Milgram Experiment: What Are The Dangers Of Blind Obedience In Society?
The Milgram experiment is one of the most surprising investigations in psychology. Discover how blind obedience to authorities can make us change our attitude.
If an authority figure ordered you to perform an electric shock that would harm a person, it is obvious that most people would believe that they would never be able to do it despite being asked. But, the dangers of human obedience and authority go beyond what we imagine. This is precisely what one of the most famous investigations in psychology discovered, known as the Milgram experiment. This study was carried out through the team of psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale University. Through one of these psychology experiments, it was discovered how authority influenced the behavior of groups.
During the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram and his team conducted a series of experiments on obedience to authority Milgram and his studies led to results that were surprising.
According to him Stanley Milgram experiment There is a lot of power in authority, so much so that people can obey unusual orders from these figures. Although this experiment had many problems, especially in the ethical field, its results have been very revealing within psychology.
Milgram’s experiment
“The social psychology of this century reveals an important lesson: it is often not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation he finds himself in that determines how he will act.”
Stanley Milgram, psychologist
Stanley Milgram He began devising his famous experiment in 1961 shortly after the trial of Adolph Eichmann, a Nazi Holocaust sergeant who ordered the deaths of millions of Jews, began. The fact that this murderer did not feel guilty for the crime he committed made Milgram wonder if everyone could experience the same thing when faced with authority.
He Milgram experiment It consisted of recruiting 40 people to see to what degree they could obey an authority. Within this study, each participant was told to assume the role of teacher to a student (who was portrayed by an actor). Every time the student made a mistake, the teacher, that is, the individual participating in this experiment, had to provide him with an electric shock that had to increase in intensity the more mistakes he made.
As I progressed Milgram’s experiment, the participant listened to the student (who was actually a pretend actor) beg to be released or even complain of a heart condition due to the electric shocks he was suffering. Beyond this point, the student remained completely silent and refused to answer any further questions. The experiment’s instructors told the so-called ‘teachers’ to take this as an incorrect answer and give them a new electric shock.
The striking thing about this experiment is precisely the dangers of human obedience The results showed that the majority of people were responsible for performing electric shocks of such a level that they could kill the supposed student.
The results of Milgram’s experiment
According to the predictions before making The Experiment, Stanley Milgram suggested that it would probably be 1% of the participants who overused the electric shocks due to their blind obedience to authority. On the other hand, when carrying out the experiment, 65% of the participants reached such levels.
In addition to the 40 participants in the study, 26 people administered the maximum shocks. On the other hand, the remaining 14 stopped before reaching these high levels.
There are a series of relevant issues that we can highlight from Milgram’s experiment Among the most relevant conclusions we find the following.
1. When faced with authority, people act differently
This ‘Milgram test ‘reveals how people change when faced with an authority figure. Although the majority of participants experienced distress when overdoing electrical practices, these individuals still went beyond what was ethically correct.
2. Replicas of Milgram’s experiment obtained similar results
Psychologist Thomass Blass replicated this experiment in 1999 and obtained similar results. Furthermore, similar results were also obtained. Something that can highlight dangers of obedience to authorities
3. Blind obedience
There are different psychological factors that make people obey the role of an immoral authority to the extreme. Therefore, it is important to educate people in critical thinking, since in this way a healthy and fair community is achieved.
How to defeat the results of Milgram’s experiment?
What it ends up teaching us Milgram’s experiment and its conclusions around blind obedience is that working on our security, self-esteem and interior is important for others and for living in society. Therefore, working on ourselves together with a professional psychologist is important. Achieving our best version means working for a fairer society.
