The Lottery Of Birth Summary

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted an experiment, which later wrote about it in “The Perils of Obedience” in 1963 to research how people obey authoritative figures and what extent a person would go inflicting pain onto an innocent person. The study involved a teacher (subject), learner (actor), and an experimenter (authoritative figure). The teacher was placed in front of a control panel labeled with electrical shocks ranging from 15 to 450 volts and instructed to shock the learner incrementally if they gave a wrong answer when asked questions with word associations. Switches corresponded with the voltage ranging from “Slight Shock” to “Danger: Severe Shock” followed by

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.

Milgram proved his belief be a series of 20 experiments with 1000 participants. He studied how people would respond to outright commands given by someone of authority to give punishment on a learning. So, if the learner gives the wrong answer the teacher(participant) would admit a bolt of electric shock delivered by a switch. Would the participants be obedient to the social constraints of authority or disobey the authority(experimenter), hence, delivering a bolt of shock or not delivering a bolt of shock? Also, at what level will the participant disobey and refuse to give punishment to the learner? Personally, I feel my best choice if I was a participant in the study is the choice from the beginning of the experiment to not continue to participate. Still, I think it is very possible to get wrapped up in wanting to please the authorities persuasion and submit to their direction, then, the outcome is giving punishment to the learner long after my moral sense tells me to stop. Ultimately, if the study was conducted today many people believe our culture in America has not changed enough to get a different outcome in a study like Milgram’s

Milgram began his experiment by soliciting subjects aged from twenty to fifty, from all backgrounds under the guise of a simple memory experiment (Milgram, Obedience 15). By Milgram keeping the true study under wraps he was able to study subjects reactions with minimum bias towards the actual experiment. Milgram told those participating in the faux study that they were to act as teachers and assist in teaching a student a list of paired words. What the subject was unaware of however was that the student was actually in on the true experiment and was trained in order to test their reactions (Milgram, Obedience 16). So it went that whenever the student guessed the word pair wrong the teacher, in this case the subject, was instructed to flip a switch on a panel that they were led to believe would shock the student. They believed the experiment was to reinforce memory through punishment. After every “shock,” the subject was told to increase the intensity from 15 to 450 volts in a sequence of 30 switches they were labeled as the following for the subjects to avoid confusion: Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Very Strong Shock, Intense Shock, Extreme Intensity Shock, Danger Severe Shock, and XXX (Milgram, Behavioral).

Milgram’s experiment consisted of a teacher, learner, an authority figure/experimenter, and a false shock generator. The subject of the experiment was the teacher. In the experiment, the teacher asks the learner a question and if they get it wrong, they received an electric shock. The shocks ranged from 15 volts to 450 volts. The learner was instructed to simulate noises of pain at certain level increments and eventually to just stop responding as if they were dead. One subject named Gretchen Brandt refused to continue the experiment once the generator reached

In the book “Opening Skinner’s Box,” written by Lauren Slater, there is a chapter dedicated to the social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, and his obedience to authority experiments. Milgram assembled one of the most malicious deceptions in the psychiatric field. He crafted what basically turned out to be an electric chair. To test his theory that obedience wasn’t in one’s personality but rather in the situation of the matter, Milgram gathered willing test subjects and instructed them to administer what they assumed were deadly shocks of electricity to another person who faked, pain and perhaps death (31). The experiment was set up with one test subject being a teacher and the actor being the learner, the “teacher’s” job was to administer shocks when the learner made a mistake in the pair of words read to him, increasing the voltage with every wrong answer.

The Milgram experiment was ethical, however there are issues within the experiment that may say that it was unethical. The ends of the experiment were to get results from those who were obedient while shocking the “learner” even under a stressful and complicated circumstances. In that time era, there wasn’t a strict control over the ethics of the experiments that had taken place. Today’s modern critics would never let this type of experiment happen if not all the variables were to be predicted before the commence of the experiment. Milgram wanted an answer if a person or group of people would obey even if they are hurting other humans in the process.

Baumrind accuses Milgram of mistreating his subjects during the experiment. She states that, “It has become more commonplace in sociopsychological laboratory studies to manipulate, embarrass, and discomfort subjects” (Baumrind 225). She does not condone such studies that cause a person to feel that way. The teacher in the experiment is the only one feeling discomfort. In a way, Milgram is the one who is actually administering the

The Milgram experiment is one of the most controversial psychology experiments of the past century. I was familiar with it prior to accessing the simulation on the elearning site from an ABC television Four Corners episode on the nature of torture. So when I participated in the simulation, I stopped administering the shock at the first sign of distress from the subject at thirty watts. If I was in the actual Milgram experiment I would like to believe that I would have behaved in the same way. Human nature dictates that we believe that only abnormal people are capable of sinister behavior. This belief that internal attributions cause certain behaviours assures us of some stability and security in our day-to-day lives and yet the

Milgram conducts an experiment to examine the act of obeying, and shows concrete instances. He pressures the subjects to behave in a way conflicting with morality. In the experiment, the experimenter orders the subject to give increasing electro shocks to an accomplice, when he makes an error in a learning session. The situation makes the subject

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.

The purpose of Milgram’s experiment was to see how far people would go to obey authority. His scientific methods followed the scientific procedure and produced external validity. There were 20 variations of Stanley Milgram’s experiment some factors remained consistent throughout all variations, while some remained the same, while some changed. The four experimental conditions grew in intensity. In the first condition, also known as remote feedback, the learner was isolated from the subject and could not be seen or heard except at three hundred volts when he pounded on the wall. At three hundred and fifteen volts he was no longer heard from until the end of the experiment. The naive subject was required to keep administering shocks with an unresponsive human at the other end. Put yourself in the teacher’s shoes. In the second condition (voice feedback) the learner was placed in an adjacent room, when he started to shout and protest at lower shock levels he could be heard through the crack in the door. In the third

For me, there are numerous issues with the great chain of being independent of scientific research, the fact that so much exist that refute it only furthers that belief. Any time humans have tried to ascribe beliefs to all powerful entities, the results have been questionable at best. This is not an attempt to rule out the possibility of a higher power, only the assertation that said deity has left us no clues to their personal belief structure is fallacy. The great chain of being implies understanding of that belief structure, which is why I reject it outright. The chain itself is structured as a top down hierarchy that starts at the highest level of perfection and importance for all life; god.

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 meaning behind “The Lottery of Birth,” is that where you are born shapes the outcome of your life. From the moment we are born, we are given a “certain class, and a certain country”. From the country you were born into, to the government that is over you, and even to the family you have. Every part of your surroundings shapes the person you will become. You will soak up the religious beliefs of your environment, you will build your political ideals off of your family and government, and you will plan your future based on the schooling you will be taught which is decided by your government.