Fundamental Attribution Error Analysis

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Esiah Stone 1. The Fundamental Attribution Error says that, “we tend to overestimate the role of our own personal factors and to over look the impact of situations.” (DeNeui, D. 2009, class lecture.) This helps us to explain the difference in the prediction versus what actually happened by overlooking the danger at hand and carrying out the task at hand by negating what is at stake. In a nut shell, the difference is how people would predict the obvious answer that he/she would never knowingly harm another person, so how could he/she go all the way, but when a person is “ordered” to do something they will blindly does it. 2. The foot-in-the-door technique used by giving a small request first. After the smaller request…show more content…
I believe that the correlation is an appropriate way to analyze the genocide during WWII by the fact that people will carry out orders to the letter when given one, but I do not agree with the fact that people use this information as their explanation of why they did something bad. They will carry out the order, and then will try and justify their actions by using excuses. Excuses are given to ensure that they won’t have any responsibility to the consequences. One such excuse that is mostly used is, “well I was ordered to do it, so I had to carry out the task to follow orders so it’s not my fault.” We can generalize from Milgram’s results in real life to the extent of legal sanity. If a person is told to do something, he/she has the ability to decide what’s wrong or right. You can’t really use Milgram’s results to generalize serial killer actions, because that person does what he/she does just on the fact that they like to do it, and not because they are told to. I believe that in order to use this generalization you must have an outside source to “give you orders” to carry out a…show more content…
I believe that this study was not ethical to conduct because it directly harmed another person just to get a statistic and a person would always get hurt based on the fact that human behavior follows normative influence almost every time. A reason for an ethics board to not approve a test like this one could be to just define ethics in itself, and use that explanation for your whole argument. Ethics is defined as a branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions (Dictionary.com, LLC. Copyright © 2009). This means that there are certain things you can and cannot do to a human being just to get results for a test. There could be a ways around hurting someone to get results. One way around harming an actual human being for a statistic could be to come up with a system where an automatic response would be given to each single shock value. The experimenter could have been told that there was another human being on the other side receiving the shock, when in fact there wouldn’t be. So the experimenter could be lead to the thought that he/she had the power to harm another person but wouldn’t. A reason for an ethics board to approve a study like this one could be based on the fact that even though it may be unethical, the results produced outweigh the wrongness of it all. It is worth it to have the information

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