week 5 discussion

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Sonia Zambiasi-Vines posted Apr 21, 2022 12:05 AM

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The purpose of the Milgram study was to examine obedience. The experiments conducted in the study tested examined how willing people would be to follow orders, when those orders involve inflicting pain on others, and also when it also goes against a person’s good conscience (Myers & Twenge, 2018). Another research study which looks at similar principles is detailed in an article entitled ‘Gratitude Facilitates Obedience: New Evidence for the Social Alignment Perspective’ (Tong et al, 2021). In this study, researchers test a theory that people who feel gratitude are more likely to be obedient. In four different experiments, participants who were made to feel grateful were more likely to follow instructions to grind up worms in a grinder more than others that felt neutral. Overall, the researchers found that ‘ gratitude can make a person more vulnerable to social influence, including obeying commands to perform an ethically questionable act’ (Tong et al, 2021).

This study is similar to the Milgram study in that people are being asked to do something that could be considered morally wrong. In this study however, people were hurting worms, and not other people. Nevertheless, the participants were made to look at the live worms prior to placing them in a coffee grinder, which could be considered a somewhat gruesome task. Unlike the Milgram study, before committing the act, participants were asked to recall a grateful, happy, or neutral moment to put them in a particular state of mind prior to the action.

Similar to the Milgram study, participants were asked to ‘continue with the task’ and then told ‘they must continue with the task’ up to 3 times before the task was stopped. And also like the Milgram study, no worms were actually harmed in this experiment – the funnel pipe was blocked so that the worms would not actually reach the grinder once they were placed in the top.

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Faith Bachman posted Apr 21, 2022 2:37 PM

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The Milgram study, by today’s standards, is considered an unethical research experiment. However, it is still being used as one of the classical experiments describing obedience.

· Search the Internet to find another research study (not one from the textbook) explaining similar principles as the Milgram’s study.

A study completed that had similar principles as the Migram study is that of Professor Jerry Burger during his time at Santa Clara University in California. In 2009, Professor Burger requested from the school board to allow him to utilize the Milgram experiment to see if students would still follow the instructions of an authority figure, regarding electric shocks, in more modern society. Of course, Burger’s experiment was very small, it received backing from the school under strict restrictions and limitations (Mills, 2009).

· Compare and contrast the study you found with the Milgram study.

The two studies were virtually the same, as both Milgram and Burger had their participants administer electric shocks to another person under instruction. As mentioned earlier, Burger’s experiment was much smaller in both participation and experimentation as he had heavy restrictions and a limitation of 150 volts. This of course is in contrast to Milgram’s study, as he did not have much restrictions or limitations on his experiment. Comparably, Burger found that regardless of what era humans are living in, they are more likely to follow the instruction and administer bodily harm onto another human. He also screened out participants that had taken more than two psychology courses and those who had familiarity of the Milgram study. Although this was labeled as insignificant, Burger’s experiment showed that 70% of his participants had to be stopped once they reached their limitation of 150 volts, which fairly close to the percentiles in which Milgram had with his study.

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