Abstract
This article has given efforts to analyze and interpret one of the most famous psychological experiments, conducted by Stanley Milgram, in the light of understanding of nature and characteristics of emotions. Milgram’s famous experiment is actually a series of experiments that started in the summer of 1961, at the Linsly-Chittenden hall of Yale University. This quintessential series of experiments revealed a very significant, yet shocking and unwelcome nature of the human psych. But there is no experimental proof that can explain the true reasons lying behind the results of this experiment. It has been inferred by different authors differently in the course of time. Milgram himself explained this as a fact of obedience in the lattice of the hierarchical social structure. Is it the singular factor? In this project, we will try to interpret it from another angle – that is basic nature and properties of individual emotions and their adaptive processes. We will see not only the matter of obedience, but a variety of factors – namely, magnitude of different emotions, previous adaptational states on different emotional scales, gradual adaptational processes, pressure of conformity to social and cultural norms, obligations coming from individual moral built, and finally genetical compositions of individual persons – all created a bidirectional force having its components acting in opposite directions. And the net product or sum of this bidirectional force ultimately expressed in a person’s action and behaviour that was observed in Milgram’s experiments.
Highlights
In 1961, Stanley Milgram at Yale University conducted a study which is regarded as one of the most famous psychological experiments of all time as well as one of the most shocking and unwelcome revelation of the human nature.In this study, Milgram showed how an ordinary person under pressure of situational determinants can behave cruelly, and inflict mortal harm to another person
Though the power of authority exerted by the experimenter on subject's mind was not so great to be the single factor to produce the unexpected outcome of the experiment, yet it had been very important in that sense that it helped in smooth progression of emotional adaptational process on 'empathy' emotional scale
In a case where adaptive range (AR) is settled on the negative side of the emotional scale, the person will be less empathetic to stimuli and will suffer from less mental distress to be adapted to ultimate stimulus, as the adaptation process will have to proceed for a shorter course (Figure 9)
Summary
In 1961, Stanley Milgram at Yale University conducted a study which is regarded as one of the most famous psychological experiments of all time as well as one of the most shocking and unwelcome revelation of the human nature. Signing the contract and pledging to help the experimenter for the sake of science further bound the subjects to that state where they lost the liberty to act upon their own, and where breaking off from the allegiance was considered socially disapproved and supposed to confer shame and discredit upon the subjects Within this ambience, even if the subjects felt their own intentions and mental tendencies were going against the proceedings of the experiment, yet they found it difficult to get them out of the situation, and continued to carry out the experimenter's commands. Milgram excluded conformity as a possible reason of the result as mutually countervailing demands, both from the experimenter and from the learner, to conform in favour of them in the experiment nullified or zeroed its effect [4] It depended on the closeness of the persons in the experiment. In experiment 5, the subject and the experimenter were in the same room whereas the learner was in the other room; but in experiments, where the subject and the learner were in the same room, the obedience to the experimenter certainly fell
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