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Reaction Paper On Obedience

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Obedience: In the documentary about MyLai the concept of obedience was very prominent and was shown through many examples both spoken and shown. Obedience is “following orders from an authority figure.” Obedience is following orders from someone one has more power than them, examples of this are parents, teachers, officers and leaders in the military. This definition is often paired with the idea that people will do anything if an authority figure tells them to do, which is explore in Milgram’s study of obedience aimed to justify the actions of accused war criminals from WWII during the Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Procedure: Milgram’s experiment started by having one confederate (a person in on the research but acts like they are part of the study) and participant and had them draw lots to find out who would be the learner and who would be the teacher. The lots was always fixed so the participant would always be the teacher. The participants were told that this experiment was to test learning and all the participants were males between the ages of 20 and 50. Mr. Wallace, the confederate, would be hooked up to an electric shock generator through wires and electrodes and the participant would watch him get set up. Then the participant was taken by the researcher (Milgram) in to a room next to the confederate and was shown the generator switch board that ranged from 15 volts to 450 volts with 30 shocks switches in between. The teacher was instructed by the

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