'The Perils Of Obedience Skinner's Box'

The presence of danger or irritability plays a huge impact on the reactions of every individual. According to Stanley Milgram in his novel the “The Perils of Obedience”, he states that authority figures can cause signs of tension and turn people into “lethal intrustuments in the hands of unscrupulous authority” (184). Also in Chapter 4 of Lauren Slaters novel, “Obedience Skinners Box”, states that humans rely on their social cues and see what others to do in reaction to someone in danger by using Darley and Latane’s Training Manual- Five Stage Approach that connects with a murder that took place in New York. Cruelty is a characteristic that every individual has whether it is caused intentionally or unintentionally. It is defined as inflicting …show more content…
Stanley had created an experiment to see how people would act when putting harm on an innocent person. According to Milgram, the point of the experiment was to “see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measurable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain…”(170). The experiment took place in a Laboratory in Yale University. It involved two volunteers, the teacher and the learner, besides the experimenter. The real focus was on the teacher because the “learner” was an actor. The experiment was designed to study the effect of punishment on learning. The learner was conducted into a separate room strapped to fake miniature electrical chair to prevent excessive movement. The teacher is told to read a pair of sample words and the learner must recite them without any errors. If a mistake was made the teacher must send electric shock to the learner’s chair that ranges from 15- 450 volts. Each mistake made causes the teacher to increase the shock intensity. The learner was ordered to scream evidently loud so the teacher will have a feeling of uneasiness. Surprisingly, Stanley Milgrams prediction of how all his volunteers would disobey the experiment was unbiased and proven …show more content…
Darley and Latane had taught us about the diffusion of Responsibility and how the naïve subjects were waiting for someone else to act before they did. It was designed to see if the student would seek help from the proctor, who is the conductor of the experiment. Darley and Latane had actually varied the size of the group because they said “when a subject believed he or she was I in group of four or more, the subject is unlikely to seek help for the victim” (100). Some subjects All in all, the larger the group, the more likely that the individual will not take action because everyone is now reliant on each other and the responsibility gets spread out to the group. Slater had said that “85% of them sought help and did so within the first three minutes”