Text type: Article
Author: Saul McLeod
"The Milgram Experiment" is an article written by Saul McLeod about Stanley Milgram. Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment at Yale University in 1963. He wanted to distinguish a connection between obedience to authority and personal conscience. He was going to use his findings to better understand and answer the question "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"
I think that some people are born evil, but good people are capable of doing evil things. In my opinion some people do evil things because they are made to think that they only have one option (one way out). For example Milgram said "More often then not adults have extreme willingness to go almost any length on the command of an authority figure." Another example of this from a history perspective is when Hitler was trying to convince all Germans that Jewish people were the devil.You could argue that he lied and tricked those people into believing him, which resulted in a lot of Jewish people being injured and murdered.
If i said at this period in time what my actions would be if i took place in this experiment i would say that i could never seriously inflict pain on anyone. But honestly if i was in that situation under that amount of pressure i'm not sure what i would do. I'm not the only person who feels this way because the conclusion Milgram came to after the experiment ended was "65% of people continued to the highest level of 450 volts and all the participants continued to 300 volts under the instruction of an authority."
If i said at this period in time what my actions would be if i took place in this experiment i would say that i could never seriously inflict pain on anyone. But honestly if i was in that situation under that amount of pressure i'm not sure what i would do. I'm not the only person who feels this way because the conclusion Milgram came to after the experiment ended was "65% of people continued to the highest level of 450 volts and all the participants continued to 300 volts under the instruction of an authority."
This is a great reading log Gemma! I can tell that you really understood the text and that you took an interest in this subject. Are you against this research? I feel that it's a really interesting topic.
ReplyDeleteGemma - this is exactly what I am looking for in a reading log. You successfully presented your opinions in detail and supported them with evidence from the text. You even provided social-political-historical links beyond the text. Continuing this discussion in more depth could bring your response up to Merit/Excellence level.
ReplyDeleteI would love to use this as an exemplar for the rest of the class, if you would be willing to share your work. Ka pai :)