Essay on Stanley Milgram: Unravelling the Dark Side of Human Nature

Introduction

Stanley Milgram, one of the most influential social scientists of 1973, was particularly fascinated by the dangers of group behavior and irrational obedience to authority. He was curious about what is in human nature that makes them act without restraint - inhumanly, harshly severely, and in no way limited by compassion and conscience. In 1962, Stanley Milgram shocked the world with his study of the act of obedience. He had some volunteers participating as students and others as teachers. The students were informed about the nature of the research while the teachers (subjects) operated a fake electric shock generator to punish the students for wrong answers. The teachers were required to increase the voltage as they progressed consistently.

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Many of the subjects were against the punishment but still went ahead to inflict voltage pain on the students. Milgram discovered that people were inherently evil and obedient to the authorities when working in groups. The purpose of the experiment was to explore the darker side of obedience, i.e., the vices which come about in society as a result of blind obedience to authorities in the community's cultural, social, or political sphere. He discovered that the problem of compliance is not entirely psychological but also has its roots in the way the society has been growing and developing.

Milgram's Assumptions in this Experiment

Milgram's experiment was based on eight assumptions, though I accept only some of them. First, I accept the assumption that obedience is a primary value in our society because most of the subjects would rather obey the experimenter whether to his face or over the telephone than show compassion to the student. Secondly, I accept that compassion is a primary value in society because of how it was a great source of dilemma in the subjects. Also, I accept that the experiment was designed to accurately replicate the real world because the experimenter randomly gathered the subjects from diverse backgrounds. Lastly, I agree that lab results can be generalized to real-world behavior since they were based on an empirically rigorous process.

However, I reject the assumption that the findings of the experiment will remain consistent over time and across cultures. This cannot be true since societal value systems change from time to time and from one culture to another. Similarly, it was not correct to assume that people are basically the same, and one groups' responses will be the same as another's, and one can, therefore, determine behavior based on a small sample of subjects.

Moreover, I do not accept that most people follow their own conscience because the majority of the subjects defied their consciences to obey the experimenter. For the same reason, I also reject the idea that most people would be more inclined to compassion or personal conscience than obedience. Besides, I also reject the assumption that the test structure adequately addressed all possible variables because there are many intervening and compounding variables that could be introduced to examine the findings further. Lastly, I do not accept that the experiment was conducted ethically because none of the subjects gave informed consent for their participation.

Support from Essays

Milgram's experiment proved that people tend to suspend their rationality when required to obey instructions in group situations. It appears that most people are more inclined to irrational obedience than personal conscious or other highly regarded values such as compassion when they are acting in groups. The participants had a notion of not being to the perpetrators but just helpless subordinates or agents of the wrongdoers. The idea took away personal responsibility from the actors, eroding their restraint and fear of committing evil against others.

Lessing (652) states that while humans love to celebrate their individuality, it does not change the fact that they are group animals, and groups undercut their individualities in a great way. The author uses the example of individuals living in the West, whom he argues subconsciously give in to pressures to conform in various ways despite their notions of living in free societies. Lessing refers to this as a flattering picture that all human beings hold of their individuality, and explains that it arises from our lack of understanding of group behavior (Lessing 653). Being in groups easily makes us abandon independent thinking for the opinion of the majority.

Sartwell explains that all humans are inherently evil, and this aspect easily manifests when we are groups. He argues that everyone possesses certain qualities that make it possible to mobilize them into organized crimes against humanity, such as genocide, terrorism, or slave trade. The qualities include disposition to be deferent to authorities, respond to a social consensus on beliefs, respond to people belonging to a group, and seek personal security and a sense of belonging. That is why most of Milgram's subjects easily obeyed the experimenter at the cost of their own moral values and personal conscience.

Lastly, Szegedy-Maszak also supports this position. In an article that attempts to explain why U.S. soldiers tortured Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2004, he refers to the outcome of Milgram's experiment to demonstrate that everyone is a potential torturer. The decision to inflict pain on another or not depends on one's present environment prevailing situation. He concluded that the young American soldiers were turned into heartless sadists by their extremely difficult experiences in the battlefield.

Works Cited

Lessing, Doris. "Group Minds," Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Eds. Laurence Behrens and Leonard Rosen New York: Pearson Longman, 2004. 652-654. Print.

Milgram, Stanley. "The Perils of Obedience." Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum. Eds. Laurence Behrens and Leonard Rosen New York: Pearson Longman, 2004. 630-641. Print.

Sartwell, Crispin."Genocide, You and Me." Crispin Sartwell Meditations. April 17, 2004. Web. Jan 18, 2011.

Szegedy-Maszak, Marianne "The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism." U.S. News and World Report, 31 Jan. 2011. Web. 12 August 2017.