Stanley Milgram conducted the obedience study in the early 1960s. It closely related to the conformity research because it showed how far people were willing to go to obey authority figures. He was a graduate assistant at Yale and considered his mentor his most important scientific influence even though Milgram’s research went far beyond his mentor’s. Milgram recruited white and blue collar workers at random to participate in his study. They were told they would be learning the effects of punishment on learning. Each volunteer was initially met by a stern man in a lab coat upon arrival and introduced to the subject of the experiment. The subject was an old man with heart problems strapped to a machine. The volunteers were then taken to another room and shown a shock generator which could induce 50 volts of electricity. They would be the teachers and the subject would be the learner. They were instructed to ask the learner questions and if he got it incorrect to flip the switch activating the shock generator. The learner’s screams were pre-taped to give the illusion that it was real. In most cases the teacher did what the instructor told them to do. Milgram’s last day of the study was taped and it showed two-thirds of the participants followed instructions and raised voltage to their highest levels. However, it was shown that they hesitated and felt uncomfortable doing it. Compliance was found to be higher when the subjects face could not be seen and lower when other people defying experiment were in the room as well. Milgram concluded that high percentages of people will cause pain to others in order to obey authority.
Phillip Zimbardo was a psychologist at Stanford University and he conducted the prison experiment. Zimbardo turned his office at Stanford into a prison with laboratory rooms being made as sales in the closet was turned into solitary confinement so. He then recruited the most psychologically stable people from Stanford’s campus for...
