Boston, Massachusetts, US
Posts: 3
Reflections on Obedience and the Milgram Experiment
The majority of people have the potential to be a perpetrator of violence against others. In the Milgram experiment, it is revealed that once authority is established with the obeying of simple commands, a person is more likely to obey harmful commands if the magnitude of the commands increases incrementally. It is harder for the individual to disobey given commands, despite being aware of the detrimental consequences it has on others. At the end of the experiment, the “teacher”, who delivered the painful shocks on the “learner”, was questioned as to why he continued to hurt the “learner”. The teacher shifted the blame to the experimenter, arguing that he was doing what he was told. This suggests that the teacher has distanced himself from his actions and the pain he thought he was inflicting. By avoiding the responsibility of his actions, he is justifying that he is not in the wrong. The Milgram experiment was originally developed to explain the defense of Nazi officers, who claimed they were just “following orders”, to understand what was happening in their head. In “How Nazi’s Defense of “Just Following Orders” Plays Out In the Mind” by Joshua Barajas, a more in depth study by Patrick Haggard, a cognitive neuroscientist, reveals that brain activity is hindered when people are given orders. They feel more distanced from their actions and less responsibility. If this is a basic human function, it is likely the majority of people have the potential to hurt others under the orders to. However, in the cases of atrocities like the Holocaust, this is not the only factor influencing the decisions of people under orders. The prevalence of an “Us vs. Them” advertised by the Nazi party, had aided Nazi officers into believing that they were in the right. The Jewish community was dehumanized to the extent where it “justified” their execution to the Nazi supporters. Another aspect of the Milgram experiment was the presence of non-conformers. The non-conformer would refuse to comply with the orders of the experimenter after they realized the pain the “learner” was going through. This highlights the importance of non-compliers in unjust governments/societies because this mindset eventually leads to a solution, whether violent or peaceful. However, in accordance with the results of the Milgram experiment, people are less likely to be non-conformers, as most people obey the orders given by the experimenter. Attempting to create a society where we encourage people who disobey immoral/unethical government officials would, in theory, prevent atrocities like the Holocaust from taking place and contribute to a more peaceful society. This could prove to be problematic, however, as people have different morals and beliefs on what is ethical. On top of this, there will always be consequences in disobeying authority figures. It is unlikely that people will want to undergo such consequences in the face of injustice. In the case of the Holocaust, there were many who knew not to disobey Nazi authority for the sake of their safety. It benefitted the non-Jewish people to let the Holocaust take its course as their safety was preserved.
Boston, Massachusetts , US
Posts: 3
Reflections on Obedience and the Milgram Experiment
After watching the video on the Milgrim experiment I do think that everyone has the potential to become a perpetrator of violence but that this is heavily dependent on cognitive dissonance and sense of self. The stronger one's own view of themselves is as “good” the less likely they are to perform an act of violence as this would greatly contrast with their self image and conflict with their morality. The Milgram experiment suggests that humans are extremely susceptible to figures of authority. For example Nazi commanders and higher ups justified their cruelty by blaming their actions on “just following orders” as stated in the article titled How Nazi’s Defense of “Just Following Orders” Plays Out in the Mind. Perpetrators feel a sense of disconnect when their actions are based on the orders of others, even if they are the ones carrying out these actions. Our willingness as humans to inflict pain on others has a lot to do with our compliant and complacent behavior. Even if an authority figure isn’t directly communicating with a subject, it is human nature to obey whoever they perceive to be incharge. This experiment explains a possible motive as to why authoritative governments are also able to obtain large followings, such as the Nazi regime. Our desire to want to be a part of a group and not be the odd one out (mob mentality) plays into the obedience theory. The more people following a leader even if that leader is corrupt will make others more susceptible to joining due to fear of being socially (or physically) persecuted.
Milgram’s experiment does help to explain ordinary people’s activity participation in violence but other factors like propaganda, fear, coercion, and moral desensitization also play a huge role. The Nazi’s for example instilled propaganda in their citizens, desensitized them to certain forms of violence against Jewish people, and made many fearful for their lives. Using these tactics the Nazi government was able to get people to blindly follow and disregard all other aspects of what they were doing. Without these contributing factors many people would not have become an accessory to genocide and destruction.
Some important factors that led some “teachers” to disobey the experimenter's orders was possibly moral conviction and a strong sense of self. Usually those who are more willing to go against the norm will have disobeyed the order to continue to shock the “learner”. Attempting to create a society that values and encourages traits of those who will disobey unethical authority figures would be very difficult. People desire the majority over anything, individuality can be very difficult to accept in today's society. It would be nice for everyone to feel comfortable questioning authority without feeling ostracized, but I do believe that there is some danger that comes with this. If everyone is rebelling and questioning authority, how do you create unity, especially within a country? Everyone's opinions on who they believe is an unethical leader are different, there is no one person that everyone will fully support and we can see this issue occurring in modern day US history with the election.
Boston, Massachusetts, US
Posts: 3
Reflections on the Milgram Experiment
In the article “How the Nazi’s Defense of ‘Just Following Orders’ Plays Out in the Mind,” it is explained that when people act under orders of others, they perceive a greater distance from the outcomes they caused, experience less agency, and feel less responsible. Being ordered to harm people makes it easier for people to do so without feeling the moral consequences or by feeling reduced moral consequences. There is cognitive dissonance between the thoughts of “I am a good person who does not hurt others” and “I just harmed another person.” However, the fact that the teacher in the Milgram experiment was ordered to harm the other person, helps to lower this dissonance. The participant feels a difference in being the one who actively came up with the idea to harm someone compared to following the instruction of another to harm someone. This way, the violent idea did not begin in their own brain. I believe this does help to explain people’s participation in mass atrocities, but I also believe there are many other factors.
Besides a blind following of authority and instructions, I think there is much more that contributes to people’s willingness to inflict pain on others. A lot of it relates to what we have talked about in class. The Nazi regime proliferated an “us” vs. “them” mindset. This is in part due to the chemical oxytocin- which promotes ingroup favoritism, while making it easier to be cruel to an outgroup member. Jews and other targeted groups were seen as completely other. They were called names, which we learned makes it easier to dehumanize someone and harm them.
In the Milgram experiment, the teacher would often ask questions such as, “Are you sure I should continue?” The experimenter would respond with some variation of, “continue please” or “the experiment requires that you go on.” And so, the teacher would often continue harming the learner. This raises the question of why the teacher trusted and followed the word of the experimenter. It likely comes down to a power imbalance. The teacher assumed that since the experimenter had more power in this situation, they knew what they were doing. The teacher also could have felt like standing up to the experimenter was disobeying the authority and overstepping their boundaries as someone lower in the social hierarchy. However, there were some teachers who disobeyed the experimenter's instructions. I believe that those who disobeyed the experimenters likely had a strong self concept and sense of self. A strong sense of self helped the teachers listen to their own feelings and to what they were hearing from the learner in the other room, instead of assuming they were wrong or overreacting and that the experimenter had to be correct because they had more power in the situation. I believe it would be beneficial to build a society that values challenging unethical authority figures. However I feel there must be an emphasis on the difference between challenging unethical authority figures and challenging all authority figures, especially just for the sake of disruption. If we build a society that values the challenging of all authority figures, it would be hard to organize society and get anything done.
Boston, Massachusetts, US
Posts: 3
Reflection of Milgram Experiment
The Milgram experiment has revealed the true human nature, in which it suggests how anyone is able to become the perpetrator of inflicting pain on others. The experiment itself is set in a very common establishment, and even when there is no sense of fear in a person's demeanor, the experiment concludes that 50 percent of the people were willing to cause violence. Given that there was persistence of rules “forced” (rules the person chose to listen to, the experimenter did not explicitly have control over the teacher) upon the teacher, the pressure to follow them, even being conscious of their actions, is incredibly great. The human nature of satisfaction, especially through the validation of other humans is incredibly normal, and conducts many discoveries through inquisition and brainstorming. However, the potential of feeling validated by a deemed higher being is so great, and this experiment proves the exact same. The notion that it is not our problem that someone else is failing is also a big theme that is picked up through the experiment. Once people know things can be done without feeling remorse, such as the experimenter insisting that the other person was not being harmed, or the fate of the others was the responsibility of the university, people see themselves as part of the bigger picture.
In addition, the Milgram experiment does in fact explain the reason why ordinary people commit heinous crimes. Mirroring the experiment to real life, people who were the catalysts of wars, did not personally attack innocent people, but used their influences to dictate if violence was going to be inflicted to others. A great example is the U.S soldiers during the Vietnam War, in which U.S. soldiers were driven with the fact that they were being controlled by America, the land of free and peace. Many soldiers used this ideology, and also mixed with the influence of their corrupt leaders to inflict great war crimes on innocent Vietnamese people. The willingness of this is also explained by the lack of knowledge on the things that they are attacking. Coming back to America, they were only able to realize their actions, when faced with the separation of bigger authoritative protection. The public, having only social power, all attacked the system, protesting the rights of these veterans. Slowly after years, veterans of the Vietnamese War started to speak up, condone the violence that happened to the victims of this war. This phenomenon is also incredibly widespread in genocide, where the validation of higher ups causes moral dissonance among the soldiers fighting for cultural cleansing.
By having a leader, people are more willing to create pain, because if someone is also as influential and wise as their leader approves of something, it is immediately correct. Even when people doubt their leaders, with pressure from within and the fear of being outcasted, many force themselves to see the pros of their situation, and force themselves to become against their own morality. The continuity suggests how this is woven into history, in all types of degrees and human nature continues its cycle.
Dorchester Center, Massachusetts, US
Posts: 3
Reflections on Obedience and the Milgram Experiment
When given no alternative, it is evident that people are more likely to go through with something, simply because they have no perceived choice in the matter. The Milgram experiment exemplifies this in that the “teachers” were not given any perceived choice in whether or not they had to continue shocking the learner, at least not until they outright disobeyed the experimenter and refused to continue despite this.
I think that with enough influence or pressure from some kind of authority, anyone can be driven to do harm against others, it is only a matter of how long it will take for someone to stop resisting that authority and blindly follow the orders given to them. How long it takes for someone to submit to these orders (or whether or not they will refuse to go on) may very well depend on what the authority says will happen if they don't; if the experimenter posed some kind of punishment to the teacher if they did not comply, perhaps even a higher percentage would have gone all the way to 450 volts. Much of the reason why someone would follow such orders to harm an innocent without any question is that the acknowledgement of authority is deeply rooted in many people’s minds; if someone grew up with parents who refused to answer any questioning of their authority, they may be more susceptible to blindly following orders from some kind of authority, like in the Milgram Experiment.
Although very thought provoking on the subject, I believe that Milgram’s experiments don’t fully simulate all the influences that may drive someone to participate in violence or genocides. There are various societal and personal drives that can influence people to do such a thing. For example, before Hitler took power in 1933, the German population was probably overall far less likely to commit an act of violence against Jewish people than they were after Hitler became chancellor. Joshua Bajaras’ How Nazi's Defense of "Just Following Orders" Plays Out in the Mind states “Haggard said his team’s findings do not legitimate the Nuremberg defense and that anyone who claims they were ‘just following orders’ ought to be viewed with skepticism. But, ‘our study does suggest that this claim might potentially correspond to the basic experience that the person had of their action at the time,”’ To me, this means that outside forces have great influence on one’s willingness to act violently, whether they are aware of it or not. So it is nearly obvious that Hitler’s rise to power and following speeches that encouraged such horrible treatment of Jewish people influenced the German population to (consciously or subconsciously) begin following his ideals as if they had never believed anything else.
Overall, the Milgram Experiments gave great insight as to how people act under an authority figure that undermines their personal moral values, but were unable to fully encompass and explain the reactions to such societal pressure as there would be under some kind of authoritarian regime.
Boston, Mass, US
Posts: 3
I think the Milgram experiments were a prime example of how we are “programmed” to obey the authority above us. These experiments highlight how we willingly inflict harm on others because we are able to justify how we are not responsible for it. We tell ourselves we are simply doing as we are told and we are being forced to do these things by the authority figure. These are principles many of us are aware of and know we possess but when we are put in situations, it is often hard to stray away from them. During the documentary of this experiment we see many examples where the teacher would say they are not comfortable with continuing because the learner was screaming in pain but when the experimenter told them to continue, they did despite how the experimenter had no physical restraints on the teacher, they acted as though they did. I believe that these experiments explain how people can justify behavior they do because they are told to but I think there are still limitations to that. On a far more extreme level, the Nazi’s that followed Hitlers orders were listening to commands but at the same time they were committing mass genocide so some part of them knew what they were doing and weather they forced themselves to agree with what Hitler was doing out of fear is different. This theory was studied in Joshua Barajas’s article, “How Nazi’s Defense of ‘Just Following Orders’ Plays Out in the Mind”. He finds “That is, when people act “under orders,” they seem to experience less agency over their actions and outcomes than when they choose for themselves, Haggard said.” I found this quote particularly interesting because it shows how for some reason when we are told to do something, it automatically shift something in our brain to make us feel less responsible for this action, Something else the Milgram experiments emphasized that I think often explains humans behavior to willingly inflict harm on others is that the teacher could not see the learner in pain. There was a wall in between them and they did not know each other, both factors making it much less personal. This physical barrier allowed them to view the subject as not human, which explains why Hitler had the Nazis use the gas chambers, to eliminate personal confrontation because he wanted them to follow his orders. They could not see them and when many went to court we saw that their reasoning was they were simply following orders, implying they were the ones doing the right things because the ones in authority were telling them to do so. Another thing I learned was people will do things when they know the results will not inflict any punishment on them. When the teachers of the Milgram experiment learned that if any physical harm was done to the learner, the experimenters would be responsible, they felt more comfortable continuing. I believe this is because we want to protect ourselves and our view of ourselves. When we can justify our behavior by saying “well it is not my fault” we are more willing to do it. This mindset was most likely used by the Nazis in the same way because they could place the blame on Hitler for the mass genocide, rather than individual Nazis despite how they were the ones who willingly murded innocent people. Overall, something I have observed is people want to protect themselves because that is human nature and they take measures to assure they are protecting themselves before continuing on to hurt someone else. We can see the human tendency to follow the orders of those in authority in many experiments such as the Milgram experiments or similar to them but also in daily life, such as in school or in the workplace. I also learned that we all want to avoid getting into trouble with these authority figures, such as teachers or bosses, so we do this by listening to what they tell us to do. This is yet again another step we take to protect ourselves.
Boston, Massachusetts, US
Posts: 3
The Milgram Experiment and Obedience
I do believe that everyone has the potential to become a perpetrator of violence against another. Human’s desperately crave, even if for a moment, a chance to portray a certain level of dominance. This feeling may be unconscious, but each of us have our own events in life, like being bullied or robbed, that made us feel inferior. When given the opportunity to blame someone for the actions that a person takes to hurt another, humans will use this as a way to let out desires and atone for being so weak in the past. In “The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment” by Maria Korrinkova, one quote, “When the “superintendent” and “warden” overlooked these incidents, the message to the guards was clear: all is well; keep going as you are” illustrates another point for why humans are capable of such horrific actions. If we are not to blame- because being called out for a bad action will invoke humiliation- then doing everything in our power to hurt another person seems okay. Even in a position of authority, if there is someone on a higher level, they will receive the brunt of the opposition's critics while we continue to do whatever we want. The reason for this, maybe frustration, anger, or fear of being violated ourselves. At the end of the day we’ll continue these acts until called out.
The Milgram experiment explains how ordinary people participate in mass atrocities because we easily conform to minimizing the impact we have on others. The best example of this is dehumanization. When someone is dehumanized, we start to create unrealistic expectations for them, like how the teachers in the Milgram experiment continued to give high voltage shocks and assumed that the learner was still willing to go on. Other factors contributing to people's willingness to inflict pain on others can be having a strong group leader, like Adolf Hitler, or the normalization of violence within a person’s community.
Not every situation has the teacher in the Milgram experiment going along with what the scientist says. Sometimes, the teacher has a strong sense of self and knows that they are in charge of what they are doing. This means that they can distinguish between what they are doing versus what they are being told to do, therefore making them more likely to not follow through with what is being told of them. They do not see the scientist as an authority figure, and they see the learner for what they are, someone being hurt for the pleasure of others. On a broader scale, I think societies can teach people how to defend themselves against unruly authority figures. The key is to educate people on how to check themselves and the power another has. Did they earn the position they are in? Are they purposely hurting others for self profit? Discouraging personal gain and promoting caring about others' well -being, morals, empathy, and courage to speak out against the majority is the key to creating less teachers who finish the experiment and more teachers who stand up for the learner.
Boston, Massachusetts , US
Posts: 3
Reflections on Obedience and the Milgram Experiment
I think that everyone has the potential to become a perpetrator of violence against others. The Mil gram experiments help us understand this more. The two teachers that were on the experiment had a choice to stop the violence that they were inflicting on someone else. The only reason why they didn't stop is because of obedience. The affects of obedience is shown in the Mil gram experiment through their actions. We can apply this to outside examples. During school when you are told to keep your backpack and all your belongings in the school while there is a fire alarm happening, you don't want to and it is apart of your natural instincts to get all your things with you. But you listen and obey because it's rules that are given to you by someone you consider a higher up. Other people also listen to this rule and they obey by it, so it feels like you have to obey by it. I think that other experiments similar to the Mil gram's experiment explain the active participation in violence and mass genocides. The reason for this is because there's a lot more to obedience that meets the eye. A lot of people are quick to just jump to conclusions about genocides and what was going on in the soldier's minds, but nobody really thinks of them as single human beings and maybe what would've been going on through their mind. I think that there are multiple factors to someone's thoughts behind murder and war crimes, but I think that there are big factors to soldiers in their own personal lives. I also think that the power struggle is a big factor of this. The commander being someone that you have to take orders from and there being consequences if there is no obedience from the solider. The blind following of authority contributes to people's willingness to inflict pain on other people because they feel like the higher power is always right. Since they are a higher power, usually they would be more intelligent on the matter or just be more educated on what is at hand. So that would make them more reasonable to be correct. Also the power struggle adds on to the reasoning to listen. Some important factors that lead the teachers in the Mil gram experiment to disobey the experimenters is that they thought it was genuine pain on the other side.
Dorchester Center, Massachusetts, US
Posts: 3
The Milgram Experiment - What does it say about obedience in humans?
As proven by the Milgram experiment, other replicating studies, and historical atrocities, everyone holds the ability to become a perpetrator of violence against others. Whether or not they consciously decide to do so serves as the larger question; in some cases, people enjoy the harm of others, but the Milgram experiment proves that perpetrators harm others not because they want to but because they are ordered to do so. Additionally, when others do not feel solely responsible for the harm of others, they tend to harm others more, given that it’s not entirely their fault, and or there is no consequence. In Joshua Barajas’s “How Nazi’s Defense of “Just Following Orders” Plays Out in the Mind,” Patrick Haggard, in reference to the Nazi soldiers’ diffusion of responsibility during the Holocaust, states “In particular, acting under orders caused participants to perceive a distance from outcomes that they themselves caused.” This quote, in particular, gives us insight into the reasoning behind the obedience theory and how experiments like the Milgram experiment are so essential in figuring out different perspectives of mass atrocities and how we can change as humans. While the Milgram experiment accounts for the behavioral aspect of perpetrators in mass atrocities, it fails to account for other personal aspects of individual lives that may influence obedience. In the case of Nazi Germany, it’s interesting to note that many German citizens and Nazi soldiers were threatened if they did not obey. Additionally, cultural differences also play a huge role in whether or not someone may harm another person; while in no way do these differences excuse the actions of the Nazis, they may have found it easier to harm the Jewish population due to the fact that they had some significant cultural, and even physical, differences. Differences in culture, society, morals, physical appearance and background create a distance between people which plays a role in an individual’s willingness to harm another person; the Milgram experiment explored ideas of physical and emotional distance, which affected the teacher’s willingness to harm the learner. Distance is significant to note when analyzing studies like the Milgram experiment, which found that hearing someone in pain may cause someone to feel more sympathy towards the victim but in most cases, since the perpetrator could not see or touch the victim. The Milgram experiment, and studies alike, help to provide researchers with evidence and reasoning behind multiple mass atrocities that have occurred throughout history. While it is difficult to realize society’s ills, experiments like these are important in determining what influences mass atrocities, crimes, and everyday actions of obedience. In addition to learning about the reasoning behind the actions of perpetrators, we can also learn how to prevent issues from occurring in the future, and how we can move forward as a society of individuals with individual thoughts. I believe that reframing our mindset of obedience can help to prevent further genocides like the Holocaust, and even less extreme punishments that happen in our everyday lives. By emphasizing the importance of the individual and the humaneness of groups of people, rather than strictly numericizing them, our society as a whole can prevent mass atrocities from occurring and reframe our mindset surrounding the need to obey authority simply because of traditional normatives.
Boston, Massachusetts, US
Posts: 3
Reflections on the Milgram Experiment and Authority
I believe the Milgram experiment shows some factors that influence people to participate in violence. I propose three main factors that may explain why the ‘teachers’ kept shocking the ‘learners’: physical and emotional separation between the person and the victim, a perceived punishment for disobedience or reward for obedience, and the placement of responsibility. These factors can also be used to explain why atrocities happen since many of them include these factors, showing how significant and prevalent they are. For example, the Nazis were not Jewish, they were paid or rewarded for their service, and many of them claimed that they were “following orders”. These factors work together to ‘incentivize’ violence.
It is easy for people to harm others who are unfamiliar to them, especially if they are considered enemies by other people. It is easy for people to create stereotypes of others, to accuse them of things they haven’t done, or to believe false statements about them. It is important for us to know the view of the other party because it allows us to do away with those stereotypes and accusations and understand how other people truly affect us. However, the Milgram experiments show that even this isn’t enough. Even when the ‘teachers’ knew that the ‘learners’ were in audible pain and wanted to leave, many of them continued. This brings empathy into question, but the experiments show that even empathy isn’t enough to stop them.
I believe that the ‘teachers’ in the experiments felt that they would be punished if they didn’t comply with the orders of the ‘experimenter’. Many of the ‘teachers’ continued to shock the ‘learners’ even after they said they wanted to leave because of the pressure put on them by the ‘experimenter’. Later interpretations of Milgram’s work explain that “those who successfully ended the experiment early were simply better at resisting than the ones that continued shocking” (Carl Romm, 2015), showing that people’s ability to resist persuasion, or possibly the pressure of a perceived punishment, also affects their willingness to continue.
In the article How the Nazi’s Defense of “Just Following Orders” Plays Out in the Mind, people lose their sense of agency, or their personal responsibility for their actions, when they are following orders. This is also a factor of the ‘teachers’ actions in the Milgram experiment; the ‘teacher’ felt that the ‘experimenter’ was really the one that was hurting the ‘learner’, and that they were simply carrying out the ‘experimenter’s orders because of how disillusioned they were from their actions.
Ultimately, these factors contribute to a conflict that everyone faces. Many people don’t want to harm others because they view themselves as ‘good’, but they become conflicted when they do something or are told to do something ‘bad’. People feel ‘good’ in the sense that they are following authority, but they also feel ‘bad’ because they are doing ‘bad’ actions. The factors try to explain why people choose to do ‘bad’ actions even when they want to be ‘good’. Ultimately, I believe that people who are able to show more empathy to the harmed, who are able to resist persuasion, and who can understand their actions can stand up to authority.