A man is running late to work one day when he passes by a homeless person asking for help. This man and many others usually consider this particular man to be generous, but since he is late, he ignores the homeless person and continues on his way. One can assume that if he had the time, he would have helped. Does that matter, though, seeing as in that situation, he did not in fact help? Scenarios like this supports Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett’s idea that it is the situation that influences a person’s behavior, not he or she’s individual conscience. Although a person’s individual conscience could play a part in how one behaves in a given scenario, ultimately, the “situational variable” has more impact on the actions of the person than he or she’s morals.
In “The Power of
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Situations”, Ross and Nisbett makes a reference to an experiment performed by J.M. Barley and C.D. Batson. In this experiment, subjects were students in a religious seminary on their way to a practice sermon. When the subjects were in a hurry, because they thought they were late, 10 percent stopped to help. However, when the subjects had time, 63 percent helped (581). If one was not provided the context of why some stopped and why some did not, one could assume it was the person’s own conscience and morals that influenced the subjects action or inaction. However, it is contextual details like this that is important to take into account when studying human behavior. It did not really matter, in this experiment, what the person’s own conscience was, but the situation that they were in. Social pressure may seem to be an example of individual conscience’s influence, it is actually also an example of how situations have impact on a person’s actions. In “Opinions and Social Pressure”, Solomon E. Asch explains an experiment where he put male students in a classroom and informs them that they would compare the lengths of lines. They were to choose the two lines that were of the same length. All the members of the experiment except one were told to choose the same wrong answer (598). The point of this experiment was to see whether or not the one person would choose the wrong answer after hearing the others choose it, even though they believe otherwise. Asch details his findings: When a subject was confronted with only a single individual who contradicted his answers, he was swayed little: he continued to answer independently and correctly in nearly all the trials. When the opposition was increased to two, the pressure became substantial: minority subjects now accepted the wrong answer 13.6 percent of the time. Under the pressure of a majority of three, the subjects’ errors jumped to 31.8 percent (600). This points to the notion that when this individual was in the situation where his visual judgement seemed to not to match the majority, he ignored his judgement and sided with them. Not because of his conscience, but because in that situation, it seemed to him that he was wrong. In the Milgram Experiment, there is a lot of evidence that supports that situational variables affect the individual’s actions.
The experiment was to see if people would follow the orders of an authority figure, even if the orders that were given proved to cause pain to the person taking the test. In the “Milgram Experiment” by Saul McLeod, he goes into detail about six variations that changed the percentage of obedience from the test subject, for example, one variable was that the experiment was moved to set of run down offices rather than at Yale University. Variables like these changed the results dramatically. In four of these variations, the obedience percentage was under 50 percent (588). This is great evidence that it is the situation that changes the actions of the individual, not he or she’s morals.
Experiments like the Asch Experiment and the Milgram Experiment provides evidence that individual’s conscience really did not have a part in how one behaved in a scenario. These experiments provided evidence that the behavior is situational, and one must have contextual details to understand these findings. Personal conscience did not have effect on behavior, but situational variables
did.
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 "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.
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.
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
Scientist tell people they are doing a test on the effects of punishment on learning, but the real
A former Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram, administered an experiment to test the obedience of "ordinary" people as explained in his article, "The Perils of Obedience". An unexpected outcome came from this experiment by watching the teacher administer shocks to the learner for not remembering sets of words. By executing greater shocks for every wrong answer created tremendous stress and a low comfort levels within the "teacher", the one being observed unknowingly, uncomfortable and feel the need to stop. However, with Milgram having the experimenter insisting that they must continue for the experiments purpose, many continued to shock the learner with much higher voltages.The participants were unaware of many objects of the experiment until
In “ Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments On Obedience” by Diana Baumrind, and in “Obedience” by Ian Parker, the writers claim that Milgram’s Obedience is ethically wrong and work of evil because of the potential harm that the subjects of the experiment had. While Baumrind’s article focused only on the Subjects of the experiment, Parker’s article talked about both immediate and long term response to experiment along with the reaction of both the general public and Milgram’s colleagues, he also talks about the effect of the experiment on Milgram himself. Both articles discuss has similar points, they also uses Milgram’s words against him and while Baumrind attacks Milgram, Parker shows the reader that experiment
Dr. Stanley Milgram conducted a study at Yale University in 1962, in an attempt to understand how individuals will obey directions or commands. This study become known as the Milgram Obedience Study. Stanley Milgram wanted to understand how normal people could become inhumane, cruel, and severely hurt other people when told to carry out an order, in a blind obedience to authority. This curiosity stemmed from the Nazi soldiers in Germany, and how their soldiers could do horrible acts to the Jews. To carry out his study, Dr. Milgram created a machine with an ascending row of switches that were marked with an increasing level of voltage that could be inflicted on another person. Then, he gathered forty random males between the ages of 20 and 50 that lived in the local area. He then told them that this experiment was to see how people learned through pain or punishment rather than without. The teacher volunteer would see the other volunteer or victim put on electronic straps and would not be able to see the person being shocked but could hear them. This setup was fake and the person being shocked had pre-recorded answers and reactions to the ascending row of buttons. The teacher volunteer would ask questions through a headset to the victim volunteer, and whenever a question was answered incorrectly, the teacher would increase the level of
Obedience to authority and willingness to obey an authority against one’s morals has been a topic of debate for decades. Stanley Milgrim, a Yale psychologist, conducted a study in which his subjects were commanded by a person in authority to initiate lethal shocks to a learner; his experiment is discussed in detail in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgrim 77). Milgrim’s studies are said to be the most “influential and controversial studies of modern psychology” (Levine).While the leaner did not actually receive fatal shocks, an actor pretended to be in extreme pain, and 60 percent of the subjects were fully obedient, despite evidence displaying they believed what they were doing was harming another human being (Milgrim 80). Likewise, in Dr. Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, conducted an experiment, explained in his article “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” in which ten guards were required to keep the prisoners from
It stays on track with relevant information from introduction to conclusion, and with practice reading experimental research articles, the reader should have little to no difficulty understanding the language and terminology of the article. The author does an exceptional job explaining how the predicted results and the actual results of the experiment are so different from each other; he offers this concept to the reader through use of numerical data and by discussing how the experimenters believed morals affected obedience prior to and following the experiment. Results are communicated though the use of a table that is easy for any reader, experienced or unexperienced, to understand. The ethical soundness of the study is questionable, however Milgram does highlight some of the precautions taken by the experimenters to assure the well-being of their participants. At the end of the article, he lists multiple possibilities for why the observed amounts of obedience could have been so extreme, however, the article still leaves many questions unanswered. Regardless of the ability of this article to be generalized for an entire population or answer many difficult questions, it still offers insight into an experiment that provided evidence that actions that violate personal moral can be influenced to occur if ordered by some form of authoritative
In the early 1960’s, Stanley Milgram (1963) performed an experiment titled Behavioral Study of Obedience to measure compliance levels of test subjects prompted to administer punishment to learners. The experiment had surprising results. Purpose of the research? Stanley Milgram’s (1963), Behavioral Study of Obedience measured how far an ordinary subject would go beyond their fundamental moral character to comply with direction from authority to punish another person, and at what point would they refuse to obey and end their participation. The subjects and methods used.
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).... ...
The general goal of the experiment was to see how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict another person just because he or she was ordered to do so by an experimental scientist. In his article, "The Perils of Obedeince", Milgram concluded his analysis of the experiment by saying "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority," (Milgram, 1974, p76). Milgram summarized that obedience is a basic behavior element in social life that is deeply ingrained that it override people from acting according to the ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct (Milgram, 1973, p62). The way obedience is set in the modern society leads to the loss of personal responsibility from ordinary citizens. In the society, people are taught to behave legally and morally. However, Milgram argued that learning ethics does not necessarily determine what people will actually do in their real-life situations (Milgram, 1973, p76). To check the experiment 's accuracy, similar experiments were held in different countries such as South Africa,
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...
First of all, Milgram’s research on conformity was an experiment to test and observe the behavior of individuals, to see if there is a controversy between obedience to authority and personal conscience. The results were that about 60% of the participants continued on with the experiment to the highest level of electric shock. This explains that the normal people would more likely to put away their personal conscience to obey an authority figure whom they view as a more powerful one. If I were a participant in Milgram’s research on conformity, I believe I would carry out the order until the end of the experiment. Just like the majority of the participants back then, I would also carry on the order because as the experimenter give out the series