The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram free essay sample

In â€Å"The Perils of Obedience,† Stanley Milgram develops a experiment that puts to test the the question , â€Å"Will humans inflict extreme pain to others under the command of higher authority? †. The essay starts off with Milgram explaining the history of obedience by exhibiting the loyalness that was portrayed by followers in historical documents. The experiment that Milgram set up was simple. He elected an â€Å"experimenter† who is the authority figure, a â€Å"teacher† which is the subject of the experiment, and a â€Å"learner† whose only obligation is to act as if s/he is in pain. The teacher in the experiment reads off a simple list of words, and the student must remember the second word of a pair upon hearing the first one again. If the student is wrong, the teacher must inflict pain on the student, increasing the pain each time the student makes an error. Before actually conducting these experiments, Milgram asked for predictions from various groups of people. We will write a custom essay sample on The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page It was predicted that almost all the subjects would deny to obey the experimenter, but these predictions were proved wrong. In the first group of subjects, only 25 of the 40 who participated in the experiment obeyed all the orders from the experimenter. In another scenario where Yale undergraduates were used as subjects, 60 percent of them were obedient to the experimenter. In the first experiment that Milgram conducts, the subject Gretchen Brandt defies the experimenters request by refusing to inflict anymore pain on the student because of the immoral pain that she believed the student was in. This is the response that Milgram initially thought would be for all subjects. In the second experiment that Milgram conducted, his subject Fred Prozi, was obedient to the experimenter, although he clearly did not want to cause any harm to the learner, Prozi respected the authority that the experimenter showcased. Each time Prozi insisted that the experiment be stopped , the experimenter would demand that he go on, and he did. Milgram’s most memorable subject, Morris Braverman, was unlike the other subjects who participated in this experiment because he showed signs of enjoyment during the experiment. Braverman strictly followed the experimenters orders, and also laughed at times when he administered pain to the learner. Later in the essay, Milgram begins to explain why subjects responded to the experiments the way that they did stating that â€Å"all people harbor deeply aggressive instincts† (77). He also stated that subjects gained more satisfaction with pleasing the experimenter and doing a good job, than actually caring for the well being of the learner. One notable subject, Bruno Batta, made sure that the experiment went as planned, even going as far as forcing the learners hand back onto the shock plate . Milgram refers to Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which Arendt states that the horrible deeds that Eichmann carried out did not make him a monster, because he was only being obedient towards higher authority. The experiments that Milgram constructed proved that most humans will inflict pain to others under the command of a higher authority.