October 21, 2016 Friday
Bedtime Story
The Obedience Experiments
The Obedience Experiments
Milgram named his 3 years of work at Yale the Obedience
Experiments.
It was named so because the subject of the experiment
or the “teacher” was taking commands or verbal prods by the Experimenter – the
authority figure sitting next to him.
Whenever the “teacher” wanted to terminate the
experiment (and thereby cease from further “torture” of the “learner”), the
Experimenter would goad on with the following series of commands:
1. Please Continue
2. The experiment requires you to continue
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue
4. You have no other choice, you must go on
After these 4 ascending order of the commands, if the
“teacher” still desired to stop proceeding any further, the experiment was
halted.
If on the other hand the “teacher” continued with
“training” and increasing electrical shocks to the “learner”, the experiment
continued until 450 volt of shocks had been administered 3 times in succession.
These were the so called end points of the experiment
with each subject.
Milgram published his experiments and the results in a
1963 paper titled “Behavioral Study of Obedience” in the Journal of Abnormal
and Social Psychology, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the
American Psychological Association.
Now what do you think were the results of the
experiment?
Think about it.
Meanwhile, before starting out his experiments, Milgram
carried out a survey on 2 groups of people, one was his own colleagues at Yale,
and second was Yale students studying psychology as their major.
Both the groups very vehemently agreed upon that only a
small fraction of the “teachers” in the experiment would go on beyond strong
shocks.
On average, the believed that by around 300 volts, when
the “learner” would be displaying signs of strong discomfort, agony and even
banging on the wall, only 3 to 4 percentage of the experimental subjects would
go on to proceed further.
They could not have been more wrong.
The experimental evidence and its implications will be
revealed in the nights to come.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average storytelling chimpanzee or
login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
Another great educator and teacher that I am aware of is Professor
Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an IIT graduate and
a former professor at BARC, actually does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All
his books can be downloaded for free through this link.
For
edu-tainment of your children may I suggest Kids Songs channel.
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