____________ 1 ___________________ 2 __________ 3 ____________________________ 4 _______________ 5 students have been given instructions. You MUST follow those directions. If you are not participating in the experiment, you must remain silent. No bathrooms, no giggling, no whispering. Just pay attention, and play along. Please provide the best answer you can to each Question. The questions will look like the example below

Question 1 ______________________ 1 ___________________ 2 __________ 3 ____________________________ 4 _______________

__________________________ 1 ____________ 2 __________________________ 3 __________________________________ 4 ______________________ Question 2

_________________________________ 1 ____________________ 2 _________________________________ 3 ___________________________ 4 ____ Question 3

__________ 1 _____________ 2 __________ 3 _______ 4 ____________________ Question 4

___________________ 1 ___________________ 2 ___________________________ 3 ____________ 4 _________________________ Question 5

_ 1 _________ 2 ___ 3 _____ 4 _ Question 6

_________________________________ 1 _____________________ 2 _____________ 3 _________________ 4 _________________________________ Question 7

___________ 1 ___________ 2 ____________________ 3 ________________ 4 _______________________ Question 8

How did YOU do? Did you conform? How can conformity be good? Bad? This experiment is called the Asch experiment, and first took place in the 1950’s It took only 1 person to disagree before conformity began Conformity

Extreme Obedience Jonestown, Guyana, 1978  Jim Jones, cult leader of the People’s Temple, persuaded his followers to drink Kook-Aid laced with cyanide  913 died, including 200+ children poisoned by their parents  Factors  Cult members felt alienated from American society  Cult members were in an isolated location  Jones was charismatic  Jones promised life “in a better place”  David Koresh, cult leader of the Branch Davidians, maintained an armed standoff with the US Government for 51 days until he and his cult leaders died in a fire of unknown origin  Over 80 adults and children died

Nazi Holocaust Germany & Poland (Europe) ,000,000-17,000,000 Cambodia (Asia) ,000,000 Rwanda (Africa) ,000 Extreme Obedience

Are the people who commit such acts inherently evil?  Adolf Eichmann  Supervised deportation of 6,000,000 Jews to concentration camps  Were Germans generally evil  Was Eichmann an evil sadist, or merely a cog in the wheel?  How would you have behaved in his situation

15 v – Slight Shock 75 v – Moderate Shock “ugh” 135 v –strong shock “get me out of here, my heart is bothering me!” 195 v – very strong shock “I can’t stand the pain” 255 v – intense shock “agonized screams” 315 v – extreme intensity shock “intensely agonized screams” 375 v – danger: severe shock “silence” 435v and up – XXX “silence” Read Handout 3 together, How far would YOU go?

Milgram’s Obedience Experiment Stanley Milgram

Milgram’s Obedience Experiment What PERCENTAGE of people do YOU THINK gave the maximum shock?

Results  The level of shock was used as the measure of obedience.  How far do you think that most participants were willing to go?  When Milgram posed this question to a group of Yale University students, it was predicted that no more than 3 out of 100 participants would deliver the maximum shock.  In reality, 65% of the participants in Milgram’s study delivered the maximum shocks.

We do what we’re told Psychologists’ predictions

Milgram Video: Questions  How did Milgram make the situation seem realistic?  What was the task for the learner and for the teacher?  How did the learner protest?  What sorts of things did the experimenter say to encourage the teacher to obey? What made the experimenter seem like an authority?  How far did subjects go before stopping?  Did the real subjects enjoy shocking the learner? Were they sadists?  Did the subjects obey just because Yale researchers had legitimate authority? … and a few things to think about…  Was the study ethical? Were the results worth it?  Why did so many people obey? What would you have done in that situation?

Disobedience  While many of the participants in Milgram’s experiments obey an authority, a number disobey. Why?  The experiment produced strain - participants did not enjoy shocking an innocent person and reported high levels of tension.  Milgram: reducing strain promotes obedience. When strain is too great, participant is more likely to disobey.

What changed the results?  Remoteness of victim  Division of labor (have someone else do it for you)  Avoidance  withdrawing attention from victim, denial, delivering shocks as briefly as possible  Physical conversion  nervous laughter, trembling  Dissent  Disobedience

The dangers of obedience…  "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 become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority" (Milgram, 1974).

The Banality of Evil From Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963  [Eichmann] remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do -- to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care.  Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as “normal” -- ‘more normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,’ one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was ‘not only normal but most desirable.’  The Banality of evil: the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal. Hannah Arendt

Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo, 1975)  How did Zimbardo make the roles of prisoner and guard realistic?  What happened? How did prisoners react? How did guards react?