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Essay / Milgram's Obedience Experiment - 432
The Milgram Obedience Experiment took place in 1961, shortly after World War II, and the war crimes trials against the Nazis were underway. An ad was placed in the newspaper for a memory and learning experiment for $4.50 an hour, but the experiment was ultimately about obedience. The experiment was carried out on behalf of Adolph Eichmann, who was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but he was only following orders. Eichmann carried out execution orders but never committed the murders. The goal of the experiment was to discover whether people would obey a higher authority even if what they did was morally wrong. There would be the experimenter who would record the teacher's reactions and answer the teacher's questions. The learner, an actor who was not actually injured, was supposed to be shocked every time he gave a wrong answer and every time he got it wrong he was shocked with more tension than the last. The teacher asked questions to the learner as well as giving shocks in case of a wrong answer. What the teacher thought he was doing was giving a painful, not fatal, shock to the learner so that the punishment test would lead to better memory. During the experiment, very few of them actually opposed authority, although all of them shocked the learner at 300 W and above. More than 50% was spent on all electricity. In fact, a prediction by another psychologist suggested that even 1% of subjects would not follow through until the last time the generator was turned on. During the experiment, the teachers, the real subjects, became nervous. The teachers began to question the experimenter, who told them to continue and that it was he who expressed all responsibility for the teachers' actions. This persuaded many teachers to continue to feel obligated to follow authority, even though they knew they were doing something morally wrong. The teachers were moving a lot, moving their hands, taking out cigarettes and looking around, talking quickly, etc. which are all signs of nervousness. Despite their nervousness and morality, they listened to the authority continue long after the learner failed to respond..