Milgram's Experiment example essay topic

In this essay "If Hitler Asked You to Electrocute a Stranger, Would You? Probably", Philip Meyer (reporter for the Esquire) writes about a social psychologist named Stanley Milgram. Milgram began his career as a psychology professor at Yale University in 1960. He is a Jewish man who was in one way or the other effected by Nazis.

So he planed to prove that Germans were different by scientific experimentation. He wanted to prove that Germans are different because they obeyed Hitler and did his dirty work. So Milgram developed a laboratory experiment to measure obedience level of Americans and Germans. So with the results he could conclude that Germans are more obedient. He was highly motivated to find the truth in his hypothesis mostly because of his Jewish Background. Milgram's experiment was in a play format in which everyone was an actor except for one person.

This person was the subject of the experiment. Obviously this person was not aware of the experiment and thought of it as real life. The experiment worked like this: the subject read an ad asking for volunteers for an experiment. The ad also said the experiment would take about an hour and pay $4.50.

So the subject goes to The Yale Interaction laboratory. Inside He meets two men one of the men is the experimenter who's says he is Jack Williams. The other man looks like a regular citizen. But before the experiment starts the Jack tells both men that if you want to you can leave at any time during the experiment and you still would be paid $4.50.

Then jack begins to explain the experiment. He tells them that it's about learning and negative reinforcement. The negative reinforcement in this experiment is an electric shock. Then Jack puts two pieces of paper in the hat and shakes them.

Both papers say "teacher" but the one subject who is not the actor thinks that the other paper he didn't pick says "learner". After the teacher and the learner are selected they are enlighten more about the experiment. The teacher gives some material to learner to memorize. After the memorization is done the learner will be ask number of question. The teacher will be asked to administer an electric shock of increasing intensity to a "learner" for each mistake he made during the experiment. The range of increasing intensity was from 15 volts up 450 volts max.

Some times when the teachers questioned the experimenter, asking to stop but the experimenter tells him to continue because he takes full responsibility if there was some thing terrible to happen. Teacher seemed to accept the response and continue shocking, even though some were clearly uncomfortable in doing so. After doing the experiments many times Stanley Milgram concluded that Americans are obedient people and he didn't need to take the experiment to Germany.