Milgram summary

Moustapha Diarra
Rhetoric and composition

Milgram experiment

Stanley Milgram was a social psychologist, and aprofessor at the Yale University. In the 1960’s he conducted an experiment on obedience to authority, known today as “the Milgram experiment”. For this experiment Milgram recruited 40 random menusing news paper ads, then asked them to give what they thought was electric shocks to another human. The surprising results and analysis of this experiment were published in the journal“Human relation” a couple of years later.
Its experiment had for goal to analyses the willingness of the participant to follow orders from an authority figure. For this purpose he set up theexperiment with a “teacher” who is the study participants, and a “learner” who is an actor. The teachers are the subject of the experiment, they signed up for it thinking they would beinvolved in a memory and learning test. A shock generator was given to the teacher. On the shock generator several level of voltage were indicated. The teachers have been told that they wouldhave to deliver electric shocks to the learner when he answers wrong. The teacher couldn’t see the learner. But the shock generator was a fake, the learner is in fact an actor who werepretended to be shocked. As the experiment goes on, the teacher would be asked to increase the voltage of the electric shocks after every wrong answer. At some point the learner would bang on thewall to act like he is in real pain, and ask to be released. At this point most of the participants asked if they should stop or keep going. It’s after this point that the Stanley Milgramstarted to analyze their reactions.
After completed the experiment Milgram report that 65% of the participant continued to administrate electric shock to the maximum level (300 volts).