1

Difference Between the Two Experiments by Stanley Milgram

In the articles ‘Behavioral Study of Obedience and The Perils of Obedience’, subjects

were instructed to deliver electric shocks of increasing severity to another person and observed

both submissive and defiant responses. In both experiments, the shock was designated to the

learner but in moral or immoral demands of authority in the vice versa experiment. And the

teacher was the suspect in both experiments.

In both experiments, the teacher is a certainly naïve subject who came to the laboratory

for an experiment. The learner or victim is an actor who has not experienced any shock at all.

The purpose of both experiments is the same, but it is performed differently with different

demands. Certainly, the purpose is to see how far a person would go in a concrete and

measurable situation where he was authorized to inflict increasing pain on protesting victims.

In the article “The Perils of Obedience” two people come together in a psychology

laboratory to study memory and learning. It presents an experiment designed by Yale University

psychologist Stanley Milgram. He set up this experiment to see how much pain a person can give

to another person when the person is freely ordered to inflict the shock at any level from a little

too severe on any other person. Different groups were tested in this experiment students from

high school, adults, and many other groups. After the experiment, many people have shown the

aggression (violent behaviour) that they might have experienced in their lives. Similarly, they

have seen the slightest high aggression in middle-class adults maybe because they have seen a lot

in their life and they might have struggled a lot, so they take out all on another person. Therefore,

they did the same, they inflicted the highest level of shock on another person because they had
 2

the power to do so. Experimentally, many people obeyed the immoral demands of authority by

disobeying their moral values.

In the article “Behavioral Study of Obedience” experiments examine whether

individuals are willing to follow orders from authorities when those orders conflict with an

individual’s moral judgement. As the subject is the same as in another article described above,

but they have their different purpose. In this article, the teacher is authorized to select

specifically the electric shock level in a row. The teacher has been tested to see if he or she keeps

going on with the experiment by obeying the orders given to them even if the learner is begging

to stop or if they disobey the authority by obeying their moral values.

Since both articles are relating some of the same purposes but they have sort of

different rules in it to experiment. Both experiments have been performed to see how far a

person can go to obey the rules but both experiments were designed differently. In conclusion,

both articles from Stanley Milgram’s point of view suggested that people were willing to obey

authority, but after experiments, it has been shown that obedience was not necessary.