October 22, 2016 Saturday

Bedtime Story 



Results That Shocked The World

The results of Milgram Experiment surprised even the experimenters.

Of the 40 subjects who participated in it, 26 of them (65%) ended up administering the final massive 450 voltage of electric shock to the “learners”.

This they did despite being very uncomfortable doing so; sometimes questioning the sense of the experiment and sometimes offering to refund the experimental money back.

During the course of this apparently cruel experiment, the participants were sweating, trembling, biting into their lips, groaning or digging their finger nails into their skin.

Some gave out a fit of nervous laughter and few had seizures.

These signs indicate that most of them had not seen through the experimental set up.

Milgram repeated these experiments with variations.

Following him, various scientists all over the world repeated this experiment over time along with its variations.

Thomas Blass is another Jewish American psychologist who was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1944 and lived through the Holocaust.

After the war, he and his mother lived as refugees in Salzburg, Austria (after being freed from the concentration camp) and later migrated to Canada.

He did his BA in mathematics in NYC and eventually PhD in social psychology.

He conducted meta-analysis of all experiments that were Milgram-like at the University of Baltimore where he was professor emeritus.

He found that the percentage of test subjects who went on to inflict maximum voltage on average did not waver, and remained over 60%.

Stanley Milgram later in 1974 went on to write and publish a book describing and discussing in detail his methodology of experimentation and conclusions.

The book is called:

“Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View”.

I think we all need to know about this book if not read it, as it reveals a surprisingly lot about human nature.

These 3 sentences of Stanley Milgram in its glorious pithy elegantly summarizes his conclusions about us human apes:

“The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study…

“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.

“Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work becomes patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with the fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

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:

http://skmclasses.weebly.com

All his books can be downloaded for free through this link.

https://zookeepersblog.wordpress.com/science-tuition-chemistry-physics-mathematics-for-iit-jee-aieee-std-11-12-pu-isc-cbse/

For edu-tainment of your children may I suggest Kids Songs channel.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMX11Z5SJQ3kgwSsFJLRIcg

Our Cruelty and Servitude lay Exposed Threadbare