Hotel Rwanda Research Paper

“The Perils of Obedience” was written by Stanley Milgram in 1974. In the essay he describes his experiments on obedience to authority. I feel as though this is a great psychology essay and will be used in psychology 101 classes for generations to come. The essay describes how people are willing to do almost anything that they are told no matter how immoral the action is or how much pain it may cause.

Hotel Rwanda is a film directed by Derek George that tackles one of the most shockingly disturbing events in recent history, when the Hutu radicals of Rwanda initiated a frightening crusade of genocide, slaughtering thousands of minority Tutsis while people from other countries did nothing and acted oblivious to what was going on in Rwanda. George vividly adapted Hotel Rwanda in a way that the viewer from beginning to end saw the effects of genocide, political corruption, and the consequences of violence. Depicted in the early 1990s , the views on ethnic conflict in Rwanda and the sequence of events is really descriptive and sometimes hard to watch as George digs deep into what happened in Rwanda. The early scenes in town set the scene amazingly for what’s to come throughout the film and gives us vivid insight on the views and social standing of Rwanda in the 1990’s. Don Cheadle portrays Paul Rusesabagina in the movie playing the hotel manager, his wife in the movie played by Sophie Okonedo is a Tutsi and wants to help when the violence ensues. Their marriage throughout the movie supplies a great sub plot detailing how a relationship can stand through turmoil.

When individuals disregard their freedom for the good of the whole, they are no longer considered individuals but products of conformity. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, engineered an experiment to test the ordinary person’s level of obedience. Many of Milgram’s colleagues admired his intricate experiment, and thought that he provided valid information on the complexity of obedience. One of his colleagues, Diana Baumrind, however, strongly disagreed with Milgram and has good reasons to criticize his experiment. She thought his experiment was unethical and very harmful to the social well-being of the participants. In her article, “Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience”, she castigated Milgram’s experiment and provided

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

Baumrind fairly claims the “laboratory is not the place” to conduct studies of obedience as the laboratory tends to increase the number of variables above what is desired (Baumrind 90). Science Magazine defends Baumrind’s claim by conducting an experiment directed toward answering the question of the reproducibility of previously conducted psychological experiments. The data collected shows a significant decrease in the strength of the data collected and the number of experiments deemed reproducible was much smaller than those which were reproducible (“Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science”). If the experiment’s results are correct, then Baumrind has fairly contested the integrity of the results of the experiment conducted by Milgram since his results have a stronger chance of not being reproduced in a laboratory than of being reproduced in a laboratory. Milgram adds credibility to his article by mentioning the population from which the subjects were drawn. Initially, Milgram enlists Yale undergraduates to volunteer for his study which led to results consistent with his study, but severely taints the credibility of his experiment. He then modifies his experiment and enlarges to volunteer population to include that of anyone living in the city (Milgram 80-81). His

Does the Genocide in Rwanda have a singular cause? I do not believe so; the cause of genocide in Rwanda in 1994 was due to years of built up hatred between the Tutsis and the Hutus along with many other occurrences. The Rwandan Genocide is no exception with many variables contributing to the horrific events that took place. According to the documentary Ghosts of Rwanda, in 1994, Rwanda experienced a premeditated, systematic and state sponsored genocide with the aim of exterminating those who were ethnically identifiable as Tutsi. Between 500,000 and 800,000 people were killed in a period of 100 days, with around 77 percent of the population registered as Tutsi being murdered.

In his article "The Perils of Obedience”, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to determine if the innate desire to obey an authority figure overrides the morality and consciousness that had been already established in a person. After Milgram conducted his experiments he concluded that 60% of the subjects complied to an authority figure rather than their own sympathy. There was additional testing outside the US which showed an even higher compliance rate. Milgram reasoned that the subjects enjoyed the gratification from the experimenter, who was the authority figure in the experiment. He noted that most of the subjects are "proud" to carry out the demands of the experimenter. Milgram believed for that reason, why the

Parker and Baumrind also question the legitimacy of the experiment and whether the results were influenced by the authority figure alone or by multiple factors. Baumrind states that the experimenter’s cold demeanor and apathetic demands caused the subjects to act in ways they would not have regularly (Baumrind 225-227). The isolation of the subjects is another factor according to Baumrind. The lack of someone to strengthen the subject causes the subject to fold to the authority (Baumrind 225). Parker also questions the legitimacy of Milgram’s experiment. He says it is a combination of several different factors that will result in the subjects actions, not solely a man demanding a subject to complete a task. He continues in saying that people’s actions are influenced by the situation and what is happening around them (Parker 238). Parker quotes Ross in saying, “We can take ordinary people and make them show a degree of obedience or conformity… to a degree that we would normally assume you would only see in a rare few” (Parker 239). Parker continues with saying a subject’s obedience is not determined by a simple command but by a range of factors. In Understanding Behavior in the Milgram Obedience Experiment: The Role of Personality, Situations, and Their Interactions, the author Thomas Blass states that

The continent of Africa has been continually engaged in civil, tribal and cross national conflicts from colonial independence up until present day. What historians regard as the most ‘efficient genocide’ in history, occurred in a mere 100 days in the small central African country of Rwanda. The Hutus and the Tutsis, two ethnic groups within Rwanda, have been at continual unrest for the past half a century. During the 100 day massacre of 1994, a murder occurred every two seconds; resulting in 18% of the Tutsi population being killed. A decade after the war, in 2004, the film Hotel Rwanda was released. The film followed the story of a Hutu man; Paul Rusesabagina as he housed over 1200 Tutsi refugees in his hotel. The Hotel De Milles

One might think that this experiment will stimulate the new research in the area of human obedience, but this did not occur. Despite the difficulties and the courage of Burger to conduct a partial replication of the original study, it did not produce any different outcomes and did not spark any new ideas in psychology (Burger, 2009). Instead, the researcher had to deal with an enormous amount of different commentaries and controversy. My main rationale for disapproving the Burger’s study is ethical characteristics of the Milgram paradigm. More specifically, now we have the Ethical Rules of the APA, which tell us that researchers should honor rights of participants to privacy, confidentiality and the right to withdraw the experiment. However, Milgram’s paradigm clearly challenges these fundamental rights and creates even more ethical dilemmas. Another rationale that I can include is the infliction of increasing pain on an unwilling participant, a characteristic that is unacceptable in modern psychological studies. Therefore, I would disapprove such experiment, because of ethical non-compliance and little contribution to the field. As for me, I view following ethical practices in my dissertation project work as a crucial element for success. It will allow me to produce reliable, meaningful and relevant scholarly data that would not be a subject to ethical

Task: outline and evaluate findings from conformity and obedience research and consider explanations for conformity (and non-conformity), as well as evaluating Milgram’s studies of obedience (including ethical issues).

“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)”

We grow up imagining who and what we would become in life, but never truly comprehend the day we are graduating college and are about to take on our dreams. I can remember the first time I realized that I wanted to become a Forensic Psychologist and those feelings are still just as strong today. It never gets old seeing the reaction on the faces of people who ask me what I want to do after I graduate, “you want to be a what...” they say. The name can confuse people on exactly what the job entails, but I have never turned down the chance to explain.

Human behaviour is the response to given stimuli, which are socially and environmentally affected. This response is something that can easily be influenced and shaped through many personal, situational, social, biological, mental factors. In this essay the case of social norms influencing human behaviour will be analyzed using previous studies. Social norms are part of a larger influential scale generally named as social influence. Social influence is the exercise of power that an individual or a group can use on other individuals or society in order to alter their attitudes, behaviours and lead them to a desired