learntoquestion ltq discussions

I believe that not everyone is capable of being violent towards others. This could be because of people's ability to have and keep a strong conscience or to just be able to fight other peoples requests of what to do. In the Milgram experiment, it proved that people are in fact able to inflict pain on others through others commands. When peer pressured enough, even though they may not want to or “feel bad”, people will do what the commander wants them to do even though they feel more humanized when hearing what the perpetrator says. So to be able to actually want to put pain on others, people need to be convinced that the person that they are hurting deserves it and is in fact a bad person. If there was a normal sumerian on the street and someone told you to hurt them, most people wouldn’t as they have no reason to inflict pain on a person when there is no reason to do so. This example can also be classified as the Good Sumerian Law. Experiments such as the Milgram experiment could definitely play a role in demonstrating how mass genocides play out. The idea of this experiment is to show the reality of peer pressure and the fact that if a person is in a big group and the group is doing something, almost every time the person will follow the group's lead, even if they know it's bad. Besides blind following of authority people inflict pain on others for a lot of different reasons. One reason could be because they have been told the person they need to hurt has done something wrong so they deserve the pain. Because of this the person hurting doesn’t feel as much remorse as they believe that this is the right thing to do. By the laws of human nature, people are meant to hurt other people to survive. With this though, over time and as people evolved, they have started to feel remorse towards others and since it is not needed to kill anymore to survive, people have gained a conscience making them feel guilty when hurting others. In the article “How the Nazi’s Defense of “Just Following Orders” Plays Out in the Mind (Joshua Barajas, 2016)” a quote stated says ““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,” he said.” This quote is stated at the end and I feel it has a very deep meaning to it. It is saying that people who are told to do something under free will, and obey to it, they feel as though if something wrong happens they will need to take full responsibility, this is also connected to the experiment when one of the men was worried that if the person on the other side possibly had a heart attack he would have to take full responsibility for it.

There’s also the question of why some people refused to go along in the Milgram study. Traits like empathy and a strong sense of responsibility led some teachers to stop shocking the learner even when pressured. Societies can try to build on those traits by teaching people to question authority and recognize when something is wrong. There’s also a risk in that, because if people always feel free to disobey, rules and laws might lose power. The hard part is finding a balance between encouraging independent moral choices and still maintaining order.

Originally posted by asky on September 20, 2025 21:46

Though the Milgram experiment has been rendered famous for its questions raised concerning human nature, contemporary critics have since asserted that its methodology is flawed such that its findings should be re-evaluated or devalued—perhaps even both to some extent. Still, most agree that to discard its results entirely would be utterly negligent—“that even with methodological holes and moral lapses, the basic finding of Milgram’s work, the rate of obedience, still holds up,” (Romm) even if the extent to which is difficult to quantify. If Milgram’s findings are to be scavenged for even a mite truth, however, perhaps they would be helpful in answering a tangential question concerning society: can we, or should we, attempt to create societies that value and encourage the traits of people who disobey unethical authority figures?

To answer this, we first must delineate what “traits of people who disobey unethical authority figures” are—and perhaps before then: what does it mean to disobey authority? I would posit that to disobey authority is to act in a way that succeeds in contradicting what that authority has asked of you. Note that disobedience here does require intent: it does not constitute disobedience if one performs an action that falls short of an authority’s expectations (even if that authority insists it was disobedience), so long as one truly sought to carry out an authority’s orders. We call that failure as opposed to insubordination. Therefore, it follows that “traits of people who disobey … authority figures” will first recognize an authority before intentionally defying it, as opposed to defying any and all requests by others. Therefore, it follows that “traits of people who disobey unethical authority figures” will first evaluate an authority as unethical before intentionally defying it, as opposed to defaulting to defiance for any given authority.

So what are these “traits?” As a baseline, these traits are not genetic, and can rather be learned and honed by individuals across all cultures and societies. Sociology PhD candidate Matthew Hollander once submitted that “the ability to disobey toxic orders … 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” (Romm). Under the requisites that these “traits” encompass the ability to recognize unethical authorities, defy said authorities, and be taught and learned, some phrases for these “traits” come to mind: subscribing to a counterculture; upholding virtue/ethics; possessing a strong sense of justice. These traits naturally recognize unethical authority, as their historical existence is directly linked to that of unethical behavior in the world: even intuitively, if unethical authorities did not exist, for instance, hardly anyone would need to possess a ‘strong sense of justice’ (characterized by notions of fair punishment, recompense, and salvation) in its modern sense, thus hardly anyone would possess it at all. Definitionally, these traits were born of moral vacuums in the world—the new question is: can we attempt to create societies that encourage them?

My immediate, gut reaction is ‘yes.’ In fact, I believe that many societies—including our own—already engage in this to an extent. Even written into the old notion of ‘history repeating itself’ is the implied takeaway that we should avoid such pitfalls at all costs; even written into the U.S. Declaration of Independence are clauses that grant citizens a right to rebel against an unjust government. Indeed, in many senses, our society already encourages those traits that are able to recognize and dismantle abusive authorities, though a question lingers: is there danger in that as well?

While obviously, a needlessly defiant state is intuitively prone to collapse, I would argue that—no—so long as there exist objective-enough means by which people are able to agree upon the extent to which an authority is unjust, there is very little reason for concern in teaching the “traits of people people who disobey.”

The most compelling idea in your post is that people can actually learn the traits needed to resist unethical authority. I agree with that because it makes disobedience feel less rare and more like a skill anyone could practice. I also found it interesting how you used the quote about how “the ability to disobey toxic orders … is a skill that can be taught like any other,” as it shows that resistance isn’t just natural, but something that societies can encourage.

Your post also connects to others I’ve read that talk about the balance between following rules and questioning them. I feel pretty similar to you, since I also think we should promote things like empathy and courage, so people don’t just go along with authority. Where I’m a little different is that I think there’s more danger than you said, since people don’t always agree on what counts as “unethical.” One suggestion I’d give is to make your points a little simpler and more direct, since sometimes the long explanations make it harder to see your main idea right away. Overall, though, your argument was really strong and clear.

Experiments like Milgram’s actually explain ordinary people’s active participation in violence, mass atrocities and genocide because for example one of the teachers in the experiment kept going over and over again even after the student stopped responding his questions yet the teacher continued and when he hesisted to continue but when he was told that he would not be responsible for the student if something were to happen the teacher continued till the experiment ended. In the article “How Nazi's Defense of ‘Just Following Orders’ Plays Out in the Mind” Joshua Barajas states that “people actually feel disconnected from their actions when they comply with orders, even though they are the ones committing the act.” When the teacher was told that he would not be responsible for the student if something were to happen to the student, the teacher continued without hesitation. When the experiment was finished the teacher was asked some question he was asked why he did he continue to shock him after the student stopped responding the teachers response was that he was told to continue this where the quotation I added comes into play when the teacher was relieved from any responsibility he continued without any issue hence the teacher was disconnected from his actions and followed the orders to continue the experiment.

The factors that come into play are the tone and the words the person that is managing the experiment says for example when the teacher began to hesitate the person running the experiment told him that it is crucial for the experiment for him to continue in a normal tone when the teacher hesitated again the person running the experiment used a commanding tone and said the same thing but with the inclusion of the words that the teacher would not be responsible for the student if something were to happen to him the teacher stopped hesitating and continued with the experiment.Another thing that contributes to the blind following of authority is the fact that they could not see the person they were inflicting pain on, they could hear them yes but not see them and their reaction when they receive the electric shocks. This made me think about how Nazi officers stood outside and turned on the gas chambers that killed jews inside. How they could have felt some type of remorse against them but did not do anything about it because they were following orders, they could not see the faces of the children and the people they killed, and how they felt disconnected from their actions because they were not going to be responsible for the jews that they were killing. The Milgram experiments suggests that when humans are disconnected from their actions they are capable to do almost anything when they know that there are no consequences for their actions which reminded me of the movie The Purge where people are allowed to do whatever they wanted including murder and there are no consequences for it so everyone does whatever they want without a second thought.

Originally posted by igtvycrgfghyjjjh on September 23, 2025 20:25

Anyone, theoretically, does possess the potential to become a perpetrator of violence towards others, but the presence of certain types of leaders within a society and the dehumanization of certain people are the driving forces behind the creation of masses who would be willing to commit harm. The results of the Milligram experiment surprised me in that I would not have expected as many participants to continue causing “harm” to the learner just because a figure of authority permitted them to. It made me reflect on what I might do if I were in an experiment, or even a real life situation similar to this one. Thinking about certain events in history where a powerful leader caused a phenomenon like the results of the Milgram experiment to occur, I noticed there is a level of insistence in justifying morally wrong actions that leaders like Hitler, or even the moderators of the Milgram experiment, expressed. I wonder if this blind and unwavering confidence is what makes a leader able to control the actions of others for the worst reasons.

Because there were some teachers in the Milgram experiment who refused to continue “shocking” the learners, I know that not every member of society would become a perpetrator of violence against others, even if everyone does possess the ability. However, “when people act ‘under orders,’ they seem to experience less agency over their actions and outcomes than when they choose for themselves,” according to Joshua Barajas in his article, “How Nazi's Defense of ‘Just Following Orders’ Plays Out in the Mind.” This feeling of lack of responsibility must be the root cause for some to commit harm against others, even though they are the one actively inflicting pain or damage to another individual.

I also think that dehumanization or physical distance from those suffering also aids normal people in committing acts of violence towards others. In the Milgram experiment, the learners were placed in a separate room from the teachers, who “shocked” them with electricity. However, the averages of teachers that continued harming learners decreased when the learners were placed in the very same room. When in the same room, teachers witnessed learners as whole humans in front of them, instead of just a being behind a wall. According to Facing History’s article “A Matter of Obedience,” It is quite easy to be cruel towards a person we neither see nor hear.” The steps taken to dehumanize the learner in the Milgram experiment can also be seen in historical genocides like the Holocaust, where concentration camps were unknown to the public and Jewish people were called names to make them seem less human.

Both dehumanization and charismatic or insistent leaders were present in the Milgram experiment, and they maximized the number of teachers complying with hurting learners. For these reasons, it can be concluded that any member of any functional society does possess the ability to become a perpetrator of violence against other people or groups, but it takes certain factors to push them over the edge and create harm.

I thought that the most compelling part of your argument was noting the insistence in which charismatic leaders, such as the experimenters in the Milgram experiment or even mass genocide leaders such as Adolf Hitler, expressed while giving orders to their subordinates. This “blind and unwavering confidence” which you say the leaders express is, to me, definitely a factor which contributes to mass obedience. It’s interesting to consider obedience from the perspective of why the leader’s orders are so effective — not just why the masses blindly follow them. I also agree with your point of dehumanization being an effective factor in blind obedience. I noticed this point in a couple of other posts, especially when mentioning the Holocaust. Your point about how everyone in society has the innate capability of hurting innocent people was interesting, especially when you add that not everyone will. You back this up using the fact that some people in the Milgram experiment refused to give full shocks to the “learners”. This point causes me to wonder if these same people would still continue disobeying authority if they were in a genocidal situation.
Similarly, I think one way that you could strengthen your argument is by adding some real-world precedents to when you state that you “know that not every member of society would be a perpetrator of violence”. Although on the outside this statement seems true, the confidence which you state it with, to me, warrants some more evidence besides just the results of the Milgram experiment, which was held in a very controlled environment. Otherwise, your post is very concise and opinionated, while also relying on evidence to answer the provided questions. Nice job!

Originally posted by asky on September 20, 2025 21:46

Though the Milgram experiment has been rendered famous for its questions raised concerning human nature, contemporary critics have since asserted that its methodology is flawed such that its findings should be re-evaluated or devalued—perhaps even both to some extent. Still, most agree that to discard its results entirely would be utterly negligent—“that even with methodological holes and moral lapses, the basic finding of Milgram’s work, the rate of obedience, still holds up,” (Romm) even if the extent to which is difficult to quantify. If Milgram’s findings are to be scavenged for even a mite truth, however, perhaps they would be helpful in answering a tangential question concerning society: can we, or should we, attempt to create societies that value and encourage the traits of people who disobey unethical authority figures?

To answer this, we first must delineate what “traits of people who disobey unethical authority figures” are—and perhaps before then: what does it mean to disobey authority? I would posit that to disobey authority is to act in a way that succeeds in contradicting what that authority has asked of you. Note that disobedience here does require intent: it does not constitute disobedience if one performs an action that falls short of an authority’s expectations (even if that authority insists it was disobedience), so long as one truly sought to carry out an authority’s orders. We call that failure as opposed to insubordination. Therefore, it follows that “traits of people who disobey … authority figures” will first recognize an authority before intentionally defying it, as opposed to defying any and all requests by others. Therefore, it follows that “traits of people who disobey unethical authority figures” will first evaluate an authority as unethical before intentionally defying it, as opposed to defaulting to defiance for any given authority.

So what are these “traits?” As a baseline, these traits are not genetic, and can rather be learned and honed by individuals across all cultures and societies. Sociology PhD candidate Matthew Hollander once submitted that “the ability to disobey toxic orders … 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” (Romm). Under the requisites that these “traits” encompass the ability to recognize unethical authorities, defy said authorities, and be taught and learned, some phrases for these “traits” come to mind: subscribing to a counterculture; upholding virtue/ethics; possessing a strong sense of justice. These traits naturally recognize unethical authority, as their historical existence is directly linked to that of unethical behavior in the world: even intuitively, if unethical authorities did not exist, for instance, hardly anyone would need to possess a ‘strong sense of justice’ (characterized by notions of fair punishment, recompense, and salvation) in its modern sense, thus hardly anyone would possess it at all. Definitionally, these traits were born of moral vacuums in the world—the new question is: can we attempt to create societies that encourage them?

My immediate, gut reaction is ‘yes.’ In fact, I believe that many societies—including our own—already engage in this to an extent. Even written into the old notion of ‘history repeating itself’ is the implied takeaway that we should avoid such pitfalls at all costs; even written into the U.S. Declaration of Independence are clauses that grant citizens a right to rebel against an unjust government. Indeed, in many senses, our society already encourages those traits that are able to recognize and dismantle abusive authorities, though a question lingers: is there danger in that as well?

While obviously, a needlessly defiant state is intuitively prone to collapse, I would argue that—no—so long as there exist objective-enough means by which people are able to agree upon the extent to which an authority is unjust, there is very little reason for concern in teaching the “traits of people people who disobey.”

I agree with the idea that there would be no need for any personalities who defy authority, if the authority was never unjust in the first place. People would feel no need for their own personal sense of justice if they thought that there was no injustice present in society. I do also think that it is unrealistic to strive for a society where all people agree and have the same notions of justice because that is not human nature. It is almost unfathomable to think that every single person will agree on all of their own ideas and morals. All of the individuality in the world would be lost if everyone had no sense of justice.

I also agree that our society contains aspects of people moving toward a society where rebellion against an unjust government is encouraged. I do disagree with the fact that fully encouraging movement against unjust government has no danger at all. People who think that they are correct and that no one should oppose them, can lead to their own egos and ideas being inflated to a dangerous level. I do, however, agree that within safe bounds and logical reasons, defying unjust authority is absolutely crucial to building a society full of differing opinions and ideas.

Originally posted by Pinkie Pie on September 23, 2025 18:17

I think everyone does have the potential to become a perpetrator of violence. The Milgram experiments show how quickly ordinary people can disconnect from their own actions when they’re following authority. The article explains that “acting under orders caused participants to perceive a distance from outcomes that they themselves caused.” That feeling of distance makes it easier for people to hurt others without thinking about it since it rids them of responsibility. If people stop feeling like their actions are truly their own, then violence can start to feel less like a choice and more like something they were pushed into, which is dangerous.

At the same time, I don’t think Milgram’s experiments fully explain why people take part in mass atrocities like genocide. Obedience is only part of it. Other factors like fear, peer pressure, and even personal beliefs play a big role. In history, many people didn’t just follow orders they believed in harmful ideologies or saw benefits in staying loyal to authority. For example movements like MAGA show how group loyalty and shared beliefs push people to act in irrational ways. That shows how violence isn’t just about authority, it’s also about social, political, and personal motives that push people to act in ways they normally wouldn’t.

There’s also the question of why some people refused to go along in the Milgram study. Traits like empathy and a strong sense of responsibility led some teachers to stop shocking the learner even when pressured. Societies can try to build on those traits by teaching people to question authority and recognize when something is wrong. There’s also a risk in that, because if people always feel free to disobey, rules and laws might lose power. The hard part is finding a balance between encouraging independent moral choices and still maintaining order.

Overall I really agree with this response as it aligns with what I said in mine, that oftentimes people feel more comfortable committing harmful acts if they are physically separated from the impact. It creates a separation and makes it easier to deny responsibility. I also agree with the point about how The Milgram Experiment does not take into account all the possible factors and how that can not show the whole story. This was something I went into more detail about as it really described the need for a broader experiment and understanding to even compare to the real life impact that mass movements have. Additionally, the idea of teaching society to question authority and grow a stronger sense of self is a great way to create change and stop this conformity from happening again. The lack of education can be detrimental to a person's understanding of right and wrong and must be corrected to prohibit history from repeating itself. Finally, I do think that it is important to maintain some kind of order along with breaking free from a group mindset, but any kind of forced conformity is on the line of becoming control and I highly agree with the point of strengthening the individual. It's not that I believe the world should be completely free to create our own rules and to debate in every discussion, but these thoughts should definitely be a regular occurrence and spaces should be opened for this kind of thinking.

Originally posted by StevenAdrianCharles93 on September 23, 2025 10:33

I think that Milgram’s experiment does truly explain part of why people participate in the horrific things that they end up participating in. The fact that the experiment ended that way shows that it is just part of human nature to get influenced in that way. I think that when you don’t exactly know what you are doing to somebody, you are way less likely to stop doing it, and I think that shows in the video. I feel like it is that part of us that just doesn’t want to deal with any responsibility or punishment for doing the wrong thing. We willingly trust things that we have been told that come from authority without stopping to think about what we are truly doing. In other countries, I have heard about ways they have dealt with this problem. It is something important that I feel people aren’t learning about, and is something that I believe should be taught and learned at a young enough age that you bring stronger morals and ideals with you through life. I learned from a German friend of a family member that in Germany, they trick college students with an assignment where they calculate for months and months on how to make a train work faster and better, calculating speed and cost in order to make the train make quicker stops. At the end of the experiment after they had made the train go as fast as possible, the professor asked them if any of them thought to question where the train was going and why. None of them did, and the professor tells them that they were recreating a train to a Nazi concentration camp. The person who I learned this from told me that this lesson has stuck with them for the rest of their life, and taught them to always question authority and their motives. That stuck with me because I feel like we need something like that in America. We need people to learn the moral consequences that can come from blind trust. I found it interesting that in the experiment, the people who were continuing with the shocks still seemed to feel bad.

I think that that relates to the article I read about the Nazi defense of just following orders. It talks about how Nazi’s claimed that they were just follow orders. That brings up an interesting point about how bad does the thing you are doing have to be before you stop and do something about it. I think the train lesson and the experiment can show that in some cases these people aren’t necessarily bad. They feel as if they want to do the right thing. They are just being heavily pressured to do the wrong thing. That’s why I think it is important to teach this because we should understand when and when not to trust authority, and we should understand when we should do the right thing that our heart is telling us to do.

We get so trapped up in potential poor outcomes for ourselves that we don’t always bother to think about poor outcomes for other people based on our actions. I think if you scale up the authority and the circumstance, a lot of people could definitely fall into the trap of becoming a perpetrator for violence and harm.

Though I find your cited experiment (concerning trains) to be thought-provoking in its own right, I cannot help but push back against the notion that it well-illustrates the implications set forth by the original Milgram experiment (that people are prone to obey the directives of authority figures to evil ends). While I agree that at a certain level of abstraction, both experiements highlight a human tendency to "blindly" obey directions, the original Milgram experiment was not only conducted in a more clinical setting, but also openly championed an express aim of attaining empirical results (even if the true nature of those sought results was not truly disclosed to participants until later on). These two factors differentiate the results of the Milgram experiment from those observed in the students; essentially, considering setting and transparency, whereas the engineering students could not have known that their ideas would be harnessed for 'evil,' Milgram's participants—at least to some extent—could witness their actions culminate into harm in real time.

I quite agree that people are prone to manipulation, and so may fall victim to becoming instruments of greater harm. I also agree that resisting immoral authortities is a skill that can and should be taught. I also agree with your diction that "people aren't necessarily bad"—for as important as it is to recognize our capacity for offense, the notion that "we are inherently evil" should not consume our waking moments. That sort of despair, I believe, is unproductive at best and dangerous at worst.

Originally posted by user9348665472 on September 23, 2025 17:04

I believe that not everyone is capable of being violent towards others. This could be because of people's ability to have and keep a strong conscience or to just be able to fight other peoples requests of what to do. In the Milgram experiment, it proved that people are in fact able to inflict pain on others through others commands. When peer pressured enough, even though they may not want to or “feel bad”, people will do what the commander wants them to do even though they feel more humanized when hearing what the perpetrator says. So to be able to actually want to put pain on others, people need to be convinced that the person that they are hurting deserves it and is in fact a bad person. If there was a normal sumerian on the street and someone told you to hurt them, most people wouldn’t as they have no reason to inflict pain on a person when there is no reason to do so. This example can also be classified as the Good Sumerian Law. Experiments such as the Milgram experiment could definitely play a role in demonstrating how mass genocides play out. The idea of this experiment is to show the reality of peer pressure and the fact that if a person is in a big group and the group is doing something, almost every time the person will follow the group's lead, even if they know it's bad. Besides blind following of authority people inflict pain on others for a lot of different reasons. One reason could be because they have been told the person they need to hurt has done something wrong so they deserve the pain. Because of this the person hurting doesn’t feel as much remorse as they believe that this is the right thing to do. By the laws of human nature, people are meant to hurt other people to survive. With this though, over time and as people evolved, they have started to feel remorse towards others and since it is not needed to kill anymore to survive, people have gained a conscience making them feel guilty when hurting others. In the article “How the Nazi’s Defense of “Just Following Orders” Plays Out in the Mind (Joshua Barajas, 2016)” a quote stated says ““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,” he said.” This quote is stated at the end and I feel it has a very deep meaning to it. It is saying that people who are told to do something under free will, and obey to it, they feel as though if something wrong happens they will need to take full responsibility, this is also connected to the experiment when one of the men was worried that if the person on the other side possibly had a heart attack he would have to take full responsibility for it.

I personally believe that not every single individual is capable, or has it in them, to be violent toward others, no matter how wronged they were. Some people have a strong conscience of their own actions and know how their actions will affect others, which allows them to resist commands from authority figures even when under pressure. The Milgram experiment shows how individuals will hurt others when they are ordered to do so, even if it's against their best judgment. This shows how an authority figure can and will peer-pressure someone to ignore their morals, which helps to explain why genocides and mass movements occur. Why will people follow the lead of an authority figure even if it goes against their own judgment or conscience?

The most compelling idea in my peer’s post was that people often need to believe their target “deserves” the pain to justify violence. I 100% agree with the statement; it highlights how even ordinary people will commit violence and hurt others when they are convinced to do so, especially if what they are doing is justified, because then they can go home and not feel guilty about what they just did. This is interesting as it connects right back to the Milgram experiment and shows how authority can change a person's sense of responsibility. How can an authority take guilt away from an individual? Other posts I saw related to this idea. My own views are somewhat similar, as I believe that some people do have the ability to resist authority due to their morals and personal values.

One suggestion I do have for improving the post is to break down the long paragraph into shorter body paragraphs. As I was reading, I noticed it was just one long block of text, which is a little hard to understand the flow of ideas sometimes, but breaking it up into smaller body paragraphs just helps the reader understand what's going on.

Originally posted by user0702 on September 20, 2025 10:54

As we have discussed, people will go to great lengths to portray themselves the same as everyone else or simply “go with the crowd.” People want to believe that they are not capable of perpetuating such acts of violence, but when put in certain situations, they do. They may experience some cognitive dissonance but nothing changes that fact that they committed the act. People may not necessarily be willing to inflict pain upon others, but they will do whatever they can to protect themselves. In the Milgram experiment, the people who went all the way only did so once they realized that the responsibility was not on them. The teacher in the experiment had to be completely certain that he would not be responsible for any health issues that the learner suffered due to the shocks. The teacher knew it was wrong, it was hurting the learner, and he didn’t want anything bad to happen to him, but yet he still continued. Humans will default to presenting authority more times than not, suggesting how susceptible the human mind really is. The majority of the teachers in the experiment became completely under control of the experimenter even though it was inflicting serious pain to the student. This experiment shows that certain aspects of human behavior are really capable of inflicting pain onto others. The idea of “situationism” was coined as a direct result of Milgram's experiment; people’s behavior is determined by what is happening around them” (Roman 3). The very dangerous aspect of situationism is that it will excuse bad or violent behavior in people's minds. People will tend to blame it on the situation and not themselves. This will only increase the occurrence of violence against others.

The behavior in Milgram's experiment reveals how humans will eventually listen to orders from almost any authority figure, even if they originally question it. People may know what they are doing is wrong but are also aware of the entire situation or even consequences for themselves if they do not follow orders. In the Milgram experiment, people were faced with the decision to care more about the greater cause itself, in this example for the sake of science, or, asked to see the person being shocked as a fellow human who did nothing to deserve this punishment (Roman 5). Other factors that contribute to whether people will harm others, just because they were told, are the possible negative consequences that will come of defying orders. If people are threatened, are given incentive, or are even a “people-pleaser” they will be more likely to participate in violence. No one wants to be the non-conformist or the person who challenges a powerful authority figure. Because of this, people will idly stand by and do what they are told. People who don’t like confrontation or upsetting others directly will do almost anything to avoid it. People will also feel more comfortable committing acts of violence if everyone else around them is also participating. They will feel that it is not just them and that they are not solely responsible. They know that it was not their idea and that if something were to happen, the blame wouldn’t fall on them; at least, that is what people will tell themselves.

Attempting to encourage people who will disobey unethical authorities has the potential to be very beneficial to society. However, one of the major problems in encouraging disobedience to unethical behavior is the fact that unethical behavior needs to be strictly defined. If unethical behavior has a set definition it is easier to punish said behavior and encourage disobedience of it. People might also believe that they have more authority and are better than those following or making unethical decisions. This can lead these people to start dominating society and making orders of their own. When people get consumed by power they tend to lose important and core aspects of themselves. It is important to discourage unethical behavior in all situations but also be mindful of how these unethical behaviors are defined and regulated.

One of this students' most compelling ideas was how people will do what is necessary to protect themselves even if that means putting other people in harm which I agree with. Most people in the world are uncontent with the way their life currently is and are trying to put themselves in a better position in society to benefit themselves and make themself happier. The student discusses how the teachers were under complete control of the experiment which I similarly discussed in my LTQ. We both discuss how humans will listen to any authority figure as the teacher believes they are responsible for their actions. As the student moves to the second paragraph, they discuss how the teachers in the experiment were more likely to continue if they were a “people-pleaser” or do not like confrontation. I liked this interpretation as I can see how these reasons are justifiable and further agrees with the theory of conformity.

This student did a great job at citing their sources including in text citations which gave proper credit to the author. This student also used many of the vocabulary words relating to the unit we have been discussing in class showing thorough work. One suggestion I have for this student is to explain what article they used their evidence from as it is useful to see what the article was titled and who was the author. Overall their argument was very strong and clear.