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Who Is The Key Protagonist In Enron's Obedience?

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Enron’s Obedience In 1962 a Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram performed a number of experiments investigating what he labelled “the issue of authority” he undertook the experiment to evaluate how normal everyday people were capable of doing terrible acts even when these actions went against their innate moral compass. The most notable experiment implemented was called the “Obedience Experiment”. This was a rigged experiment, test subjects would ask questions to an unseen victim, if the victim failed to answer correctly a shock would be given with the voltage increasing as the victim continued to give wrong answers, unbeknown to the test subject no shock was actually received by the victim. The test subjects were called teachers, the “teachers” …show more content…

Men in white coats were used to ask the “Teachers” to continue and explained that it was “Essential” for them to continue. His experiment discovered that 65% of the people that took part would continue all the way to the 450 volts and even the visual warning of “danger severe shock” emboldened on the face of the panel did not stop them. Milgram concluded that the responsibility had been taken away from the “Teachers” because they were told by figures of authority to continue. Inserting the key protagonist in the Enron story into the confines of the “Obedience experiment” we can clearly see the “victims” were the investors and speculators that invested in Enron. The “Teachers” were the analyst and employees of Enron and the CEO’s and heads were the men in white coats. There rigged experiment was in financial tools and deregulations of the markets. The only major difference was the level of pain felt by the “Victims” in Milgram’s experiment no shocks were ever felt but for the Enron speculators it was a financial pain that would stay for the rest of their lives. The men in white coats in the Enron story were Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, these key men should have set the moral bar at Enron and should have upheld there core values, set out in there code of ethics at the inception of the company, shown

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