Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Book Reading #37 - Obedience to Authority

Chapters 9-14
Summary
Next up in the round of testing was to add in the element of having a group aspect to the variables. This is to see whether these people would still choose to go with the authority aspect even with peers by them. Then the next chapter pondered on the idea of why authority and obedience correlate so well. What makes the person who disagrees with what is happening go along with the instructions. The disobedience aspect of the equation is even more interesting because people simply don't just disobey because of the fact that shocking a victim is morally wrong because when the space between the subject and the victim is changed so does the obedience factor. Strain will definitely be a factor in this equation. Also proposed was maybe aggression as a key cause for all the outcomes. The last chapter was reserved for stating possible problems with the study such as whether the test subjects were truly thinking they were administering a shock, whether they were actual volunteers or whether the recruitment gave them any bias.

Discussion
This last half of the book was much more on the technical aspects of the study and how specific outcomes were achieved. This study specifically turned out to be a little more substance than I thought. Many of the details of this experiment were left out for me when I normally read about how they performed it.

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