'Opening Skinners Box, By Lauren Slater's Obscura'

. The author of the chapter “Obscura” is Lauren Slater; she is a psychologist as well. This chapter comes out of a novel called Opening Skinners Box. The main characters presented in this chapter are Stanley Milgram, who is in charge of doing the experiment on testing obedience, and there was fake names given to the volunteers for the experiment. This chapter was about an experiment that tested the importance of obeying somebody in a white coat and who would obey or give up. There was a teacher and a learner in this experiment; the learner was put in an electric chair and every answer he would get wrong he would receive a higher shock voltage from the teacher. An analysis of the “Obscura” chapter is that it challenges us how to respect our authority, the power somebody in a white coat has over a college student, and overall obedience to authority. Stanley Milgram wanted to study obedience to authority in 1961, and at the time he was a twenty-seven year old Yale assistant professor of …show more content…
“Slater said that it was very difficult for Elms and Milgram to determine character traits between defiant and obedient subjects; they did find that obedient subjects were not as close to their fathers during childhood then defiant…. Obedient people received spankings, and defiant people got abused or a form of deprivation” (47). How could it be determined that someone is obedient or defiant as a personality? Personally every human being has a little bit of both of these character traits. “Many candidates from Milgram’s experiments came out the opposite then what he had hoped. The experiments brought a form of awareness and could have been the first steps towards change” (61). It brought many human beings into realization. Were they really considered defiant or obedient; how would we really know? Obedience is the smarter way to go about life especially when being a part of such a brain powering