...in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.” There is a true feeling of what authority can do if placed in situations that require someone to follow instructions. What happens to someone when they follow the orders of another person in authority? An experiment conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram reveal how situationism applies to study results. How would this experiment differ if the participants were from various races, cultures, gender groups? A summary of the study and how it was conducted Stanley Milgram is a psychologist who conducted a study based on obedience during the 1960’s, and this experiment produced startling results. Questions still arise about the experiments validity, but the impact on psychology remains to be one of the best measures to assess how authority plays a role in obedience. In 1961 after the Trial of WWII criminal Adolph Eichmann, Milgram started his study. Stanley Milgram's experiment built on the idea of obedience, and the experiment would deliver a shock to participants who participated in the experiment. There were levels of voltage from mild to dangerous, and to a maximum voltage of 450, the highest level were labeled XXX. The role of a teacher who would deliver the shock to the student every time the student answered incorrectly. The student would only pretend to be shocked, but...
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...Describe a Study: The Milgram Experiment of Destructive Obedience Systemic obedience of institutional authority can result in destructive consequences. In the events of the Holocaust, the atrocities committed in concentration camps would not have occurred on such a mass if not for the obedience of Hitler’s forces (Milgram, 1963). For the purpose of observing the particularly destructive effects of obedient behavior, Stanley Milgram of Yale University conducted a controlled experiment in 1961 to observe what influences obedient responses to the commands of a figure in authority (Milgram, 1963). Summary of Experimental Procedure Subjects 40 male subjects were used in this experiment. They ranged from the ages of 20 to 50. They also came from a range of occupations and different educational levels (Milgram, 1963). The subjects were not informed about the true motive of the experiment. They were told that the...
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...Born on August 15th, 1933, Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist. He is most notable for his Milgram experiment, a controversial experiment that drastically changed the way social psychologist’s looked at obedience. Early Years and Education In his early years, Milgram lived in the Bronx. By the time he had reached college age, his family had moved to Queens. Here, Milgram attended Queens College in New York. In 1954, he would receive his Bachelor’s degree in political science. From here, his interests shifted to psychology. He applied to Harvard University’s graduate program in Social Relations but was initially rejected due to never have taken a single psychology course in his undergraduate years. Later, he was able to gain...
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...Sociology Exam #2 Short Answer: 1. Explain the concepts of status set and role set. Provide examples of each concept. Every person has developed a specific status for themselves, whether it is a voluntary or they have no choice. A status is a person’s position in society, and the statuses are either pursued or involuntarily received. Role sets are behaviors that are specifically attached to a status, each status can have a number of role sets. People have multiple status sets and many more role sets, because each earned status has its specific responsibilities. For instance, an American woman has the potential to be several things in a modern American family. She has the likelihood of being a mother which would be an achieved status because she has the choice of becoming a parent. Several roles would be attached to this status such as, providing for the children, being active in the child’s extracurricular activities and much more. 2. What makes something funny? Explain the foundation of humor and what is involved in “getting” a joke. Playing with reality is our cultures form of humor for now, and it is a reasonable way to discuss topics that are typically avoided in today’s mainstream culture. With today’s outlook on race and sexuality, put down jokes is what is found humorous to the generations now. Overall, humor is derived from violations of the culture’s norms. The foundation of humor is from mixing realities which promote humor. Since humor involves...
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...planet through a chain of | |acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy | |in a short story called "Chains." | |In the 1950's, Ithiel de Sola Pool (MIT) and Manfred Kochen (IBM) set out to prove the theory mathematically. Although they were able to| |phrase the question (given a set N of people, what is the probability that each member of N is connected to another member via k_1, k_2,| |k_3...k_n links?), after twenty years they were still unable to solve the problem to their own satisfaction. In 1967, American | |sociologist Stanley Milgram devised a new way to test the theory, which he called "the small-world problem." He randomly selected people| |in the mid-West to send packages to a stranger located in Massachusetts. The senders knew the recipient's name, occupation, and general | |location. They were instructed to send the package to a person they knew on a first-name basis who they thought was most likely, out of | |all their friends, to know the target personally. That person would do the same, and so on, until the package was personally delivered | |to its target recipient....
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...Obedience to Authority, written by Stanley Milgram, is a book about a highly controversial experiment. The experiment has 3 people in it; with two of them being a part of the experiment. The subject will be told to give the victim shocks up to a dangerously high voltage. The experiment is set up to see if ordinary people will be obedient or defy an authority figure to harm the victim. The experiment is first set up at Yale University to see how the students who are very intelligent would act to authority. Milgram, who made the experiment, set this experiment up because he was curious to as if humans will do cruel and out of their usual behavior things just because an authority figure says so. First, to completely understand the experiment...
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...The Milgram Experiment was conducted by Stanley Milgram who was a psychologist at Yale University. He invented this study to explore the issue of authority. Milgram wanted to understand obedience. Milgram asked the question, “What is there in human nature that allows an individual to act without any restraints whatsoever that allows us to act inhumane and not limited by compassion or conscience.” This experiment allowed insight into the topic of conflict between obedience to authority and conscience. How far would people proceed in obeying authority if it involved hurting another person? In order to conduct this experiment Milgram used male subjects from 20 to 50 years old. The authority figure told the subjects they were testing to see if people...
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...Questioning Authority: A Rethinking of the Infamous Milgram Experiments By Liliana Segura, AlterNet Posted on February 12, 2009 Between 1963 and 1974, Dr. Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments that would become one of the most famous social psychology studies of the 20th century. His focus was how average people respond to authority, and what he revealed stunned and disturbed people the world over. Under the pretense of an experiment on "learning" and "memory," Milgram placed test subjects in a lab rigged with fake gadgetry, where a man in a lab coat instructed them to administer electrical shocks to a fellow test subject (actually an actor) seated in another room in "a kind of miniature electric chair." Participants were told they were the "teachers" in the scenario and given a list of questions with which to quiz their counterparts (the "learners"). If the respondent answered incorrectly to a question, he got an electric shock as punishment. The shocks were light at first -- 15 volts -- and became stronger incrementally, until they reached 450 volts -a level labeled "Danger: Severe Shock." The actors were never actually electrocuted, but they pretended they were. They groaned, shouted, and, as the current became stronger, begged for relief. Meanwhile, the man in the lab coat coolly told the test subjects to keep going. To people's horror, Milgram discovered that a solid majority of his subjects -- roughly two-thirds -- were willing to administer the highest levels...
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...Running Head: POWER OF SITUATION AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY The Power of the Situation in Milgram's Obedience Experiments Ahsan Chishty Ohlone College POWER OF SITUATION AND OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY The Power of the Situation in Milgram's Obedience Experiments Stanley Milgram is a name universally known for the Yale professor who shocked the world with his experiments on obedience. In 1961, Milgram along with many other colleagues devised an experiment after receiving a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct an experiment in response to the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Milgram wanted to know if Germans under the rule of authority figures did exactly what they were instructed to do by those of higher power than them due to the fact that many of the explanations for the Nazi atrocities was simply that Nazi soldiers were following orders. After placing an ad in the New Haven Register for a learning experiment on the study of memory. According to Thomas Blass (2009), offering participants $4.50 and a paid bus fare for an hour of their time seemed to be the biggest factor that attracted people to the ad but several of the participants also agreed to be a part of the study to learn something about themselves, expand their curiosity about psychology, or because they were fascinated by memory and hoped to understand it better through an experiment like Milgram's. The subjects were introduced to a man in a lab coat who...
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...Obeying rules, both unspoken and spoken, is second nature to mankind. It has become habitual to conform to the orders of authority in order to promote obedience as a social virtue. This often leads man to equate disobedience with sin, which traces as far back as the biblical account of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. However, neither disobedience nor obedience could exist without the power of an authority figure to dictate the rules and restraints of submission. In his article “The Perils of Obedience,” Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram asserts that authority as a whole is an essential component of social living and that obedience to this authority is a social behavior unknowingly entrenched in a majority of the population. Milgram’s scientific review explores this claim as he shares data from his experiment in which subjects blindly obey someone they believe to be an expert, simply due to his prompting. Supported with reactions...
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...“The Perils of Obedience” Response Rochelle Jarmer Composed 2 Karsten Piper Due: 06-23-15 “The Perils of Obedience” by Stanley Milgram is a disturbing and thought-provoking article that details the author’s experimentation in human obedience. The article describes an experiment in which the “teacher”, is put in a position to administer a shock to the “learner” when a wrong answer is given during a test. The teacher is left unaware that the learner is an actor and not being shocked and, in fact, the focus of the experiment is the teacher himself. I think this article is particularly disturbing because people tend to believe that evil only lurks in the shadows. It is terrifying to realize that any ordinary person can commit cruel and horrible...
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...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...
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...consequences as well as having to notifying participants on all features of the study which could have an influence on their decision to take part (Hobbs, 1948). Throughout the psychological history many research studies have been conducted by various psychologists. There have been some which have been ethically critisied, with the lack of ethics taken into consideration. The most commonly discussed research study which has many ethical issues is known to be conducted by a behavioral psychologist Stanley Milgram (1963). Leading to many discussions Milgram (1963) purpose of his study was to investigate how far an individual would obey a figure of authority (Bernstein, 2011). Stanley Milgram (1963) introduced his well-known study on obedience within psychology. Milgram (1963) was a psychologist based at Yale University; he had based his laboratory experiments in a form to be able to study the occurrence of obedience to authority within humans. To be able to conduct the experiment Milgram (1963) advertised his experiment on a newspaper, which he then used to select 40 males age ranged from 20 – 50...
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...Malicious ideologies have enabled groups of people to inflict inhumane violence on other members of society through compliance to authority. Such historical events of massive genocides include the Holocaust; where Nazi soldiers killed six million innocent Jewish people based on their political and ethical reasoning. Troubled by situations of this nature, Stanley Milgram held a collection of experiments that his book “Obedience to Authority” outlines. Milgram tells us that “the aim of the study was to find when and how people defy authority in the face of clear moral imperatives” ( 4). Milgram found that there are social forces which allow populations to commit morally conflicting acts against other populations. The fundamental variable for this influence is ideology; which is defined in Webster’s dictionary as “a systematic body of concepts, especially about human life or culture”(“ideology”). Ideologies accompanied by social contagions, admit ordinary individuals to transgress in inhumane conformed evils. The obedient subjects of Milgram’s studies and the Nazi soldiers alike are not all necessarily sadistic psychopaths. Rather, they’re a result of ideological social conformity. It has been a commonly accepted idea that those who participated in the holocaust were all individually psychopaths, but conformity to a corrupt authority’s dogma influences ordinary people to behave malevolently. Between 1941- 1945, fifty-five thousand Nazi soldiers worked at death and work camps...
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...The Milgram Experiment The Milgram experiment took place in 1963 and was conducted by Stanley Milgram. Stanley Milgram who was a psychologist at Yale University performed this experiment to show the conflict between obedience to authority and personal ethics and morals. In 1962 Milgram wanted to investigate how the Nazis could terminate Jews during World War II without even the thought of human dignity. With this experiment he would show how the Germans were obedient to authority figures. To do this Milgram selected 40 males’ participants between the age of 20 and 50 to play 2 roles. The first role was the teacher and the second role was that of student. All the participants were teachers because Milgram rigged the selection process. With all the partisipants believing they were selected as teachers they were taken to a room where the students were connected to electrodes. The researcher asked a serious of health questions and the student would answer with some concerns but decided to continue with the test. Next the teachers were put in adjoining room seated in front of a shock generator. The shock generator was comprised of multipul switches ranging from 15 volts up to 450 volts. The researcher explained to the teachers that for every wrong answer given they were to administer a shock starting from 15 volts. For every wrong answer after that he was to increase to the next voltage and so on. The student which was a recording would show signs of pain and wanting to stop...
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