Obscura: An Analysis In Opening Skinner 's Box, the author uses an assortment of imaginative scenarios in order to foster a more interesting narrative in the readers mind. In my opinion, this technique is a hit and miss, as it can alternately grasp your imagination and make the author seem very incredible. This chapter is an intriguing look at famous psychological experiments, but is overall weakened by the authors rampant imagination. When Slater describes an imaginary scene, like saying the odor in the air is of something rotting, she is plainly trying to foreshadow in her history made fictitious story. Her credibility is besmirched in her attempt to make the history more interesting, as she is preemptively trying to bias the reader. However, …show more content…
Although this can often be a clever tool to use in order to get readers to think for themselves, I think that in this aspect as well she has gone too far. In attempting to provoke thought, she has left the chapter unfortunately devoid of many hard facts. Her highly subjective interviews and imaginary scenarios point to many different directions, but that is not what the point of the rest of her book is. In this she is attempting to present, wholesale, a scarring and shocking experiment on human nature, but she does not present enough of the context and subsequent debunking/reinforcement that surely occurred after the experiment. Surely progress has been made in this area after 1968, but she does not see fit to reference or explain it. Of course, her technique is very useful in other parts of the book, in which she does not go over board in order to shock and …show more content…
This is done well, but it also shows of course a rather biased view of the situation. In the only interview mentioned, we find an unflattering portrait of a person who stopped the shocking experiments. Nothing about the descriptions present him in a positive light, and we eventually figure out that he stopped the experiment out of fear for his own heart. The reader is then left to draw their own conclusions. Reasonably, one can assume that the reader reaches the idea that most people don 't help others out of altruism, and that this experiment reveals a dark part of the human psyche and soul. However, the experiment is at it 's root flawed by both cultural and authoritative expectations. As the author goes on to say in later chapters, there is a very high chance that if two people are alone in a expectation-less environment one will help the other. As a contrast, in this experiment most people assume that the scientist, the only person with the full knowledge of what is going on, knows best. And why wouldn 't they? Most people trust doctors to give them shots, and if they hear someone having a fit, they can be relatively assured the doctors will take care of it. They would not shove the doctors aside and attempt to help by themselves, because they would default to the person with the most knowledge about the situation to make a thoughtful and informed
However, all of the participants continued to administer up to three-hundred volts. These were everyday “normal” people that functioned successfully in society. Slater had the opportunity to interview one of the participants of Milgram’s experiment, one which happened to follow through with the shocks all the way to the very last one. During the interview the participant stated, “You thought you were really giving shocks, and nothing can take away from you the knowledge of how you acted” (Slater, 59). These words came from the mouth of an “average joe” that never knew what he was capable of before the experiment. With these words, we are reminded that we are not as “nice” as we’d like to think we
Respect for Subjects, as defined by the U.S government, is to “show respect to human subjects, researchers must continue to check the well-being of each subject as the study proceeds. Researchers should remove subjects from the study if it becomes too risky or harmful.” (Emanuel et al. p.7, ¶7-8). The means that the doctors must keep checking on the subjects and must be removed if it was dangerous. Charlie wasn’t removed from the experiment even though it becomes harmful to him. This is why the study violates the principle of Respect for Subjects, as it doesn’t benefit Charlie, making this experiment treacherous. “I have already begun to notice signs of emotional instability and forgetfulness, the first symptoms of the burnout.” (Keyes June 5, ¶8). Charlie is struggling and is getting worse by the day, and Dr. Strauss and Nemur are not taking any action into it. At the same time, these doctors are still keeping Charlie in the experiment even though he is at discomfort. Later on in the passage, Charlie is at distress. “Deterioration progressing. I have become absentminded.” (Keyes June 10, ¶1). Charlie symptoms are getting worse progressively just because he recieved the experiment. He is returning back to his original state. In the story, Fair Subject Selection was clearly not applied to the experiment as is didn’t follow the regulation. The main reason why this
The Asch and Milgram’s experiment were not 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 detail of the experiment and inflicting unwarranted stress Asch and Milgram’s were
They needed healthy men, and I am somewhat healthy, so I just had to do it. I had to talk to others to see what is happening in their point of view, and I also had to see their opinion about these things. I figured that I needed to talk to a man named Dr. Waldo. Since he was a doctor, I asked him what was happening, what he saw. The look on his face was unbearable to stand, anyone who looked at him would be terrified at what he was about to say. He told me that it was a terrifying experience, and that 1,800 to 2,500 men were dying in December-June, he also said that there were many diseases such as smallpox ( when Dr. Waldo was experimenting, I was one of them to be experimented on, and now I’m immune to it), dysentery, typhoid, and pneumonia.(Busch, 147) By then, even I was shaking, I knew that it would be hard, but it was a risk that I was willing to
Upon analyzing his experiment, Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, concludes that people will drive to great lengths to obey orders given by a higher authority. The experiment, which included ordinary people delivering “shocks” to an unknown subject, has raised many questions in the psychological world. Diana Baumrind, a psychologist at the University of California and one of Milgram’s colleagues, attacks Milgram’s ethics after he completes his experiment in her review. She deems Milgram as being unethical towards the subjects he uses for testing and claims that his experiment is irrelevant to obedience. In contrast, Ian Parker, a writer for New Yorker and Human Sciences, asserts Milgram’s experiments hold validity in the psychological world. While Baumrind focuses on Milgram’s ethics, Parker concentrates more on the reactions, both immediate and long-term, to his experiments.
Nicholas Carr has many strong points in his article. He successfully proves that what he has to say is worthy of his readers time, and that maybe we should all take caution to how much time we spend on the
Saunders explores this concept by presenting the reader with two characters: Jeff, a criminal, and Abnesti, the head scientist of the testing facility. Abnesti is introduced as a nonchalant, goal oriented scientist. To test the effectiveness of ED289/290, he threatens to use Darkenfloxx™ on the subjects’ former romantic partners. Darkenfloxx™ is a drug of torture. It floods the brain with an overwhelming amount of negative emotions. It is so potent in its effect that it is worse than if one were to “imagine the worst you have ever felt, times ten” (56). At first this is simply a bluff, yet when he is told to actually administer the drug, he recognizes the order merely as a slightly unpleasant turn of events. After Heather unexpectedly dies after only five minutes of Darkenfloxx™-inflicted torture, his excuse is, “This is science. In science we explore the unknown. It was unknown what five minutes on Darkenfloxx would do to Heather. Now we know” (72). As well as serving as the story’s main antagonist, Abnesti is symbolic of scientific progress in general. The Darkenfloxx™ incident, especially, paints him as an unsympathetic man with a stubborn moral code, but his definition of morality emphasizes the “group”—or society at large—over the individual prisoners whom he experiments on. Despite this, Abnesti is not altogether evil. He reminds Jeff, “When a certain
In the chapter Obscura, Milgram’s experiment of compelling participants to shock other people with what they believed to be potentially deadly amounts of electricity was, and is, viewed as controversial. The controversies were based upon moral, methodological and transferable-relevancy arguments. There were claims that Milgram himself was immoral, and that his experiments illustrated him as such. There were other claims that the environment and circumstances set by the experiment were so linear that they could not possibly represent the complexities we all face in daily life. Whatever the flaws of the experiment or experimenter may be, I think there are moral lessons that this controversy helps reinforce.
To conclude, I can continue to go on about the caste system, racism, and war on drugs. The point is that racism continues to exist and the rebirth of the caste, continues to exist it never went away. People just did not do as much, but now is more obvious than ever. The clear examples she introduce and statistic show and support the statement of the “rebirth of the caste”. In my opinion, I found the book interesting; and statistic surprising from class and the book. Things continue to go bad in the United States. When are we going to do something about it! This book shows the effects of the
Watson did not debrief either Albert or his parents about the nature of the study. The study’s purpose was to induce an emotional response of fear into this young child. Watson both physically and mentally harmed the child, possibly leaving Albert emotionally traumatized by the experiment. To add,
...ed and as safe as possible it still failed. I believe that this book hit its mark completely. Any procedure not properly introduced, researched, and carried out has the potential to fail and we as educated people need to be aware of this fact. Any small or large experiment could fall through and prove fatal to anyone. It scares most people to think about the fact that at any time our world could change as we know it. Utopia is unachievable simply because there is no such thing as perfect.
1938) In his time, B. F. Skinner attempted to make a lot of changes in modern
Concluding thoughts on this book are as follows. The author does a supreme job organizing the topics in this book rationally. He takes things that would seem obvious to others in relation to a particular topic, and describes them so in depth that it is almost as though a personal epiphany is reached in each section. To put it plainly, this book just makes sense. Nothing in it had the feel of new information; rather it takes old information and applies it perfectly to pertaining topics. The author does a lot to ensure that all of his arguments are grounded in logic and reasoning rather than in facts and figures. Granted he does use history to prove many points, but for many others he makes arguments that just seem sensible. This book, however difficult to read due to a wide use of vocabulary, is very thought provoking and should be read by anybody who has ever sought justification for the way societies act in different situations.
During the chapter he talks about certain topics, such as the war on poverty and sex education, and broke each one down with the four stages. I had a particular interest on the topic of sex education. I agreed with Sowell about the “Crisis” with the sex education within schools. He mentioned hoe pregnancy and disease was done in the 60’s than it had been in the fifties. Usually when society makes a fuss, it could do the opposite affect than help the situation. It seems when sex education was permitted into schools, which more sex started to happen. Although that may have not been the intent, but unfortunately it did not help the problem, that was never a real problem.
Skinner believed that the best way to understand behavior is to look at the causes of the action and its consequences. He coined the phrase operant conditioning. His experiments thought us that behaviors that are reinforced tend to be repeated and the ones not reinforced tend fade away. He was able to prove is his theory with famous “skinner box”. This experiment used animals to show if given reinforcements like food they behavior will repeat. When the animal was given a punishment or negative reinforcement the animal was less likely to do it again. This experiment still holds true today. While educators do not put their students in a box and give them electrical shocks when they are wrong, They do however promote good behaviors such as the token economy, where they provide gold stars on a big board which will condition the kids to want to get the stars for a special treat at the end of the specified time. Teachers now focus more on positive reinforcement rather than punishment. It tends to reap better benefits.