Describe the research of Stanley Milgram and the factors that influenced the high rate of obedience he observed

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

ANSWER:
?In the 1960s, Milgram set out to discover just how likely the average person is to engage in destructive obedience. Milgram ran an ad in a New Haven, Connecticut, newspaper that solicited participants for an experiment that would investigate the role of punishment in learning. In actuality, the experiment would measure the participants’ willingness to obey an order to administer a very painful electric shock to another person. The participants weren’t told this until after the experiment was over. As far as the participants knew, they were participating in a study on learning, not obedience.
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In all, 40 men participated in Milgram’s first study (Milgram, 1963). These men ranged from 20 to 50 years of age, and they represented a variety of professions, including teachers, engineers, and postal clerks. All of the men were paid $4.50 (approximately $30 in today’s money) for their participation before the experiment began. When they arrived at the lab, the participants were told that they would be playing the role of a teacher in the experiment. As the teacher, their job would be to administer electric shocks, using an apparatus that delivered shocks ranging from 15 volts to 450 volts, to a participant playing the role of the learner. The learner was supposed to learn a list of words, and the teachers were told that the purpose of the experiment was to see whether the shocks would improve the learner’s rate of learning. In actuality, the learner was a confederate, an actor who only pretended to be shocked, but the participants did not know this until after the experiment ended.
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The results of Milgram’s study were nothing short of shocking. A full 65% of the teachers continued to shock the learner all the way up to the 450-volt mark. Despite believing the learner to be ill or worse, most of the teachers continued to follow the experimenter’s orders. Even Stanley Milgram was surprised by his findings.