting in the text I read that says, “When Milgram described this experiment to a group of 39 psychiatrists, the psychiatrists predicted that one participant in 1,000 would continue until he or she delivered the most severe shock, 450 volts. In reality, 62.5% of participants did (page 2).” This goes back to putting yourself in other people's shoes where these psychiatrists thought that people would react a certain way just because it is the right thing to do. We may think we would act differently until we are actually in that situation with all that power. We are so easily controlled into believing someone as long as they sound smart. This is why I don’t respect people who basically worship celebrities or people of power because they believe everything they say. That's our biggest problem is we see Donald Trump or Kamala Harris and we go with everything one of them says. All they promote is us turning on each other so they can benefit themselves. There's no problem in supporting someone because you agree with a lot of what they say. It is a problem however to agree with everything they say. That is impossible as we are all different as human beings.

The only real personality trait that can make people disobey the words of the experimenter in this experiment, and more broadly, the personality traits that allows people to disobey negative authority is confidence and the ability to think for oneself. When people don’t feel confident in themselves, they will defer to someone who they think does have this self-confidence. After all, all good leaders have to have a certain amount of charisma, which comes from confidence, or else people would never follow them. In our current society, people often feel like cogs in a machine, working hard, long hours for little perceived benefit. When someone, then, comes along and says they have all the answers to making their lives feel worth living again, it’s no wonder why so many people get swept up. I don’t have a clear-cut solution to this problem, but there has to be a way that the current system of labor can work while allowing people to keep their spirits, for lack of a better term. The other personality trait, the ability to think for oneself and question authority, has a much simpler solution: school. Right now, lower education is very formulaic: follow the agenda on the board, do the reading, take notes, remember to study for the standardized test. There’s very little time to question the narrative the textbooks are teaching, and often, dissent is punished. This isn’t how it should be. People should feel comfortable disagreeing with the narrative presented in class. My APUSH teacher last year did a good job at this; he presented both the College Board’s view of history, his own interpretation, and encouraged us to disagree with both and come to our own conclusions. Of course, this doesn't work with classes like math that are based on objective reality, but for classes like English and History, where things are malleable and up to interpretation (within reason, of course), we should be encouraged to question the narrative we are being presented with. This allows us to carry a healthy skepticism within the rest of our day-to-day lives when we’re older, something essential to being an informed citizen. Otherwise, we’d just be blindly following the orders we are given without giving it any real thought, just like some of those participants in the Milgram experiment, and the many, many people who have been complacent in mass government violence and genocide throughout history.

I think Milgram's experiments do explain, to a large extent, ordinary people's active participation in violence and mass atrocities. Ordinary people have a tendency to believe that authority figures have more knowledge than they do. Like, who knows more about the political relations between the United States and China right now, me or the American ambassadors who actually go talk to Chinese officials? Because of this, we tend to follow orders authority figures give because we'll look stupid if we're wrong and we mess something up because we acted without having all the knowledge. Additionally, in the article about the Stanford Prison Experiment, they mention that they redid the experiment years later without the expectation of brutality from the guards. In this redo, the prisoners actually had more power than the guards and successfully rebelled. The conclusion the author takes away from this is that "[a]ll else being equal, we act as we think we’re expected to act—especially if that expectation comes from above."

I don't think we blindly follow authority. I think we have our reasons. Feeling less educated is definitely one. I think people also think about themselves. That was a major motivation during the Holocaust: was it really worth becoming a political enemy and most likely getting killed yourself to help someone else? Additionally, there's that sense of social conformity theory. Similarly to assuming authority figures know more than we do, we tend to assume the group does, too. And we're scared to ask questions because we don't want to look stupid and be ostracized for it. If everyone in your community normalizes violence, you'll probably go along with it because you feel like you're missing something that justifies the violence. And, if you don't do anything, is it really your fault? I think it is, because you should at least ask for a reason before going along with anything you don't understand.

Finally, I think we can attempt to create societies that value and encourage the traits of people who disobey unethical authority figures. We need to teach kids to question everything and feel brave enough to be different. I think we're headed there by "celebrating our differences" in the media, but we also need to emphasize that it is safe to have and share opinions, and give ourselves time to think about things, rather than trying to drown everything bad by doomscrolling or bingeing TV because we don't want to have to remember how doomed we feel.

In a prison, obviously, the prisoners are subordinates to the guards. But the BBC's prison experiment showed that, by setting different precedents, the prisoners were able to take power. By changing the expectations we set for people, we can completely change the environment and actions of our society and the people in it. This is dangerous, of course, because we don't want actual prisoners taking over their prisons or anything like that. But we should treat them more humanely, and act like everyone has the ability to be good and redeem themself, no matter what they've done.

There is that question of inherence. What fundamental attributes come inherently natural to us as a species? Is there a string of moral goodness in us all? Are we inherently good or bad? With that comes a discussion of how do we characterize good and evil? Realistically, morals come as a function of the circumstances that surround them. That is to say, in different cultures in different crevices of the world, there are different sentiments as to what is perceived as morally permissible and what isn’t. Scroll back in our country’s history some odd 300 years and examine the Calvinist settling colonies. These Congregationalists have their own the spine of morality rests on religious authority. I would like to invoke, before any discussion of the Milgram experiments, the Salem Witch trials. That hysteria could penetrate a community so fully that these virtuous followers of god would condemn and execute young women and children as young as four years old casts a question of what could turn humans so evil. What is that fundamental mechanism that dictates our decisions? Is there some inherent moral string within us that runs through our spines? Are we, then, good or evil? If we are good, then why do we so readily hurt people? If we are evil, then what explains our good intentions to build our current modern society? I think that these questions have permeated our psyche for long -- long enough to disturb psychologists like Stanley Milgram.

No doubt, Stanley Milgram was flawed. One could attribute it to his times, wherein psychological and scientific standards were not established. The American Psychological Association’s ethical standards were published just seven years before Milgram began conducting his experiments. But as Cari Romm mentions in her 2015 Atlantic article, Rethinking one of Psychology’s ,most infamous experiments, some of the methods of his experimentation were not just flawed, but plain wrong. She quotes Arthur Miller (!) of Miami University: “‘Critics of Milgram seem to want to—and do—find material in these archives that makes Milgram look bad or unethical or, in some cases, a liar.’” The conditions of the study were not standard among all groups; some participants received unwarranted heckling from the conductors. There was increased pressure on the conscience of many of these innocent laymen that incited stress and trauma. Milgram ultimately came to the thesis that often a large majority of people will continue to incite pain on others to follow the order of the a superior. The one thing that I extracted and find particularly significant -- and I hope others do too, is some of the ideological natures in this study. Namely, that these laymen had no guaranteed allegiance to the study conductors; they had no clear incentive to participate in the study other than the four dollars (adjusted for inflation 47.66 today), although money was clearly beyond the motive. There was this insistence that you can see in films of the trials wherein the conductors always invoked an appeal to authority -- that the “experiment requires that you continue” being a mantra repeated nearly religiously. This word choice, I think, is not only intentional, but skews the study in some way, because although the participants seem to blindly follow this feigned leader figure, it is not because they blindly follow like sheep, nor because they believe it is truly necessary. Rather, they believe that there is some superior mechanism that they are not aware of, in this case, some of the most intelligent scientists of Yale University, that they must accord to. Then, I conclude, compliance is not necessarily dictated by a strong leader figure, but rather by an appeal to an authority that they perceive has a greater judgement than them. In the modern world, certainly, these metaphysical authorities could be government, religion, or in this case, the mystique of those more famous, more intelligent, more capable than them.

I do believe that everyone does have the potential to become a perpetrator of violence against others. As much as we want to believe that this isn’t true, it very much can be. Even if you witness an act of violence and do nothing about it until after the fact, you are still a perpetrator of violence against others. Invented by Stanley Milgram in the 1960’s, the Milgram experiment showed a group of “teachers” and “learners” in a room. The “teachers were supposed to dangerously shock the “learners” if their answers were incorrect. In the end the “learners” started to be tested on whether they would help someone in need, or stay in the room when the “teacher” said so. Most of the “learners” listened to the “teachers” and ignored the person “in need”, but others stood for their morals and didn’t continue the experiment until they knew the other person was okay. What the Milgram experiments suggest is that people usually have the tendency to obey higher placed people. They do this because they believe that since certain people have a sense of authority that those people are always in the right, because they are smarter.

In The Matter Of Obedience(Facing History and Ourselves) it is described that , “It is difficult to harm a person we touch. It is somewhat easier to afflict pain upon a person we only see at a distance. It is still easier in the case of a person we only hear. It is quite easy to be cruel towards a person we neither see nor hear(3).” As we see this can be very true, but in the Milgram experiment it is demonstrated that emotional distance is also a fairly important reason for becoming a perpetrator against violence. In the video that we watched earlier in class, which was the real experiment, we witnessed that many started to feel guilty and responsible for anything that would happen to the person next door, because of them doing nothing to help them or stop the experiment. As we seen, one of the “learners” in the end of the experiment started to say that the “teacher” made then not help, but in reality all the “teacher” need was tell them they needed to continue and experiment, and that the “teacher” themselves would be the one responsible for anything that happened to someone. I believe that this statement from the “teacher” made the “leaner” feel less accountable for the person next door, and continued their experiment.

A large part of what makes humans susceptible to becoming the perpetrators of violence against others is heavily influenced by whether they are going to be responsible for it. If human actions don't have consequences, they are more likely to act immorally because they will not be held accountable for it by society. It is also a matter of clearing their conscience of any guilt they would have if they were held responsible for said violence. Yes, I think that the Milligram experiment does display a good representation of ordinary people's active participation in mass violence because it shows that with the right coercion and mental manipulation, anyone can inflict pain on any other person. After all, they feel that it is necessary. A lot of these mass genocides were led by dictators, saying that these mass casualties were required to achieve a bigger goal. People can be blindsided by this larger goal, failing to recognize its impact on others. The circumstances people are put under also determine how willing they are to inflict pain on other people. As Maria Korrinkova puts it in her article titled “The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment,” she states, “ Even as it suggests that ordinary people harbor ugly potentialities, it also testifies to the way our circumstances shape our behavior.” In these experiments, you are given two options: being the one who inflicts pain or the one who experiences the pain, and any human would instinctively choose to be the one who inflicts pain out of survival. This also reveals humans' true nature and how greed can distort our perspective on other matters. It's easy for people to inflict pain when put in this circumstance because they would rather do that than be the one who is getting hurt. Another significant part of these experiments that reflects real-life genocides is that these perpetrators of violence are given a choice to act upon it against people they don't know. The experimental results would differ if it involved harming people they knew and cared about. It’s harder for humans to feel remorse for people whom they have no connection to. This ties back to the idea that humans are more willing to inflict violence if there are no consequences for it. Inflicting pain or violence on people you are familiar with now interferes with your ability to move forward in life, knowing you have the capability of hurting the people you know. The “experimenter" in the Milgram experiment had a monotone voice, suggesting that everything was going according to plan despite the learner yelling in agony. This tells us that the “teacher” is willing to go by anything the authority says as long as they are confident in their “knowledge”. With the right tone and reasoning, coercion can be much easier, especially when it is inflicted upon people with lower educational backgrounds.