The Memory Experiment

Solomon Asch, a social psychologist conducted an experiment on the influence of

The teacher would be the lab rat thinking he was administering a shock for each fallacious response, and with each erroneous reply the shock would intensify. The astonishing fact was all participants would continue to 300 volts, which would precipitate extreme torment. Furthermore, two-thirds would proceed on to shock the learner with 450 volts, which would result in death, hypothetically.

The experimenter is there to encourage the teacher to continue. The learner gave wrong answers purposely to see how far an ordinary American citizen would go just because a legitimate authority figure told them to. The experimenter had four prods to make the teacher continue. Despite hearing the screams of the learner, the teacher or participants would continue because they were given orders by an authority figure. The experiment resulted in 65% of the participants going to the maximum voltage of 450 volts, which would kill the learner.

There are several types of memory. They include explicit, episodic, semantic, implicit, and procedural memory. Explicit memory is one of the two main divisions of long-term memory. It consists of all information that requires consciously remembered. An example of explicit memory is remembering what was done in class the day before or a sibling being born. Episodic memory is a memory of an autobiographical experience. It is a type of explicit memory. Normally, these memories are emotional and in great detail. A personal episodic memory for me is the Henryville tornado on March 2, 2012 which destroyed my elementary school. This memory for me is episodic because it was very emotional and I can remember almost every detail. Another type of explicit memory is semantic. It includes a person’s memory

The purpose of the experiment was to see if the teacher, the one being tested, would be willing to shock the student and eventually kill him if told to do so by an authority figure. The teacher would ask a question to the student and if answered incorrectly the teacher had to shock the student by pressing a button. The more questions the student answered incorrectly the higher the voltage. The catch to it was that the student was actually not getting shocked, but screamed as if he was to see if the teacher would eventually stop. The voltage started from as low as 15 and went up as high as 450.

Throughout experiment 12-13, Milgram wondered if the person who gives the orders would change; would the amount of obedience increase? His results indicated that yes, the amount of obedience increased. In experiment 12, the learner demands to continue with the experiment. However, the experimenter told the subject to stop at 150 volts. 100% of the subjects obeyed the experimenter while discarding the learners plead to continue.

Then, the participants were fully debriefed about the situation and how no physical harm was inflicted. Generally, “the obedience experiments produced a disturbing view of human behavior” (Blass, Print). The procedure heavily relied on the experimenter because the participant, upon instinct, chose to turn to them when in doubt or when showing nervousness. They were always commanded to continue the

Name : Muhammed Irshad Madonna ID : 250509 Subject : Medical Ethics Due Date : 8/01/2018 Paper : 1-The Milgram Experiment The Stanley Milgram Experiment is a famous study about obedience in psychology which has been carried out by a Psychologist at the Yale University named, Stanley Milgram. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. In July 1961 the experiment was started for researching that how long a person can harm another person by obeying an instructor.

He signed up just like I did without knowing what he was in for. If there were any signs of hesitation the experimenter would urge "teachers" to continue by saying "You must go on. The experiment requires that you continue. " If the "teacher" failed to comply the experimenter would tell them that they had no choice but to continue. Some of the "teachers" were very upset by this statement, I would be

the student is unconscious/dead). Milgram wanted to see how far the participants would go with the shocks before they stopped the experiment. If they continued to order shocks, just because that was the rules of the experiment, Milgram claimed this would prove that people will commit acts of violence simply because they were ordered to do so. The results were that all participants continued to administer shocks well into the range at which the student was screaming in pain, and around 60% kept going until “XXX”. At the time, the Milgram experiment ethics seemed reasonable, but by modern day psychology, this experiment would have never been allowed today.

The experimenter betrayed the participants who were made to believe that they were imposing pain on the learners and were put on stress. Some teachers even believed that they have hurt or killed the learner causing a lot of stress. Milgram also lied about the experiments, informing his participants that the purpose of the experiment was to study about the effects of punishment on learning; however the real purpose of the experiment was to measure the obedience. Even though the participants were not informed after the experiment was over, opponents believed that it was not enough because it did not stop the psychological damage that have affected the

(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.

Obedience is tested by how long the subject will continue to “shock the victim”. The point of this study is to determine if Americans are obedient even if they know the act is wrong. 2. What is/are the research questions and/or hypothesis/hypotheses? How obedient would subjects be to researchers when it comes to shocking a victim?

Within 24 hours of the experiment, the prison guards began to humiliate and mentally abuse the prisoners. The prison guards were given little instructions about how to treat the prisoners, except that there was not to be any physical force used on the prisoners. The lack of instructions that

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