Don’t Fear the Truth

Shane May 19th, 2008

Image via WikipediaThis story is pretty shocking. The Milgram Experiment was a psychology experiment in 1961, “three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”"

If you don’t want to read the entire thing on wikipedia through the link, here is the abridged version.

A person was told that they were to push a button and give an electric shock to another participant, if that other person answered a question wrong.

As the experiment progressed, the person giving the test told the test subject to increase the voltage, and eventually the other person (who was behind a wall, and not really receiving shocks at all) started to yell and scream in mock pain. The test subject was told four times to continue. If they asked to stop after the administrator had told them to continue four times, the test ended.

The administrator would continue to tell the person to increase the voltage, until the test subject was dishing out the maximum voltage - 450 volts.

Guess what percentage of people continued to push shock the other person, all the way up to 450 volts?

Sixty-five percent. And no person refused to administer the shocks until they hit the 300 volt mark. (Which is interesting since most people, I think, would assume that the power would be based on household power, where 220 volts can kill people…)

The experiment of course, provides evidence that a lot of Nazi’s were not evil - they were just following orders, and even decent people do bad things when told to do so, as this experiment shows.

I have an issue with this. When I read about this experiment, the author stated that it showed humanity was doomed. He assumed this study gave an example of human nature, when to me, this shows how strong societies’ rules are. In another experiment in the 70’s, a teacher told his students to ask someone on a subway for their seat. The test subjects found it almost impossible to do so.

In America, we are taught to respect authority, even more so in 1961, I would think, than today. What if this experiment were performed in a society that taught children that questioning was more important than discipline or being well behaved?

What if our society thought the idea of following one leader was silly? Or if we were taught that to question teachers, parents… the Government was healthy? Amazingly, many people in the US don’t question the government, and we are all taught to do what our teachers tell us in school, mind our parents, etc. In 1961 the disciplinarian mentality was, from what I have heard over the years from people in my parent’s generation, even stronger in our society. My grandfather would tell my father when he was young to ‘respect his elders’ while today kids are taught ‘respect has to be earned’. My grandfather would also tell my father to cut a switch off of the cherry tree (no joke) in the back yard to whip him with when he misbehaved. My father rarely even spanked me as a child. This has to affect our society, wouldn’t you agree?

Also, what about people being involved in an experiment in *Yale* University? If someone came to my home and performed this experiment, I would be much less likely to administer the shocks than I would being in Yale University. People would obviously be more inclined to follow crazy instructions when they thought the people creating the experiment were amongst the most intelligent people in the country. Yet if this experiment were given by just some random person, and you had no idea what his credentials were, you would be much more likely to disagree, and stop the experiment.

I would bet that if this experiment were just given on the street to random people today, the results would be much different. And I think that if it were given in a completely different society, one that promoted the questioning of authority, the results would be drastically different.

Yet when experiments like this are done, the results are given to us as evidence on what humans do, not what society has trained us to do.

• Psychology
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