Determining not the Length of a Line, but the Greatness of an Article
What makes an article great? Is it the amazement and awe that someone gets from learning something intriguing and new? Or is it how it withstands the test of time? There are many factors that goes into an amazing article and when an article does not meet all of those criteria, are they a complete failure? The article, “Opinions and Social Pressure” by Solomon Asch, published in Scientific American in 1955, was an amazing discovery. After completing research on past experiments that were similar to his own, Asch conducted an experiment that was revolutionary. With eight subjects in total for each experiment, Asch tested the effect social pressure has on an individual. Seven
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When an experiment is conducted there are certain things that have to be done for all of the data to be valid. For instance, there must be controls, and one independent variable that will be tested. While this experiment has the basics, it does not have all portions needed for a truly amazing experiment. This experiment took place in the fifties, which is a very different time. Segregation, and unequal rights between males and females caused the sample to be skewed. A sample of subjects should be random and include individuals from many backgrounds. This experiment uses college age males, presumably Caucasian, due to the time this experiment was conducted, and this is a problem. A female from a low income African American family that is uneducated, and in their thirties would have a totally different reaction to the test than any of the individuals being used in the experiment. Meaning, the data only represents only a small percentage of the human population, while Asch uses it to represent the human population as a whole. This is an outdated way to conduct an experiment and it would not be accepted in science today. Since this article’s main purpose is to present this data it is problematic that the writing is based on a not credible experiment. As well, the data was skewed because not all data was present. Asch states,” The instructed majority occasionally reports correctly in order to reduce the possibility that the naive subject will suspect collusion against him. (In only a few cases did the subject actually show suspicion; when this happened, the experiment was stopped and the results were not counted)” (Asch). This is yet another serious flaw. What Asch has done tampers with the validity of this experiment. It is unknown how many individuals became suspicious, how they would have reacted if they were told there was
State the title of the article, the name of the publication in which it appeared and the date of publication.
The article, “Motivated Rejection of Science” stood out to me because the vast amount of scientific research to back up findings and the vast majority of the population that rejects it. Lewandowsky and Oberauer discuss the prevalence of false beliefs in the general population. They bring up the popular conspiracy theories that have either false or no scientific research, plaguing the minds of many. When the majority of the general population believe in a certain theory – like the vaccines that are ‘linked’ to measles, Autism, mumps, and rubella – the effects can be detrimental. The vaccine craze was felt worldwide and is the best example of misinformation.
She analyzed conversations among her students to find out what helped them in becoming engaged in the classroom discussion. The class she chose as her subject had eleven women and nine men. Tannen said that she observed the class for a good amount of time when she concluded that almost all the men talked in class occasionally. The student who talked the most in class was a woman, but then she mentions almost half of the women did not speak at all in class. Tannen decided to divide her class in ways where she could prove her thesis statement that having both genders in the same classroom is an issue. She analyzed the students, separated them into three groups that are relevant to each, from their degree, gender, and the conversation style that she observed from each student. Naturally, she focused on how the all-woman group became talkative once the men were gone. At this point of her essay, she focused too much on what she was trying to prove with her thesis statement rather than really giving the readers to consider the other side of the story. As Tannen goes on with explaining the experiment she conducted in class, she started to divert with including the ethnicity of some students. The foreign students tend to talk less despite what gender, therefore counting the validity of their contribution out. The information provided towards the end of the essay started to become irrelevant. This part of her essay was very weak, showing some obvious bias as she was sharing the information
The representative sample used in this study was large enough but yet randomized. The reason being was that the researcher used subjects from the ages of 20 through 50 instead of being bias and basing it off of one particular age. Milgram had a diverse of men that were either skilled or unskilled workers, white-collar ages or business-men, and professional men. In addition to the representative sample being randomized, its contribution was from newspapers ads that were posted and the direct-mail solicitation with money being offered. It allowed the men who were interested in this study to
This created an atmosphere where the teacher thought he was really inflicting pain on another individual, which was highly stressful for the volunteers. I definitely think that our current generation of 20 and 50 year old males are more inclined to question authority than the group from 1962. Ethics This experiment is relevant to an ethics course because putting individuals in this type of experiment is traumatic and can cause a high level of stress and unnecessary pain for the volunteer. The volunteers were deceived by the study, believing that they were actually harming another person, and there was potential to cause psychological harm, which is unethical (McLeod, 2007).
The article was effective because of the use of examples to help readers relate to research that many would otherwise find boring.
What determines a good' article from a bad' one? In the Des Moines Register on February 3, there was an article titled, More parents, doctors refuse to put kids on antidepressants," was written by Marilyn Elias. Elias is a well-known writer from USA Today, and has written on topics such as stress, marriage, and health. The article was about the effects on children, ages 18 and younger, taking depression pills. There are many elements that establish a good' article from a bad' one. Some of these elements would be the content, reader, and credibility.
To begin the experiment the Stanford Psychology department interviewed middle class, white males that were both physically and mentally healthy to pick 18 participants. It was decided who would play guards and who would be prisoners by the flip of a coin making nine guards and nine prisoners. The guards were taken in first to be told of what they could and could not do to the prisoners. The rules were guards weren’t allowed t o physically harm the prisoners and could only keep prisoners in “the hole” for a hour at a time. Given military like uniforms, whistles, and billy clubs the guards looked almost as if they worked in a real prison. As for the prisoners, real police surprised them at their homes and arrested them outside where others could see as if they were really criminals. They were then blindfolded and taken to the mock prison in the basement of a Stanford Psychology building that had been decorated to look like a prison where guards fingerprinted, deloused, and gave prisoners a number which they would be calle...
The Tuskegee Study, as exampled in the film “Miss Evers’ Boys,” was a horrendous example of the result of racism, a vulnerable population, and the manipulation of people not given the proper dignity they deserved, to benefit the majority class (Woodard). According to the film, in this study a whole community of African Americans went decades with identified cases of syphilis, being given placebo interventions and unjustifiably told that a later recognized intervention of penicillin shots were too risky for their use. Why would they do this? To gain knowledge; and they viewed the study as a “pure” scientific experiment, a human trial that would likely never be acceptable to have been conducted on Whites of the time, and under the full knowledge and aid of the U.S. government (Woodard, “Miss Evers’ Boys”).
...hers developed and should be used for further investigation of the issue. There were some limitations that should have been examined, however, to make this experiment more effective. One concern is that the sample allocation was not random, because people were able to choose which group they wanted to be in. These individuals could have picked the immediate intervention group because they care more about their health than others in the community. Another issue was the dada analysis because the groups were so vastly different in size and the delayed group did not give an adequate amount of demographic information for comparison. Yet, the researchers did a good job in ethical considerations by guiding their experiment with the principles of principlism. They also had a clear purpose of the research and what problem they were trying to identify and find a solution for.
Asch and Milgram’s experiment was unethical in their methods of not informing the participant of the details surrounding the experiment and the unwarranted stress; their experiment portrayed the circumstances of real life situation surrounding the issues of obedience to authority and social influence. In life, we are not given the courtesy of knowledge when we are being manipulated or influenced to act or think a certain way, let us be honest here because if we did know people were watching and judging us most of us would do exactly as society sees moral, while that may sound good in ensuring that we always do the right thing that would not be true to the ways of our reality. Therefore, by not telling the participants the details of the experiment and inflicting unwarranted stress, Asch and Milgram’s replicated the reality of life. In “Options and Social Pressure” Solomon E. Asch conducts an experiment to show the power of social influence, by using the lengths of sticks that the participants had to match up with the best fit, Asch then developed different scenarios to see how great the power of influence is, but what he discovered is that people always conformed to the majority regardless of how big or small the error was the individual always gave in to the power of the majority.
“Just do it, it’ll be fine.” or things like “Nobody will know, trust me” or even “If you don't do it we can’t be friends anymore.” These are all examples of peer pressure, a problem the whole world faces. Peer pressure is a big problem, and also is in the book Speak too. Peer pressure is the act of peers trying to make you do something, whether it be good or bad. Peer pressure can vary from friends wanting one to help them in doing good deed, or wanting one to do something bad like steal or disobey one’s parents or elders. Peer pressure in the book had put the main character Melinda Sordino through a lot, not knowing where she belonged and who was really there for her throughout the story. Peer pressure in schools and in everyday life of
...hy these 600 black men participated in the study and why did Black professionals allowed this experiment to continue without any objections. it is quite evident that ultimately, the reasons why the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male begun and continued was because of racism. Racism created the economic and social impecunious conditions of the 1930’s that would allow these men to accept their offer. racism created the conditions that would allow black people to “turn the other cheek” as their brothers were being victimized, exploited and murdered. Racism in this case and many other instances of historical racial oppression offered no alternatives.
To what extent do those around us affect the way we think; they we perceive a situation; or they way we form our prerogatives? There are many different trains of thought, some of which are adopted, others of which are taken into account based on experience and periods of introspection, but there is one that lies with it, a fundamental difference in comparison to others: the group mind. To which it involves several individuals, a group mind is in essence, a collective following to a set of beliefs and/or practices, usually brought together through forms of social pressure and preconceived notions of moral obligation. Furthermore, these groups are often characterized by the absence of individualism and a sense of obliviousness towards how their unspoken rules influences their view of the world as a whole. Moreover, group minds also involve social pressures, often enticing some to forsake their opinions to fit the given status quo of the group. Indeed, humans are social creatures that want to feel as if their participation in a group has value, but without the awareness of how social pressures affect their ability to make decisions and how one can overcome such pressure, they are nothing more but mental toxins, or in other words, group minds.
In 1951, Solomon Asch carried out several experiments on conformity. The aim of these studies was to investigate conformity in a group environment situation. The purpose of these experiments was to see if an individual would be swayed by public pressure to go along with the incorrect answer. Asch believed that conformity reflects on relatively rational process in which people are pressured to change their behaviour. Asch designed experiments to measure the pressure of a group situation upon an individual judgment. Asch wanted to prove that conformity can really play a big role in disbelieving our own senses.