Please answer only one (1) of the following questions (but make sure to still meet the 150-word criteria for your first post).
1. Compare the ethics of the two experiments, discuss each experiment (Milgrim and Zimbardo). Though studies like these would never again be allowed, and would not be approved by an Institutional Review Board, is there anything you would like to test that would get at authority again that would benefit our understanding of human behavior in the modern context?
2. In one of this week’s videos, Philip Zimbardo discusses the Milgram Obedience Experiment. He notes that in the study, a dispositional orientation takes place, in that 65% of the studies participants (teachers) inflicted the highest level of voltage (pain) on the learners, versus what psychiatrists had estimated (1%). Using concepts from our course text, discuss why you feel this number was so large. If conducted today, what kind of obedience do you think Milgram would get and why?
3. Given our understanding of how prison situations act on the mind of the individual (as demonstrated by the Zimbardo study), what recommendations or changes would you suggest for our nations prison environments? (In answering this, please be sure to note concepts from the sections of the chapter that directly discuss this).
NOTES:
PPT Presentation (Attached)
There is a 2015 movie Experimenter, on Netflix. If you watch that, you don’t need to watch the video below. They are interchangeable. The movie is average movie length (about 1 and 1/2 hours). The video below Title: Obedience is from the 1960s and the quality is poor. Compare the ethics of the two experiments (Zimbardo and Milgram). Though studies like these may never again be approved by an Institutional Review Board, do you feel that they would benefit our understanding of human behavior in the modern context?
LINK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdrKCilEhC0
In this video. Philip Zimbardo discusses the Milgram Obedience Experiment. He notes that in the study, a dispositional orientation takes place, in that 65% of the studies participants (teachers) inflicted the highest level of voltage (pain) on the learners, versus what psychiatrists had estimated (1%). Using concepts from our course text, discuss why you feel this number was so large. If conducted today, what kind of obedience would Milgram get?
LINK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g1MJeHYlE0
There is a 2015 movie on the Zimbardo Prison Experiment too, that is worth watching, and is on Netflix, Title: The Stanford Prison Experiment. If you watch that, you don’t need to watch the above documentary. They are interchangeable. The movie is average movie length (about 1 and 1/2 hours). Given our understanding of how prison situations act on the mind of the individual (as demonstrated by this study), think about the following as you watch The Prison Experiment. Also, the last question is a final discussion question. There is also controversy surrounding validity and reliability of this experiment. There is recent evidence that those students who answered the volunteer ad to be in a prison experiment, may have had less empathy, and act in more authoritarian and aggressive ways than those who did not (Carnahan and McFarland 2007). There may have been some selection bias in who answered the ad and became part of the experiment.
LINK:
http://bit.ly/qwXOBD
Carnahan, Thomas and Sam McFarland. 2007. Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: Could Participant Self-Selection Have Led to the Cruelty? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33(5): 603 614.
