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 voltage of electric shock increased with each incorrect answer. The teacher was unaware the learner was not receiving the electrical shock. The results were that obedience would take precedence over moral sense. Most subjects obeyed and administered shocks ranging from 15 volts up to 450 volts to the learner. My Reaction My first reaction after listening to the video was disbelief and shock.
Each time the learner is wrong the shock will get stronger. In reality, the learner receives no shock because he is just pretending to be in pain so the teachers will stop. In most cases the teachers continues to increase the voltage up to 450 volts to the learner even though the learner refuses the answer the question. Milgram's experiment was set up to determine how people in a psychology laboratory would react to authority. Since more than half of the subjects in the first experiment administered the shock to the end,
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”. The test subject, or teacher, would administer electric shocks to the learner, a paid actor, when the learner incorrectly answered the word pairings. The teacher thought the learner was receiving electric shocks when in reality the learner was not receiving any shocks. An instructor, the authoritative figure, was sitting behind the teacher reassuring the teacher that the shocks may be painful but would not inflict permanent damage. Throughout the experiment, the teacher can be seen looking back towards the instructor for permission on whether to continue or stop .The teacher instructed the learner to continue even when the learner cried out in pain and begged for the experiment to stop.
Kayla McNutt Professor Williams English 1101-107 17 September 2013 The Obedience Test Stanley Milgram’s article, “The Perils of Obedience” focuses on the experiment he created to test society’s willingness to obey. In the experiment Milgram has one person who is a learner and another who delivers the shocks, the teacher. The focus of the experiment is on the person delivering the shocks because the “learner” is an actor. The learner’s role is to recite words to practice memorization. If he recites the words incorrectly the teacher has to administer a shock to the learner.
Texts that are interesting and haunting have themes such as power and manipulation. However, stories with power, manipulation AND conformity, have strongly affected me and caused me to overthink about how simple it is to brainwash members of a society. This kind of activity (conformity, manipulation and power) is evidently shown in The Wave which was written by Morton Rhue. The Wave took place in Gordon High School. It's about Ben Ross, an intelligent history teacher that decides to perform an experiment on his class called “The Wave”, which at first started out so simple and small, until The Wave became unstoppable and spread around the school in such a short period of time, affecting many people.
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.
Part 1 The table shows data from an experiment by social psychologist Stanley Milgram into levels of obedience to authority amongst 'ordinary' people. How would they behave in a moral dilemma between authority and wickedness? The headline row labels the 2 numerical columns directly below, which show the average level of shock administered and the proportion of participants who obeyed until the maximum voltage. The extreme left column labels pre-trial predictions, the original study and 2 variations. Row 1 shows that before the experiment students predicted a relatively low, (140v), level of shock would be administered and that none, (0%), would comply to the end.
Milgram’s experiment was taking two individuals – a teacher and a learner- and he would see how much the teacher would inflict pain upon the learner simply because he was following orders. Milgram wanted to see how far the teacher would go. Milgram put the teacher and learner in two separate rooms. The teacher actually believes that they will be giving shocks to the learner, but the learner is actually an actor who receives no shock at all who knows what is going on. The learner was put in a room with an electric chair, where he sat with his wrist strapped down and an electrode attached to his head.
This is exactly what the Nazi troops or the Germans had to do to obey their higher power. The person conducting the experiment has interests to give orders to the teacher to conflict pain on the learner if the learner gets a wrong answer. This is exactly the same orders Hitler would give to his soldiers to hurt or exterminate the Jews. Even is the teacher didn’t want to hurt the learner, the person conducting the experiment would tell the teacher he is not held responsible to the wrong doing on the learner. With that the teachers would proceed.