Stanley Milgram discovered most people would obey orders even though they were hurting people. options: True False
The correct answer and explanation is:
Correct Answer: True
Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, conducted in the early 1960s, revealed that most people would follow orders from an authority figure even when those orders involved inflicting harm on another person. The experiments were designed to explore the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience, particularly in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust.
In the study, Milgram recruited participants under the guise of a memory and learning experiment. The setup involved a “teacher” (the actual subject) and a “learner” (an actor). The teacher was instructed to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to the learner each time the learner gave a wrong answer. The shocks were fake, and the learner was not actually being harmed, but the teacher was unaware of this. The learner, hidden from view, would scream in pain, beg to stop, or eventually become silent, simulating being unconscious or worse.
Despite the apparent suffering of the learner, a significant majority of participants continued to administer shocks when prompted by the authoritative experimenter. About 65 percent of the participants went all the way to the maximum voltage level labeled as “danger: severe shock.”
This experiment highlighted a powerful psychological tendency in humans: the willingness to obey authority figures even when it conflicts with their personal ethics. Milgram concluded that people are surprisingly obedient to authority, and this obedience can lead them to perform acts they would normally consider morally wrong.
Milgram’s findings sparked intense debates about ethics in psychological research but also led to a deeper understanding of human behavior. His work demonstrated that situational factors and perceived authority could strongly influence actions, sometimes more than personal morals or values. This insight remains relevant in discussions of authority, responsibility, and human behavior in various institutions and historical events.