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Stanley milgram's obedience study
Social influence on behavior
Stanley milgram's obedience study
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Jacob Finco 2nd Period Slater, L. (2005). Opening Skinner’s box: Great psychological experiments of the twentieth century. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Laura Slater explains Stanley Milgram's’ experiments with obedience to authority by first beginning with a hypothetical personal experience that breaks down the experiment in a first person perspective. This perspective humanizes an experiment that tests how far people would go when told, and in the end the results were scary. The entire experiment was based on the fact that there was a “learner” and a “teacher”. The teacher asks questions, and whenever the learner gives the incorrect answer, they receive an ever increasing shock, eventually leading to death if it went that far. People
who took place in the experiment were always the teacher, and the learner and instructor were both paid actors. The teachers were hesitant, scared, and nervous, but the instructor who was overseeing the experiment would urge them on, and the teacher would continue on. In the end, 65% of participants escalated to a lethal level of 450 volts, and all of the participants went to 300 volts. Very few ended up backing out, and when Slater interviews one that does back out, it was because he himself had a heart problem, not because what he was doing was wrong. The next experiment that was discussed was Rosenhan’s experiment “On Being Sane in Insane Places”. Rosenhan tested the hypothesis that psychiatrists cannot tell the difference between sane and insane people. To examine this, Rosenhan and four others attempted to be sent to different psychiatric hospitals around the United States. They told the psychiatrists that they heard a voice that said “thud”, and were all admitted. Immediately after admission, they stopped pretending to have any symptoms and told staff that they were feeling fine and were ready to leave. The “patients” remained hospitalized for an average of 19 days, and all except for one were diagnosed with schizophrenia. One interesting fact was that other patients that actually had mental illnesses could tell that the people performing the experiment had nothing wrong with them. However, this was only the primary portion of the experiment. After criticism, Rosenhan was challenged to send a random number of pseudo-patients
Milgram’s experiment basically states, “Be that as it may, you’d still probably commit heinous acts under the pressure of authority.” He also, found that obedience was the highest when the person giving the orders was nearby and was perceived as an authority figure, especially if they were from a prestigious institution. This was also true if the victim was depersonalized or placed at a distance such as in another room. Subjects were more likely to comply with orders if they didn’t see anyone else disobeying if there were no role models of defiance.
In Chapter 4, In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing, the author Lauren Slater starts the chapter off telling the true story of how a young woman, Kitty Genovese, was brutally murdered and raped outside of her apartment complex. What was most shocking in the aftermath is there were a total of 38 witnesses and not a single person did anything to help her. This raised many concerns as to why the witnesses did nothing. When they were being interviewed by the cops, they stated that they just did not want to get involved(p.94), thus “diffusing responsibility”, this is a term used by two psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane, who were very concerned with and wanted to understand why nothing was done to aid young Kitty Genovese as she was being stabbed and raped.
In "The Perils of Obedience," Stanley Milgram conducted a study that tests the conflict between obedience to authority and one's own conscience. Through the experiments, Milgram discovered that the majority of people would go against their own decisions of right and wrong to appease the requests of an authority figure. The study was set up as a "blind experiment" to capture if and when a person will stop inflicting pain on another as they are explicitly commanded to continue. The participants of this experiment included two willing individuals: a teacher and a learner. The teacher is the real subject and the learner is merely an actor.
Dalrymple states that he obeyed his superior because she was more knowledgeable over her job (256). The Milgram experiment demonstrates how ordinary people act towards authority in certain situations. Dalrymple accurately utilizes that point by describing when a boy is turned in for trying to steal a car and then the parents proceed to yell at the guards. The guards began to stop reporting kids because they wanted to avoid the conflict all together (257). Parker agrees with Dalrymple by explicating that the experimenter alludes to conflict when the teacher wants to discontinue the experiment, but stumbles to rebel when dictated to continue (238). Parker’s solution is to offer a button for the teachers to press when they are no longer able to continue the experiment (238).
At first Milgram believed that the idea of obedience under Hitler during the Third Reich was appalling. He was not satisfied believing that all humans were like this. Instead, he sought to prove that the obedience was in the German gene pool, not the human one. To test this, Milgram staged an artificial laboratory "dungeon" in which ordinary citizens, whom he hired at $4.50 for the experiment, would come down and be required to deliver an electric shock of increasing intensity to another individual for failing to answer a preset list of questions. Meyer describes the object of the experiment "is to find the shock level at which you disobey the experimenter and refuse to pull the switch" (Meyer 241). Here, the author is paving the way into your mind by introducing the idea of reluctance and doubt within the reader. By this point in the essay, one is probably thinking to themselves, "Not me. I wouldn't pull the switch even once." In actuality, the results of the experiment contradict this forerunning belief.
Obedience is when you do something you have been asked or ordered to do by someone in authority. As little kids we are taught to follow the rules of authority, weather it is a positive or negative effect. Stanley Milgram, the author of “The perils of Obedience” writes his experiment about how people follow the direction of an authority figure, and how it could be a threat. On the other hand Diana Baumrind article “Review of Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience,” is about how Milgram’s experiment was inhumane and how it is not valid. While both authors address how people obey an authority figure, Milgram focuses more on how his experiment was successful while Baumrind seems more concerned more with how Milgram’s experiment was flawed and
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.
... More people followed their direct orders and continued shocking the learners to the very highest voltage. Stanley Milgram’s experiment shows societies that more people abide by the rules of an authority figure under any circumstances rather than follow their own natural instincts. With the use of his well-organized article that appeals to the general public, direct quotes and real world examples, Milgram’s idea is very well-supported. The results of the experiment were in Milgram’s favor and show that people are obedient to authority figures.
Memory is an important information for a student in which it has a capability to recall and learn from the past experiences that influence student's behavior. According to Lauren Slater's book "Opening Skinner's Box states that, "Memory is narrative that gives continuity and meaning to our existence"(216). For it is a memory that has a unique abilities and meaning to a students that wherever they go, they see memories that become their extensions of knowledge and identity. Since students has a capability to recall memory, they also have a capability to forget memories that will benefit them from learning. On the other hand, psychologists provides information through experimentation on how human works when positive reinforcement is presented.
In Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” Milgram explains his own study on the effects authority has on levels of obedience. Milgram designed the experiment in order to recognize the subjects as “teachers,” and actors as “learners,” with another actor posing as an "experimenter.” (Milgram 78). Milgram required the teacher to read a list of word pairs to a learner and to test their remembrance afterward (78). As Milgram explains in his essay, each time the learner answers incorrectly, the teacher is required by the experimenter to flip a switch on an electric shock generator. The author illustrates that the experimenter implies that the teacher is electrically shocking the learner; however, no shocks are actually inflicted. Diana Baumrind
Milgram’s studies on obedience to authority as well as obedience under extreme stress, paved a way to understanding the human psyche and how we handle choices we do not understand. As human beings we are given from a very young age a set of morals and standards we choose to live by. We see our parent’s successes and failures and we base the choices we make on what made them happy, and what will in the long run, bring us the same joy. From the beginning of the experiment you can see the pressure he starts everyone under. Where he chooses to begin his testing tells you a lot about what he was wanting them all to feel. A very rundown, dark, empty building with prison cell like rooms with sparse walls. Pipes showing and most likely a musty smell
Stanley Milgram is well known for his work with obedience to authority. His work, “The Perils of Obedience,” studied whether average individuals would obey an authority figure, telling them to do something that harms another individual.
Summary of the Experiment In Stanley Milgram’s ‘The Perils of Obedience’, Milgram conducted experiments with the objective of knowing “how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist" (Milgram 317). In the experiments, two participants would go into a warehouse where the experiments were being conducted and inside the warehouse, the subjects would be marked as either a teacher or a learner. A learner would be hooked up to a kind of electric chair and would be expected to do as he is being told by the teacher and do it right because whenever the learner said the wrong word, the intensity of the electric shocks increased. Similar procedure was undertaken on the teacher and the results of the experiments showed conclusively that a large number of people would go against their personal conscience in obedience to authority (Milgram 848).... ...
Factors such as institutional authority, people’s attitude change after the experiment, participants’ interaction with the experimenters or the confederates may play an important role in the results of Milgram’s experiment. People or even social psychologists can also be vulnerable to the situational factors and thus conform or obey.
In 1961, Stanley Milgram, a Yale University Psychologist conducted a variety of social psychology experiments on obedience to authority figures. His experiments involved three individuals, one of them was a volunteer who played the role of the teacher, one was an actor who played the role of the student, and one was the experimenter who played the role of the authority. The teacher was instructed by the authority to administrate shocks to the student (who claimed to have a heart condition) whenever they answered a question incorrectly. The voltage of the shock would go up after every wrong answer. The experimenter would then instruct the teacher to administrate higher voltages even though pain was being imposed. The teacher would then have to make a choice between his morals and values or the choice of the authority figure. The point of the experiment was to try to comprehend just how far an individual would continue when being ordered by an individual in a trench coat to electrically shock another human being for getting questions incorrect. The experiment consisted of administrating pain to different people and proved that ordinary people will obey people with authority. Some of the various reasons are that the experimenter was wearing a trench coat, fear of the consequences for not cooperating, the experiments were conducted in Yale University a place of prestige, and the authority f...