Whenever the pupil answered incorrectly, the teacher was instructed to throw one of the switches, starting at the lowest voltage and progressing to the higher voltages. The pupil, of course, was not actually receiving shocks, but he would act out preplanned mistakes and feign pain upon receiving the "shocks." About midway through the series of switches, the "pupil" would complain loudly that he wanted to stop, kick the wall, and scream. At the highest levels of shock the pupil would remain silent. All the while, the experimenter, wearing a white lab coat and carrying a clipboard, would instruct the teacher to continue with the "learning experiment."
The teacher was told that the object of the experiment was to study the effects of punishment on learning. They are also told that their role in the experiment was to read word lists to the learner and the learner must remember the second word from a list of word pairs they had read earlier. If the learner got the answer wrong, then the teacher was told to administer shocks, for each answer that the learner got wrong, and the shocks had to increase in intensity. The teacher is unaware of the fact that the learner is actually an actor, and receives no shock. The experiments, involving the Undergrad students from Yale, resulted in 60
Stanley Milgram a Yale University psychologist, who does a series of social psychology experiments to measure willingness, and study how participants obey under pressure. Milgram’s experiments showed the world that an ordinary citizen will inflict pain on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.
Abstract This paper will attempt to explore two different viewpoints on the use of deception in human participants for social psychological experiments. The paper will compare and contrast two different articles that have conflicting views on the topic. Alan C. Elms, the author of a pro- deception article views deception as just, ethical, and even necessary tool of social psychology; however he does assert a very strong degree of caution, and care when implementing deception in an experimental design (1985). Opposite Elms, Diana Baumrind views deception as unethical and unfair to unsuspecting subjects who are unaware of such “trickery”. She debates that the harm done to the individual, society, and to the profession are at times irreversible or to great and outweigh possible benefit from the study.
If the learner is unable to repeat the word groups back to the teacher correctly the teacher is required to shock the learner. The shocks that the teacher administers vary in range from 15 volts to 450 volts. The experimenter will inform the teacher that they need to continue the experiment, if the teacher balks at shocking the learner. The experiment ends when the teacher either quits the experiment or the learner is shocked with 450 volts three times. Surprisingly, the results of Milgram’s experiment proved that when individuals are in a position of following an authority figure’s directive, or their own moral conscience, people will overwhelmingly choose to obey.
The experimenter explained that the learner would be asked a series of questions and if he answers incorrectly, the teacher will administer an electric shock. Gretchen Brandt is the first of several subjects to undergo the experiment, and her reaction the learner’s pain was similar to what was predicted before the study began. She remained calm, composed, and was firm in her decision to disobey the experimenters orders. According to Milgram, this was the reaction he expected from almost all the participants. He collected predictions about the outcome of the experiments from a diverse group of people and most predicted that the subjects would not be obedient, but they were wrong.
He wanted to see the affect authority figures had on ordinary people. He also wanted to see just how far someone will go just to get rewarded, and what limits people will go to disobey. He set up his experiment using three people; the experimenter, the teacher, and the learner. The teacher and the learner could not see each other
Military commanders use proven tactics to produce unquestioning obedience in these wistful children while transforming them into killers. In the novel a long way gone, one notes how Ishmael Beah and the other soldiers were brainwashed by repetition by their lieutenant and how they were physically abused by senior soldiers. Being forced into the army created an excessive amount of negative impacts on Ishmael and changed his life drastically. Clearly, children can be altered into "child soldiers" by using brainwashing, forced recruitment, drugs and physical abuse. Can you imagine yourself in that same position as those soldiers and how your life would change based on the series of events you would
December 13, 2011 Eng. 21A Essay 4 Deception Deception by definition is causing someone to believe something that is not true, typically in order to gain personal advantage over someone. That is what Stanley Milgrim did to his test subjects; he deceived them in order to get results for his studies which directly caused many of them to suffer from mental issues afterwards. In Stanley Milgrims article “Perils of Obedience,” the author demonstrates the morals of science and if it is ethical to run deceptive tests on naive subjects (aka human beings). I believe that what Milgrim did in his experiments were unethical to his naive subjects because he lied to them to get what he wanted, it caused them to have mental break downs when they left the test room, and because he abused the trust people have with scientists.
They were limited to simple answers such as ‘just, I just wouldn’t join the course’ without any sort of real explanation. Another example of conformity is the Asch experiment. This experiment was conducted by Solomon Asch who was a psychologist. It was a famous experiment designed to test how peer pressure to conform would influence the judgment and individuality of a test subject. In the experiment, participants were asked to match a reference line with another one line