Obedience to Authority - Microblog

Chapter 1: The Dilemma of Obedience

Summary

In this chapter Milgrim explains the meaning of obedience and how a person comes to act in an obedient behavior. He goes into more details of his shock experiement and discusses the foundation of his experiment and some of the events that infulenced his study.

Discussion

I found it interesting to read more from the perspective of Milgram's point of view in how he defined obedience. While I have always thought this was an interesting and odd experiment it helped to know more in dept about it.

Chapter 2: Method of Inquiry

Summary

Here Milgram discusses the components and constraints of his experiement and how he got his participants (no undergraduate students to avoid exposing his experiment). He explains the requirement of needing actors so that he could define his variable of study. He also discussed the machines that were used in this experiement.

Discussion

As I said for the first chapter, it was useful to know the in depth details of the experiment even to the reasoning why they chose the subjects they did for the experiment. It's just as important to have the proper tools in a user study as the study is so I thought it was good they he expanded on this information.

Chapter 3: Expected Behavior

Summary

This chapter explains how Milgram asked people for their input, in regards to the responses of the subjects in such experiment. This was an effort to get their own personal responses as well as what they thought others involved in the experiement would respond in doing. Many people responded that they believed that people would be stop when the learner expressed the desire to stop and be released and that they wouldn't continue shocking the learner.

Discussion

I found it interesting in how they chose to define the hypothesis of this study taking feedback from the subjects, versus that they could have gone with previous studies or their own knowledge. It's good to know the baseline they were going off of and this was a creative way to go about setting this for that experiment.

Chapter 4: Closeness to the the Victim

Summary

In an effort to determine the factor of proximity to the learner various test were done with the victim in the same room and not being in the same room. They discovered that when the victim was within the same room obedience was less likely to occur and and the subject was less actually finished the experiement. While when they were in a different room they did show signs of impact from the victim's reactions but they were more likely to be obiedent.

Discussion

I can understand how proximity can impact someone's actions. I think it's very true that we are very capable of doing harm at at distance, just consider the kinds of weapons we have in our society today. People will be more incline to fire a gun because they can do that at a variety of distances. I think it was a movie that I heard this statement, but I always heard that a knife is a more personable weapon and it takes guts to use it on someone since you have to get within close range to use it. In a more personable answer, I am becoming more aware in the use of proximics in how we react in social behavior based off the work done by Cindy Bethel, which will soon be expanded by one of the members on my robotics team in our lab.

Chapter 5: Individuals Confront Authority

Summary

This chapter unfolds more about the individual who were subjects in the study. While each experiment was taylored for each person, Milgrim made an effort to obtain and factor in the profile information of each victim when testing obedience. The profile information consisted of both their backgrounds, comments and thoughts on the experiement, as well as there reactions once the experiments were completed.

Discussion

I found it to be very good that they made a lot of effort to collect information on their subjects in order to truly test obedience for each subject involved in the experiment. As a researcher myself I've come to realize how important it is to truly analyze the ones your are going place in your user studies if you really want accurate results. Theirs a lot of factors that can attribute to someone's responses, but often some of the easiest ones can be overlooked if proper information isn't initially collected.

Chapter 6: Further Variations and Controls

Summary

This chapter expands on the variations that were altered in some of the experiements. They did various things with the victim as well as gave the subject some freedom to determine if this would impact the results. Some of the specific things altered was applying a heart condition to the victim, changing the personality, the proximity of the victim, the background information of the victim (school affilation to Yale), using women as subjects, or if the subject was given the option of determining the shock level.

Discussion

I hadn't considered the possibility of them using different variations in their experiment in order to ensure their results reflected sound feedback. It's interesting some of the factors they decided to change or add in, but I can see how that would impact the situation and find it necessary to try and test.

Chapter 7: Individuals Confront Authority II

Summary

Similar to the first experiments with the only difference is that this time the subjects were more women than men. This chapter concluded that the results with women were similar to the ones from the males, so there was no dramatic difference in the gender of the subject, the behavior resulted in the same behavior.

Discussion

Interesting how they tested woman and men separately, but yes I do believe that's a factor they had to try and see mattered for the results. Perhaps being a woman myself I'll quickly admit that often woman and men will result to doing the same action in many different scenarios. While some women may be prone to respond to some situations differently than men we are still human and often susceptible to such error and incorrect response.

Chapter 8: Role Permutations

Summary

In an effort to test the role impact on the subjects responses in the experiement they tried applying different roles in different context to test obedience. Some of the roles included having the learner ask to be shocked, contradictions in authority or if the person was an authroity figure or just an indvidual. The results showed that the hierarchy of authority proved to be valuable.

Discussion

It makes sense that they would test the various roles and how such changes in roles could impact the obedience of a subject to express on the victim. I can understand how the hierarchy of authority would proved to be valuable. In order for us to be obedient we would need to yield to someone we believe to be of esteemed, well-respected role and person.

Chapter 9: Group Effects

Summary

This chapter expands on experiement 17 and18 where they test whether groups (the existance of rebellion by two people) impacted authority and whether instructing others in a group impacted obedience. The results reflected that in experiment 17 obedience was very low. Where as in experiement 18 obedience was a very high.

Discussion

The impact of groups on behavior is something that has always interest me. The findings from this factor was something that I expected, we often follow the crowd and long to fit in. We'll even fall susceptible to doing what people in a group instruct us to do to fit that conformity.

Chapter 10: Why Obedience?

Summary

This chapter expands why the subjects were obedient and the reasoning which go into making someone respond in obedience. He presents the concept of the agnetic shift where someone goes from being a person in a state where they are controlling what they do and being controlled by someone else, someone of authority. There is also a shift in who the responsibilty of the actions committed in this shift.

Discussion

The agnetic shift makes a lot of sense in that we change states of thinking and it doesn't surprise me that they would also shift the blame of their actions to the person whom told them to do something. That's one thing we've seen that's consistent with human-kind throughout all of history is that we're consistent with trying to excuse ourselves and we have difficulty admitting that we are wrong. Rather we try to excuse our behavior by distributing the blame to make ourselves feel better.

Chapter 11: The Process of Obedience

Summary

Here Milgram expands even fruther of the agnetic state and goes more into detail of what factors go into producing the result of obedience. It reflects a lot of the the background of an individual and their certain conditions that result in being obedient and thus concludes why so many believed that they could not violate their authority.

Discussion

I found the in-depth information he provided and the results of the experiment to be consistent with what I believed before in regards to obedience. There are a lot more factors than what just meets the eye and I appreciated that he expanded on that within this chapter.

Chapter 12: Strain and Disobedience

Summary

This chapter discusses how strain factors into being disobedient. Being disobedient for many could mean that they are not fulfilling the experimenters wishes and thus there is a conflict within the individual to decide to be disobedient. Specificially some of the strain factors in this experiment would be the response of the victim. Milgrim presents that one of the ways the subject would resolve the strain would be to be disobident of the authority figure.

Discussion

I found it interesting how he presented the strains within the study and how the strain was resolved through being disobedient. While I can see that relieving the strain in that moment I wonder if that was something that was really a resolution. For me I think I would have still felt the strain of my actions, even if I did stop, but the fact that I probably struggled with that and that I even took part in the experiment as long as I did. I think I would still be struggling with the guilt of what I did do because I knew my internal thought process in a sense the 'real me'.

Chapter 13: An Alternative Theory: Is Aggression the Key?

Summary

Milgrim presents an alternative theory as to why the subjects were capable of shocking the victim and that being the possiblity of agression factoring into the obedience. The author then goes on to prove why agression was not the reasoning in the desire to be obeident.

Discussion

I could understand how this is an alternative theory for compliance. While I can see that might be a reason for some of the subjects I don't believe that was the compounding factor for everyone and I do believe that the evidence that Milgram presented to counter this theory was sufficient. There was a solid foundation to prove that aggression couldn't be the only reasoning but that it was an issue of obedience to authority.

Chapter 14: Problems of Method

Summary

Here Milgrim presents the three critisims which people presented about his experiment. He refutes these three critisms by providing evidence and reasoning. The chapter closes out by him comparing the experiement's results to what happened with the Nazi's in Germany.

Discussion

I appreciated that the author chose to cover this in his explanation of his experiment. It's important as researchers to be able to counter the arguments that come up against our research questions and to be able to defend it properly. I feel that the entire book did a good job of presenting information and reasoning why these claims could be refuted and I think the results did reflect the true desire of the research in the experiment.