Knowledge, Obedience and the Physical World

In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale, conducted a series of experiments that became famous. Unsuspecting Americans were recruited for what purportedly was an experiment in learning. A man who pretended to be a recruit himself was wired up to a phony machine that supposedly administered shocks. He was the "learner." In some versions of the experiment he was in an adjoining room. The unsuspecting subject of the experiment, the "teacher," read lists of words that tested the learner's memory. Each time the learner got one wrong, which he intentionally did, the teacher was instructed by a man in a white lab coat to deliver a shock. With each wrong answer the voltage went up. From the other room came recorded and convincing protests from the learner — even though no shock was actually being administered.

In Derren Brown’s reenactment of psychologist Stanley Milgram’s experiment done in 1963, he solidified Milgram’s results by having the same framework as Milgram’s experiment. Milgram tested to see how much harm a person were to inflict if told to by an authoritative figure. In this particular experiment, a learning environment was set up, subjects were told that the focus was to see how negative punishment affects learning and they were told that they would be either a teacher or learner in the set up. All of the subjects in both Milgram’s and Brown’s situation were teachers and an actor, who all the subjects assumed to be another subject, as a learner. Learners were attached to a shocking mechanism ranging from 15 to a lethal 450 volts,

The Milgram experiment was conducted in 1963 by Stanley Milgram in order to focus on the conflict between obedience to authority and to personal conscience. The experiment consisted of 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, and who’s jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. The roles of this experiment included a learner, teacher, and researcher. The participant was deemed the teacher and was in the same room as the researcher. The learner, who was also a paid actor, was put into the next room and strapped into an electric chair. The teacher administered a test to the learner, and for each question that was incorrect, the learner was to receive an electric shock by the teacher, increasing the level of shock each time. The shock generator ranged from

The Milgram Obedience Study was an experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1963 to observe how far people would obey instructions that resulted in harming another individual. The experiment consisted of a “learner” engaging in a memory task and a “teacher” testing the “learner” on the task, administering electrical shocks to the “learner” each time an incorrect answer was given; the electric shocks started out small from 15 volts, labeled as “SLIGHT SHOCK”, all the way to 450 volts, labeled as “X X X”—of course, that was what the participant was told. The true purpose of the experiment was not disclosed until after the experiment and the “random selection” of who would be the “teacher” or “learner” was rigged so that the participant was always the “teacher” and the “learner” was always an actor. The shocks, naturally, were never given to the “learner”, and the “learner” gave responses that were scripted, both in answers to the questions and in responses to the shocks.

A classic experiment on the natural obedience of individuals was designed and tested by a Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram. The test forced participants to either go against their morals or violate authority. For the experiment, two people would come into the lab after being told they were testing memory loss, though only one of them was actually being tested. The unaware individual, called the “teacher” would sit in a separate room, administering memory related questions. If the individual in the other room, the “learner,” gave a wrong answer, the teacher would administer a shock in a series of increasingly painful shocks correlating with the more answers given incorrectly. Milgram set up a recorder

Stanley Milgram writes about his shocking experiment in “Perils of Obedience.” Milgram writes on the behaviors that the people had during the experiment. Milgram had an experiment that involves two people. One person was a student and the other a teacher. The student was strapped into an electric chair and was required to answer certain questions. The teacher asked a certain word, and the student must know the pair that goes with it. If the student answered the question incorrectly, the teacher must shock the student. Each time the student answered a question incorrectly, the volts increase. Milgram was expecting the teachers to back out of the experiment once they saw the student in pain for the first time, but surprisingly enough, more than sixty percent of the teachers obeyed the experimenter and continued on with the experiment, reaching up to four-hundred-fifty volts. After three times of the four-hundred-fifty volt shock, the experiment was called to halt.

Throughout history there have been occurrences where humans have blindly followed authority leaders. Such as the holocaust, which is an example of conformity at its best. Conformity is a compliance with standards, rules, or laws. In other words, it is an effect that causes people to do things they may not have otherwise done. During the Holocaust one man was at power, Adolf Hitler.

Stanley Milgram, established a new course of study in the psychology of obedience. The purpose of his experiment was to have an idea of to see how people react the autocritical standard; during his experiment, he recorded how people will behave when given a source of power. Milgram gained this idea after the World War II. He believed that some people had the ability to essentially block out human thoughts of morals, ethics, and sympathetics when assigned to a job. The core issue that Milgram faced was finding a way to create a situation to test his theory; because behavior is such a complicated aspect of psychology to test, Milgram had to properly execute the experiment without physical harm from one person to another.

In 1961, psychology professor Stanley Milgram conducted quite the controversial experiment called the Milgram Shock Experiment. Milgram paid people four dollars an hour to attend a learning and memory in his lab that quickly transformed into something else entirely. Under the watch of Milgram, the person assigned to be the teacher, would read out words to the other person who was assigned as the student, and was hooked up to an electric shock machine in another room. Every time the student incorrectly repeated the words that was read out to him/her, the teacher then delivers a shock to the student. Starting at fifteen volts (labeled as “slight shock”), the teacher can increase the volts to all the way to four hundred and fifty volts (labeled as XXX). As the teachers reached the higher voltages, some of them refused to go on any further in fear that they might harm the students, defying Milgram’s authority. Some on the other hand, continued to increase the shock, even as the student yelled and pleaded for the shocks to stop till they fell silent. Once the experiment was finished, the person assigned as the teacher was soon to find out that the students were in fact not being shocked, and the cries of pains were prerecorded. The experiment was deemed unethical because of deception that the participants actually believed that they were harming an actual person, unaware that the student is an actor. Also that the participants were exposed to very stressful situations that could have harmed them psychologically and were not given the chance to withdraw from the

The Milgram Shock experiment was one of the most famous psychological studies ever conducted, and also the most controversial. In the experiment, two subjects were studied. Through random selection, each subject was chosen to be either a teacher or a student. However, the choice was not random, and the student was actually an actor who would pretend to be the student. In the experiment, the teacher would read out certain words and have the student repeat them back as a sort of memory game.

“At the time Milgram's study was big news. Milgram explained his results by the power of the situation. This was a social psychology experiment which appeared to show, beautifully in fact, how much social situations can influence people's behavior. The experiment set off a small industry of follow-up studies carried out in labs all around the world. Were the findings still true in different cultures? By and large the answers were that even when manipulating many different experimental variables, people were still remarkably obedient. (2007)”

The Milgram experiment is probably one of the most well-known experiments of the psy-sciences. (De Vos, J. (2009). Stanley Milgram was a psychologist from Yale University. He conducted an experiment focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Milgram wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II. Milgram selected people for his experiment by newspaper advertising. He looked for male participants to take part in a study of learning at Yale University.

Knowledge, as defined, is the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association. Every day that we face bears new experiences which we encounter for us to learn. If so, we can, therefore, assume that all of the knowledge we bear as of now are all obtained from all of our past daily experiences and this idea contrasts the idea of innate knowledge.

We live in a strange and puzzling world. Despite the exponential growth of knowledge in the past century, we are faced by a baffling multitude of conflicting ideas. The mass of conflicting ideas causes the replacement of knowledge, as one that was previously believed to be true gets replace by new idea. This is accelerated by the rapid development of technology to allow new investigations into knowledge within the areas of human and natural sciences. Knowledge in the human sciences has been replaced for decades as new discoveries by the increased study of humans, and travel has caused the discarding of a vast array of theories. The development of

Knowledge can be accepted or refuted, hence what determines accepted knowledge? I believe ‘accepted knowledge’ is that which has been tested whereby sufficient evidence has been collected to support certain knowledge claims. However, it is important to consider times when knowledge has been refuted. Despite strong belief that we possess objective facts, through research and technological progresses, such facts become re-interpreted in light of new evidence and discoveries. Personally, discarded knowledge refers to theories or laws being dismissed as new-found information proves more accurate. However, knowledge can also be amended as it is evolves. Knowledge is often discarded or amended due to technological progresses or changing social trends. Taking both a natural and a human science in IB, I feel that knowledge is more readily discarded in the natural sciences whereas in the human sciences knowledge is amended as certain theories evolve. This suggests that knowledge is not static hence leading to the main knowledge issue which will be explored: “To what extent is knowledge within the human and natural sciences provisional?