Milgram’s Experiment: Obedience or Emotional Adaptation on Empathy Emotional Scale?

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.