Are you a sheep or a Shepard? Do you obey unquestioningly? Do you socialize your children to obey unquestionably.. Here is an interesting clip from my readings about obedience and conformity. Milgram wanted to observe how far the obedience-inducing power of authority could be extended. He conducted a series of studies to gauge the responses of participants. Initially, he studied only male participants. Each participant who arrived at the experimental setting was told he was about to participate in an experiment on the effects of punishment on learning. Milgram also explained to the subject that in front of him was a student or learner hooked up to a shock generator. The subject, referred to as a teacher, was asked to read off a list of word pairs and then call out the first word of each pair. The student, unbeknownst to the subject, was told by Milgram to respond with the second word in the pair. Starting with 15 volts, which is a slight shock, the subject or teacher was asked to increase the voltage level by 15 volts each time the student made a mistake. At gradually higher voltage levels, the student screamed and asked to be let out of the room. Milgram, dressed in a lab coat, told the teacher he must continue. What would you do in this situation? In reality, the shock generator was fake, and the student learner was a confederate, a person who knew about the study from the start. He only acted as if he was being hurt. As it turned out, nearly two-thirds of all subjects went all the way to potentially fatal voltage levels—a figure much higher than psychologists predicted before the experiments.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 20:28:31 +0000