Summary of Research Article

Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram

Introduction

Obedience is considered as a positive trait and among one of the foundations of organized systems like a political party , an organization or the society . It is nothing but submission of an individual to an authority . It is this submission that leads to a hierarchy or an organized social structure . Therefore , apparently obedience appears to be a very holy attribute but it is not so . It should be realized that obedience is something we have learned and taught ourselves during the course of evolution

. No matter , how much holiness is to this attribute , no matter how deeply this is ingrained in our minds , it is against our natural self , which likes to remain free and dislikes subordination . Thus there always exists a dilemma , when our natural conscience finds there is something wrong in obeying s from authority . The larger question is what we do in those circumstances when our obedience goes against our own consciousness ? Why we do not mind being part of a chain , the act of which has disastrous consequences for humanity and which will never be acceptable to our consciousness This article attempts to answer these questions of great importance to humanity . The article reports tangible results from beautiful experiments and draws logical conclusions and is not merely a theoretical article . In the experiments obedience of the subjects were studied while they were inflicting pains through electrical shocks to other individual following s from the experimenter as per the design of the experiment . In subsequent sections , we will briefly look upon the experiments and results and the conclusions drawn from these results

Methods and Materials

A beautiful experiment was designed to measure response of an individual , while obeying s from the authority for executing an action which is directly explicitly painful and dangerous to another individual . In these experiments , a teacher - learner pair has been formed by the experimenter . The pair is to complete a study on memory and learning . The teacher has been falsely told that the experimenter is studying the effect of punishment on learning and the punishment , though painful but not fatally dangerous to the learner and also that any responsibility for any kind of harm is solely with the experimenter and the teacher has no responsibility for any loss to the learner . During learning the teacher has to read a list of simple pairs of word to the learner who has to remember the word pairs and during memory testing the learner has to tell the second word of the pair , when the teacher reads the first word . Wrong answer or no answer or refusal to answer will result in penalty , which is giving electrical shock , the magnitude of which will start from 15 volts and will go on increasing in the increments of 15 volts until 450 volt has been reached and 450 volt shock will be given thrice and then the experiment will be considered complete . To give electrical shock , an electrical generator...