In this movie after his obedience experiment his results was not appreciated by majority and he struggles with the public objection about the ethics of his experiments and how his career advances as he becomes a professor in New York City and continues to study social interactions and social pressure in more benign experimental settings, including the small world experiment, the lost letter experiment, the street-corner (or gawking) experiment, familiar stranger experiment and various experiments that he makes his students carry out. He tried to move on with other experiment but his friend reminded him the importance of obedience experiment that he could run again in different culture to obtain more accurate results.
His experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience.
His experiments idea came from his childhood experience and hope to find the answer regarding human nature. He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on "obedience" - that they were just following orders of their superiors.
Milgram did more than one experiment to prove his results, he alter the situation (IV) to see how this affected obedience (DV).
The conclusions we can get from his obedience experiment is that ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority are ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up. People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize their authority as morally right and / or legally based.
This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of situations, like in the family, school and workplace.
Milgrams' Agency Theory
Milgram explained the behavior of his participants by suggesting that people actually have two states of behavior when they are in a social situation:
The Autonomous State
People direct their own actions, and they take responsibility for the results of those actions.
The Agentic State
People allow others to direct their actions, and the pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving the orders. In other words, they act as representative for another authority’s order.
Agency theory says that people will obey an authority when they believe that the authority will take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. This is supported by some aspects of Milgram’s evidence.
In the film many of the participants asked for assurance and confirmation regarding who should take the responsibility if there is anything happened to the participants that receiving shocks. Once they found out the responsibility will be taken by the experimenter and not up to them they all mostly go all along till 450 volts intact with Milgram's expectations.
The Milgram studies were conducted in laboratory type conditions and we must ask if this tells us much about real-life situations.
We obey in a variety of real-life situations that are far more subtle than instructions to give people electric shocks, and it would be interesting to see what factors operate in everyday obedience. The sort of situation Milgram investigated would be more suited to a military context.
Milgram's sample might be biased towards male only, the participants in Milgram's study were all male. Do the findings transfer to females?
Milgram’s study cannot be seen as representative of majority population as his sample was self-selected, where they became participants only by electing to respond to a newspaper advertisement (selecting themselves). They may also have a typical "volunteer personality" – not all the newspaper readers responded so perhaps it takes this personality type to do so.
Milgram’s findings have been replicated in a variety of cultures and most lead to the same conclusions as Milgram’s original study and in some cases see higher obedience rates.
But the majority of these studies have been conducted in industrialized Western cultures and we should be cautious before we conclude that a universal trait of social behavior has been identified.
Ethical Issues
Deception – the participants actually believed they were shocking a real person, and were unaware the learner was a confederate of Milgram.
However, Milgram argued that “illusion is used when necessary in order to set the stage for the revelation of certain difficult-to-get-at-truths”.
Apparently after the experiment Milgram claimed that 83.7% said that they were “glad to be in the experiment”, and 1.3% said that they wished they had not been involved.
Harm to participants - Participants were exposed to extremely stressful situations that may have the potential to cause psychological harm. Many of the participants were visibly distressed as decsribed by Milgram such signs of tension included trembling, sweating, stuttering, laughing nervously, biting lips and digging fingernails into palms of hands.
In his defense, Milgram argued that these effects were only short term. Once the participants were debriefed and it was obvious after the 'teacher' have seen the 'learner' was not receiving any electric shocks and was in fine condition, the 'teacher' feel much better and decreased in stress level.
Free will of participants and humans in this context has raised questions regarding how much free will one possess to the extent our actions and behaviors is it necessary came from our self-determination or being controlled by social laws or prior causes? If then do we human consider to have free will or act upon free will? This movie depicts the struggle of experimenter in all fields fight against the norm of society and the readiness of our society to receive new or threatening idea on the concept of human living. Societies work in a circle and human tend to follow the circle or norm so that they feel same with others and not easily out cast, if then we all live in a system that repeating itself and not our own life we have control of.
This movie provoke questions regarding human nature by using fact-based story. Milgram will remain inspiration to us all to question about human nature and life.
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