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.

Opening Skinner's Box - Full Blog

Reference Information

Title: "Opening Skinner's Box"

Author: Lauren Slater

Summary

This book presents the work of many psychologists and also presents information about there lives and how their research impacted society as well as her personal views. The book opens up talking about B.F. Skinner and his work with animals and rewards and reinforcement to encourage certain behaviors. The following chapter presents the work of Stanley Milgram's work in obedience to authority. Continuing The third chapter presents Thomas Szasz work on the myth of mental illness and then Rosenhan decided to try out an experiment. In his experiment he goes to the admissions of a mental hospital and told them he was hearing a voice where he was actually admitted into the facility. The fourth chapter discusses five stage approach when it comes to acting in a crisis or situation. The author expands on various cases that relate to the steps and experiments performed to test the steps. The fifth chapter talks about the experiments of Leon Festinger and his best-known work Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, which is defined as the adjustment of one's behavior to fit one's belief. The author then interviews people with extreme religious perspectives and discusses the various forms of cults that exist today. The sixth chapter discusses Harry Harlow's experiments which consisted of a soft surrogate mother and a metal milk-bearing one and how growing up without a real mother impacts development. The seventh chapter discusses the 1960s and 1970s research that was focused in the nature of addiction, specifically the studies of Dr. Bruce Alexander and Robert Coambs. His two claims were there is nothing "inherently addictive" about any drugs; and two, repeated exposures to even the most enticing drugs do not usually cause problems. The eighth chapter discusses Elizabeth Loftus in her effort to scientifically prove that it is capable to create false memories based on the information you are exposed to. She uses this effort in performing various experiments and in turn using her finding to try and help people who she feels were falsely accused and are facing a sentence they didn't commit. She did receive a lot of scrutiny for her work, but it did prove to be a perspective in psychology regarding memory. The book continues on memory by covering the experiments of Eric Kandel, which began with working on sea slugs in an effort to find where memory was located in the brain, then expanded to working on humans such as HM. The book closes up covering some of the more severe psychological work in memory and the brain by covering the work of Anonio Egas Moniz, the father of lobotomy. The chapter begins discussing some of the earlier cases and then some of the later procedures that were done in aiding people with various metal disorders. The author presents some of the positive aspects, but also presents some of the negative consequences of such a procedure.

Discussion

I found this book to be very enlightening. Since I had taken psychology before I was familiar with a lot of the studies, but never really had the opportunity to study them more in dept and see them from a perspective such as Lauren Slater's. She presented the cases but also did good in expressing how she viewed them and the work she did to come to the conclusions she did. I think it was good that we covered this in class because it's important for us to actually research and learn the meaning of experiments other than just the results presented. It's interesting to have such knowledge because as computer scientist we do need to consider psychology in our line of work and what we produce and design.

Ethnography Results Week #4

This week our during our observation time we got to follow-up on previous problems with HECC 204. What was believed to be just a computer replacement issue, ended out being a system issue. Later that day they ended out seeing the entire system stop working. They replaced the computer but ended out realizing that the issue was a programming issue and it was passed along to the Microcomputer LAN administrator.

Upon our arrival we came to an empty office (or perhaps the student worker fell asleep), so we waited out in the hallway for a little bit and proceeded to observe the automated system in HECC 100. This system is slightly different and consist of a better sound system and an HD projector. It also had a small touchscreen which has tabs for the devices. The one thing I noticed is that the tabs can be misleading because the DVD tab is actually the Blu-Ray/HD DVD player, while the DVD/VCR combo is controlled by the VHS tab (this has been known to confuse professors in the past).

Upon entering the office the environment was rather relaxed for a Friday morning (8:30). One student worker was studying anatomy and physiology because he had a test at 11:30. The other student worker was friendly as usual and was entertained on the computer near us by playing computer games and browsing facebook.

We did get to visit with one of the IMS consultants and he told the upstairs office that they were short-staffed downstairs so that might impact what the student technicians did during the class changes. One of the supervisors from the tech office did go downstairs to help during the class change. We followed one of the student technicians to HECC 200. The CPS receiver wasn't responding correctly and had to be rest via the back of the podium. The professors seemed slightly stressed and even questioned why we were in there particular space. They seem to change their attitude once they learned that we were observing one of the technicians. The student technician worked well with the professors present and was very polite, he even asked one of the professors how her other class was doing. In seeing that I realized how this particular role can become a very personable one and the student technicians do take pride in mentally tracking previous problems and the satisfaction of the professors.

Paper Reading #12: TwinSpace: an Infrastructure for Cross-Reality Team Spaces

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Reference Information

Title: TwinSpace: an Infrastructure for Cross-Reality Team Spaces

Authors:Derek F. Reilly, Hafez Rouzati, Andy Wu, Jee Yeon Hwang, Jeremy Brudvik, and W. Keith Edwards

Conference: UIST 2010

Summary

This paper presents a software infrastructure called TwinSpace. It combines physical and virtual environments, which combines the use of interactive or smart room technology. Their novel implementation is centered around 4 key features: communication layer, common model, mapping capability, virtual world clients that can participate fully in the services. They can connect to the virtual world through an interface. The paper progresses on the details of the framework. The team room is composed of three main regions: the assembly/array, which is on a wall; the aside table composing and modifying items on a table-like surface; the aside wall which is a whiteboard for new content. The system functions on two modes: brainstorming and present mode.

The TwinSpace software system

Discussion

This paper introduced an interesting system. I think it's a useful product because often in meetings one will use those three spaces, so it's nice that they can be put together and also be a virtual environment as well for people who are off-sight. It would be neat to try this system out.

Emotional Design Microblog

Chapter 1: Attractive Things Work Better

Summary

An experiment done between Japanese and Israelis to determine if attractiveness of an design was a very important factor. In the study it was found that Japanese took attractiveness of design more of a valuable factor in design than did the Israelis that cared more about the functioning factor. A rather new study from psychology has found that affect, emotion and cognition compliment one another. The brain could be seen as three levels: Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective. Input is taken in through the senses and as humans it is processed by the three layers to output an action. The response can be a combination of the levels (bottom-up or top-down) or it can be mostly impacted by one specific layer over ruling the others. The role of positive and negative states do have an impact on design. Happier thoughts often result in creativity; versus negative thoughts often guide people to be more contentious of the appropriate design function. Yet design can and should be driven by both thought processes in order to have both the creative and functioning factor. A brains action can be driven from both biological predisposition and experience; and it is the second and third layer that is often impacted by these factors.

Discussion

I found this to be an interesting shift between the author's last book to this one. On the "Design of Everyday Things" it was more focused on making a product that worked correctly and could be understand by users. This books takes a different approach around affect, emotion and cognition. I've seen similar work with affect and behavioral factors presented in other courses I've taken (HRI focused) so it was nice to see the correlation between fields.

Paper Reading #11: Eden: Supporting Home Network Management Through Interactive Visual Tools

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Paper Information

Title: Eden: Supporting Home Network Management Through Interactive Visual Tools

Authors: Jeonghwa Yang, W. Keith Edwards, David Haslem

Conference: UIST 2010

Summary

This paper presents the network managing system for the home called Eden. It's an interactive and direct manipulation of the home network. It supports a range of tools and puts it in a format that is graphic oriented and user friendly to make manipulation of the network understandable to the user. In a study they found some of the features that people to be desirable in the system. One would be a desired to have an easy way to see the status of the network. Second feature would be security. Last would be to gain more control over network performance to ensure resources are being used correctly. From that analysis they grouped network management task into the following groups: membership, access control, network monitoring, QoS for bandwidth priority.

Eden Interface (Source: publication)

Discussion

I found this paper to be rather interesting. The interface of an application makes all the difference in how a product is used and if it's used successfully. I found it useful that they evaluated people's responses of the system as the implemented features. They took a user's perspective and it strengthened their network tool.

Paper Reading #10: Gesture Search: A Tool for Fast Mobile Data Access

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Paper Reference Information:

Title: Gesture Search: A Tool for Fast Mobile Data Access

Author: Yang Li

Conference: UIST 2010

Summary

This paper presents the Gesture Search tool for mobile phones. This tool uses a handwriting method that can be activated from multiple areas of the phone based on the gesture the person does. Based on what letter the application detects the user writes it will collect information, applications and web links based that correlate with that letter. The author provides a through explanation of the implementation and algorithms used to create this tool. There was also a user study done with the tool with the tool implemented on Android phones. The log analysis test had 125 users. It collected information on the types of data the users accessed using the application and contained some statistical findings on length of the gesture. According to user feedback in the study they found the tool to be 'useful and usable'. They did find that 66% of the users used the tool to access their contacts versus 35% that accessed applications although 17 our of 59 who participated in the feedback survey found this feature useful.

Discussion

This tool seems to be a neat feature. While I've seen it on smaller scale of texting in a few phones, I thought it was interesting how they implemented it to access the store of the phone and able to access a lot of different things. I personally think that would extremely useful, the phone I have at the moment has a scroll by letter feature, but I've always found it difficult to use because the button is rather small and it doesn't always scroll correctly. Due to that finding I often just scroll to my contacts until I get to the one I want. I thought the last line of the conclusion was an interesting way to end the paper, made me laugh. "As a user enthusiastically commented: 'I gesture it, I find it.'"