Authority as Related to the Milgram Studies

Authors

Elizabeth A. Ajadi, Cleveland State UniversityFollow

Abstract

The topic I chose to research was authority as related to the Milgram studies. I chose this topic because of my curiosity about the legitimacy of the Milgram experiment after reading about it and watching several videos of the Milgram experiments. Stanley Milgram was a psychologist at Yale University who carried out the Milgram experiment to address conformity in a domain that self-evidently mattered and, with the Holocaust as his obvious point of reference; he chose the willingness of people to inflict serious physical harm on others. The experiment consisted of a “learner” and a “teacher,” the teacher read out questions to the student who was in another room. For every question the learner answered wrong, the teacher would administer shock voltage and the volts increased up to 450Volts. The ‘Milgram Studies’ measured the willingness of study participants, mostly young Yale students, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. In his own words, Milgram was looking for a “phenomenon of great consequence” that would make the world sit up and take notice (Reicher, Haslam, and Miller 2014).

Recommended Citation

Ajadi, Elizabeth A.. "Authority as Related to the Milgram Studies." The Downtown Review. Vol. 2. Iss. 2 (2016) .
Available at: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/tdr/vol2/iss2/7