How many of you have heard of the Milgram Experiment? To those of you that haven't: (NOTE: The following is a long excerpt from a textbook on Sociology. I Spoiler'd the stuff that you should read beforehand. If it's interesting enough, feel free to read the entire thing although it's not entirely necessary.) If it says embedding is disabled by request: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXcwUJ-HMQ0 [yt]pXcwUJ-HMQ0[/yt] Why do you think someone would go all the way up to 450 Volts without stopping? Are these people necessarily cruel or heartless? What do you think of the experiment? ________________________________________ [hide=]Obediance to Authority: If ordered to do so, would you comply with an experimenter's instruction to give people increasingly painful electric shocks? Most people would say no; yet, the research of social psychologist Stanley Milgram suggests that most of us will obey such orders. In Milgram's words "Behavior that is unthinkable in an individual...acting on his own may be executed without hesitationw hen carried out under orders." Milgram placed advertisements in New Haven, Connecticut, newspapers to recruit subjects for what was announced as a learning experiment at Yale University. Participants included postal clerks, engineers, high school teachers, and laborers. They were told that the purpose of the research was to investigate the effects of punishment on learning. The experimenter, dressed in a gray technicians coat, explained that in each testing, one subject would be randomly selected as the learner while another would function as the teacher. However, this lottery was rigged so that the real subject would always be the teacher while an associate of Milgrams served as the learner. At this point, the learners hand was strapped to an electric apparatus. The teacher was taken to an electronic shock generator with 30 lever switches. Each switch was labeled with graduated voltage designations from 15 to 450 volts. Before beginning the experiment, subjects were given sample shocks of 45 volts to convince them of the authenticity of the experiment. The experimenter instructed the teacher to apply shocks of increasing voltage each time the learner gave an incorrect answer on a memory test. Teachers were told that although the shocks can be extremely painful, they cause no permanent tissue damage. In reality, the learner did not receive any shocks; however, subjects in the role of teacher believed that the procedure was genuine. The learner deliberately gave incorrect answers and acted out a prearranged script. For example, at 150 volts, the learner would cry out, Experimenter, get me out of here! I wont be in the experiment anymore! At 270 volts, the learner would scream in agony. When the shock reached 350 volts, the learner would fall silent. If the teacher wanted to stop the experiment, the experimenter would insist that the teacher continue, using such statements as The experiment requires that you continue and You have no other choice; you must go on. The results of this unusual experiment stunned and dismayed Milgram and other social scientists. A sample of psychiatrists had predicted that virtually all subjects would refuse to shock innocent victims. In their view, only a pathological fringe of less than 2 percent would continue administering shocks up to the maximum level. Yet almost two thirds of participants fell into the category of obedient subjects. As Milgram observed: Despite the fact that many subjects protest to the experimenter, a substantial proportion continue to the last shock on the generator. Why did these subjects obey? Why were they willing to inflict seemingly painful shocks on innocent victims who had never done them any harm? There is no evidence that these subjects were unusually sadistic; few seemed to enjoy administering the shocks. Instead, in Milgrams view, the key to obedience was the experimenters social role as a scientist and seeker of knowledge. Milgram pointed out that in the modern industrial world, we are accustomed to submitting to impersonal authority figures whose status is indicated by a title (professor, lieutenant, doctor) or by a uniform (the technicians coat). The authority is viewed as larger and more important than the individual; consequently, the obedient individual shifts responsibility for his or her behavior to the authority figure.Milgrams subjects frequently stated,If it were up to me, I would not have administered shocks. They saw themselves as merely doing their duty. Milgram launched his experimental study of obedience to better understand the involvement of Germans in the annihilation of six million Jews and millions of other people during World War II. In an interview conducted long after the publication of his study, he suggested that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town[/hide]
