I <3 Sociology

While reading the textbook today, I came across an experiment by sociologist Dr. Stanley Milgram (1963, 1965). Don't stop reading! This is interesting!

Milgram asked random people to preform an experiment. He told them they would be participating in an experiment on punishment and learning. He set up a "learners" chair and a "teachers" chair in a laboratory. The teacher had a dial in front of them that controlled how many volts went through to the learner's chair. The learner would be strapped in and asked a series of questions by the teacher, if the learner answered incorrectly the teacher would shock them. For every incorrect answer, the dial was supposed to be turned up.

It was staged. The people in the learner's chair didn't actually get shocked, but they acted as if they did. The people under experiment were the "teachers". Some learners reacted by yelling in pain as the dial was turned up more. Some didn't verbally respond, but all reacted with some form of discomfort. In many cases the teacher would ask for them to end the experiment, but the authority (scientist, white coat, guy) would say no. Not in a violent way, a simple "No." That was disturbingly enough for most people to continue the experiment even until the dial was turned to the most extreme of shocks which read on the dial as 'Danger: Severe Shock".

In a few ways you could consider the experiment immoral, but what disturbed me most was what this said about our society. We expect authority to tell us what is right. Police officers, government officials, parents, even peers; anyone and everyone who asserts some amount of control on our lives. The sociologists aim was to see how people would react to being told to continue doing something even if they found it immoral and inhumane (especially in regards to how the Nazis treated the Jews during WWII). In almost all cases, no matter who this person was, the "teacher" would continue shock treatment, even though it was just an experiment and that within their understanding it was harming another human being.

This experiment was preformed forty years ago. Not in Hitler's day. It's frightening to understand how even when we turn into independant adults, we still feel obligated to accept the immoral and inhumane things authority asks of us. When we were children, it was because it wasn't within our realm of control to say 'no', and we were considered to be bad kids if we did say 'no'. But when you're an adult, you have the right to speak against things that you feel are wrong. Even though people recognize that fact when they look at it from a third person's perspective, that experiment proved that when we're IN that situation, things are much different.

Our laws are put in place for a reason. Social order. We are allowed rights but we also understand restrictions are in place for a reason. Does that still make authority absolute? Are we so affected by authority that we can't follow through with our objections to inhumane treatment?

I can understand why people continue to turn up the dial. That's what makes it so hard to swallow.

PS check your e-mail inboxes. I changed my address.