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 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
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.
1. The teacher rearranged the seating to make it more uniform, he voted himself to be the project leader and made the students call him Mr. Wenger for respect as a dictatorship would be. The teacher made it so that nobody talks without permission, and when they do talk they must stand up. Mr. Wenger made the kids sit straight so that they seem more respectful towards the dictator, and make their answers to the point. The leader created a bizarre energy which everyone was caught up in.
Our American education system is only postponing these students from entering the real world. These changes would force young adults to work with people of all ages, and no longer be constrained to the typical high school environment (Source 3). American high schools need to step up their game as they are merely falling behind. By abandoning the large emphasis on testing the students will learn the information for good and not just for the test. Incorporating more relevant information into the curriculum, will allow students to become more interested.
Lots were apparently drawn, but it was arranged that in each case the volunteer would be the teacher. Teacher and learner were then taken to a room where the learner was strapped into a chair and electrodes fixed to his wrists. The volunteer/teacher was told that the punishment to be applied was electric shock, and that these shocks could be extremely painful, although they would cause no permanent damage. Next the volunteer/teacher was taken to his own room where he was given his instructions; every time the learner made a mistake, he was to give an increasingly high electric shock by way of punishment. The intensity of these shocks - as displayed on a 'shock generator' - ranged from 15V to 450V.
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.
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 Perils of Obedience Review the structure of social life as one can point to These experiments started three months after the trial of the Nazi war criminals in WWII. Milgram also tells us that “authority is ancient as old as the story of Abraham” (White, Billings. Pg.691). He wants us to look deep inside of ourselves and wants us to see how we obey the commands we do, against our better judgment. Stanley Milgram a Yale University psychologist, who does a series of social psychology experiments to measure willingness, and study how participants obey under pressure.
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.