In the book, Opening Skinner’s Box, by Lauren Slater is a really interesting, mind boggling book. In chapter 2, Obscura, talks about this Yale assistant professor named Stanley Milgram who decides to conduct an experiment on obedience to authority. Milgram himself seemed to have a strong appealing and curiosity to the way people behaved and acted. Stanley loved to experiment on the way humans adapt and react to such situations. He would point up at the sky for no reason, and timed how long it took a huge group of people to look up at nothing happening. He also would write letters, and address them and would drop them on the sidewalk, and would see who would come pick them up, and mail them (Slater, 43). He had a keen sense on human behaviors, …show more content…
He first took a poll on how his experiment would turn out. He asked residents of New Haven, Yale undergraduates, and a group of psychiatrists how they thought a group of people would behave in this situation he wanted to enact. They all told him the same answer, and predicted that every person who was to be involved in this experiment would not go all the way and shock someone all the way up to 450 volts (Slater, 40). He ended up with the result of 65% were obedient, and the other 35% were defiant. Why didn’t the 35% carry out the experiment? Why were they able to stop themselves, when the other 65% were not? These are all questions Milgram had after coming up with these results. No psychologist can answer this. After he tested these subjects, and had the results, he then called them back to test them on how they’re childhoods were, and how they were brought up. He wanted to see if maybe he could find the answer to the results he got. He got little help from this. All he came up with is that Catholics were more obedient than the …show more content…
She found that the person, who was defiant for the experiment, was a soldier who murdered Japs, and didn’t feel ashamed for it. He also kept Milgram’s cover and never told a soul about his experiment, even though it was an atrocious experiment. She also found out, that the person who was obedient in the experiment lived a great, normal life. After being in this type of observation, this subject felt that it helped him with life. He found how easily he was manipulated in such a test, that he began to become stern with himself and learned to deal with such expectations. It caused him to live life less according to authority. Tons of letters, from past participants, were mailed to Milgram, which he kept in a black binder. A former student of his, named Harold Takooshian, recalls of it. Written in the letters, were subjects saying how the experiment taught them about how to live life, and what it’s about. They said it caused them to rethink their ways to responsibility and authority (Slater,
In conclusion, I believe the way Slater presents her evidence is very convincing. She makes it a point to explain all of the controversial points that surround Stanley Milgram and his experiments. While we might not agree on all of her points, we both share the thought that Milgram and his experiments have affected positively despite the issues of its purpose, results, usefulness, and morality shroud the experiments in
Homework: Research Design Analysis and Critique Section C. Critique of Research Design (70%) This critique is on “Behavioural study of obedience” article by Stanley Milgram from Yale University. This article is an extract from the journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378. Milgram conducted an experiment in the year 1961 to study the struggle between obedience behaviour and conscience of a person. Based on his study, he wanted to analyse whether obedience to an authority can be destructive in a laboratory experiment.
He led his men to issue a code red on a marine who was underperforming due to health concerns. The group went along with it. They followed the leader just like the experiment has shown. Not only were the soldiers following orders from an authoritative figure, but they did it without any questions as they are trained to do so. This therefore shows the relation of obedience by respecting authority, between the Stanley Milgram shock experiment, and A Few Good
This Milgram research on respect to authority figures was a series of cultural science experiments conducted by Yale University scientist Stanley Milgram in 1961. They assessed the willingness of survey participants, men from a different variety of jobs with varying degrees of training, to obey the authority figure who taught them to do acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to think that they were helping an unrelated research, in which they had to distribute electrical shocks to the individual. These fake electrical shocks gradually increased to grades that could have been deadly had they been true. McLeod's article about the Milgram experiment exposed the fact that a high percentage of ordinary people will
In the video of the Stanley Milgram Experiment People were given roles as teachers and students. The students had been hooked up to an electrical system were they had been received questions and whenever they had answered incorrectly they received a dosage of electricity and got progressively got stronger each time they were wrong. At a certain point the student stopped responding to pain and the scientist had kept making them give a voltage. Some People discontinued the experiment.
In the experiment, Milgram uses purposeful deception as the teacher is the naive subject and is told they are participating in a memory and learner psychology experiment and are in charge of delivering shocks to the learner, who, in fact, is an actor. The majority of the participants in the study were obedient to the experimenter even though the experimenter "did not threaten the subjects with punishments such as loss of income, community ostracism or jail for failure to obey. Neither could he offer incentives" (Milgram 651). Despite having nothing to gain, the subjects continued participating in the experiment. The participants continued to administer shocks to the student because they were instructed to
1. What rationale do the author(s) give for conducting the study? The author that is conducting this research is testing the obedience of a subject when dealing with “stocking a victim” by use of a shock generator. There are thirty levels of shock that are generated varying from a slight shock to a severe shock.
To Milgram’s surprise, the pilot study showed a 60 percent fully obedient rate, far different than what most had predicated. However, this pilot was dismissed as “irrelevant” by one of his colleagues on the basis that Yale students are highly aggressive and competitive by nature. Milgram then moved on to regular experiments drawing his subjects from regular New Haven society by way of newspaper advertisements. Subjects ranged from white collar professionals to the unemployed, although all were male, and the results were the same as the experiment with the Yale students.
He saw that the more personal, or close, the real participant had to be to the fake one, while they were being shocked, affected the obedience as well. He also noticed that if there were two other fake participants teaching that refused to shock their learners that the real participant would not comply. Finally, he tested the experimenter telling the real patient to shock the learner by telephone, instead of actually being there in person, reduced obedience as well (McLead). The Milgram experiment and the Nuremburg trials can relate extensively to explain how the Holocaust happened the way it did.
There are many ways to find out how individuals would react in certain situations, for example, by putting individuals in a simulation. Causing stress and discomfort to individuals in order to gain knowledge is at times necessary. For example, Stanley Milgram’s experiments which focus on obedience to authority and the extent a person is willing to ignore their own ethical beliefs and cause pain to another individual, just because he is ordered to do so. Stanley Milgram writes about his experiments and results in his article “The Perils of Obedience”. In his experiments Stanley Milgram causes subjects who have volunteered to be a part of them some stress and discomfort in order to receive relevant results.
The Milgram experiment and the society Speaking of one of the most renowned psychological experiment, which even replications on TV are done, is the Milgram experiment, on obedience to authority figures. It involves the measurement of how much participants will to obey the authority, in order to explain the reason why soldiers obeyed to allow the Holocaust, the homicides of millions of Jews, happened. With the participants’ roles as a teacher to punish a learner by incrementing degrees of electric shocks, though they didn’t know it’s staged, 65% of them did it to the last under the horrendous moans and the commands of the experimenters, which surpassed the expectation of 1.2%. Milgram himself elaborated two theories, encompassing theory of
(Russell 2014) Conclusion: Despite controversy Milgram’s experiment was ground breaking. It remains relevant today and is frequently cited in demonstrating the perils of obedience.
On day six Zimbardo and Milgram decided to conclude the experiment. Zimbardo originally intended to explore how prisoners adapt to powerlessness, but he has contended that the experiment demonstrates how swiftly arbitrary assignment of power can lead to abuse. (Maher, The anatomy of obedience. P. 408) Once the experiment was completed Zimbardo and Milgram concluded that generally people will conform to the roles they are told to play.
The Milgram experiment was conducted to analyze obedience to authority figures. The experiment was conducted on men from varying ages and varying levels of education. The participants were told that they would be teaching other participants to memorize a pair of words. They believed that this was an experiment that was being conducted to measure the effect that punishment has on learning, because of this they were told they had to electric shock the learner every time that they answered a question wrong. The experiment then sought out to measure with what willingness the participants obeyed the authority figure, even when they were instructed to commit actions which they seemed uncomfortable with.
In the article of “The Perils of Obedience”, written by Stanley Milgram, the experimenter explains that the experiment is to see how far a person could hurt a victim in a situation where he is ordered to do so. Also, in the article “The Stanford Prison