Stanly Milgram’s Obedience Test In chapter two of Opening Skinner’s Box, by Lauren Slater, she talks about a man named Stanley Milgram and his test to see why people obey even the worst of orders. His studies were compelled by the holocaust. German soldiers were getting hit by war time crimes but all they had to say about them was “I was just obeying orders” so what was it exactly that made these soldiers kill of tons of people even though they knew what they were doing was wrong? What he did was hire people off the streets to do an experiment. He had a paid actor play the role of the learner and the test subject be the teacher. The test was simple the teacher would say a series of words and the learner would have to say them back in proper order. If the learner messed up then the teacher would have to shock him and for every time he messed up the shock would stronger …show more content…
What the teachers did not know was that the shocks were not actually causing any harm to the learner but the learner had to act like they were. When the torture became too much for the teachers and they tried to say they were done, there would be a scientist in a white lab coat standing there to tell them they have to keep going the experiment must go on. Stanley Milgram found that sixty-five percent of his test subjects obeyed while the rest said no and refused to shock the learner. Milgram also found that the subjects who had a rough child hood and where beaten by their parents refused to keep shocking and the subjects that were not punished as bad growing up would obey. An interesting thing that happened after the experiment was a subject that refused ended up becoming a soldier in which he would have to take orders and obey no matter how he felt about them as to where another subject that did obey ended up being a gay activist following his own rules doing what he thought was right. It seemed as if the experiment was traumatic enough to change how the subjects