Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist, conducted an experiment in 1963 about human obedience that was deemed as one of the most controversial social psychology experiments ever. Ian Parker and Diana Baumrind, responded to Stanley Milgram’s experiment. Baumrind focuses on the moral and ethical dilemma while, Parker focuses more on the experiment’s actual application. The experiment’s original intent was to determine if society would simply obey to authority when put under pressure by an authoritative figure. Milgram put a twist on the experiment asking the age-old question of, “if the Germans during WWII were simply obeying to authority when carrying out the Holocaust or were they all acting on their own”.
Rules such as: deception, protection of participants and the right to withdraw. Participants were deceived by description of task because he did not want to give away the true nature of the experiment. Participants believed they were investigating punishment and learning to which they gave full consent but the study was on obedience. However before undertaking the experiment Milgram spoke with psychiatrists to determine whether people would be obedient and follow the instructions, they predicted that most subjects would not go above 150 volts, while 4% could be expected to reach 300 volts. The results contradicted the prediction and 65% of normal working class men continued to the maximum voltage.
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 instructor tells the teacher that this is a memory test and if the learner misses a question then the learner will be shocked with voltages varying from 15 volts to 450 volts. The only way for the teacher to quit the experiment is to refuse to obey the instructor. The first subject does just this, as expected, and refuses to continue the experiment. Milgram asked various people for their predictions about the experiment. They predicted that the teachers would stop, not going past 150volts, while only one in a thousand would actually go to 450 volts.
Annotated Bibliography Annotated Bibliography Boese, E. (2011) Standardized Tests: Shouldn’t We Be Helping Our Students? In Reid, S. The Prentice Hall Essential Guide for College Writers (pp. 342-348) Englewood Cliffs. NJ: Prentice Hall. In his essay, “Standardized Tests: Shouldn’t We Be Helping Our Students” Colorado State University student Eric Boese (2011) passionately expresses his assertions that standardized testing is degrading the quality of American education; he argues (specifically with the intent to persuade readers and in particular test policy setting politicians) that standardized tests are too difficult and fail to properly measure and motivate the qualitative performance of both teacher and student.
If he was wrong the teacher shocked him. The shocks went up in fifteen-volt increments for each wrong answer. This tested the moral conscience of the teacher because eventually the screams from the shocks stopped, leading the teacher to believe that the learner had died or was seriously hurt. No matter how many times the teacher said he wanted to stop, the administer of the test told him to continue. By no means did he have to continue but because the authority figure told him to, he did.
Once again the teacher looked up at him, and informed him that if he continued to disrupt the class she was going to write him up. The student stopped the noise and remained quiet for the rest of the class period. The antecedent in this scenario is that the student was ignored by the teacher when he raised his hand, and his behavior after the antecedent was talking out loud to himself and tapping his hands on his desk. The consequences were the teacher threatening to write him up and I believe the function would be that the student wanted the teacher’s attention. In this
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.
The president of Indiana University, who was known as a great defender of academic freedom, had no choice but to give Kinsey the ultimatum that either the class he taught or the interviews had to be dismissed due to outside pressures from the state level (Brown & Fee, 2003). This initial pressure is what ultimately directed Kinsey to leave his work at the University and continue his research about sex. Many books, and media coverages later Kinsey’s work was being received very well but as explained previously all fame has to come to an end. Kinsey’s work became scrutinized, questioned and bantered by conservative groups, religious groups and the academic community. The particular social factors that resulted in the resistance was the fact that in this era there was an influx of media coverage which allowed more people to gain access to the information and develop their own biased
Today, children view school as a “place of danger”, and their main focus is to avoid danger as much as possible (Holt 360). This danger comes in the form of mistakes on tests, quizzes, and homework assignments in which the children earn grades based on what they are able to remember at that time, instead of making a long-term connection between the educational content and the children’s own distinct method of learning. Teachers, despite their best intentions, diminish the children’s will to read when they conform to these “conventional” methods of teaching. These methods have made a game, between the teachers and students, out of learning to read; a game in which the students are to guess what the teachers want to hear and to agree with the conclusions the teachers draw. This gives children the impression that reading is dangerous, because they don’t want to make mistakes and lose the game.