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Evaluate Milgram's Experiment

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Evaluate Milgram's Experiment
Milgram's experiment in 1960 by social psychologist Dr. Stanely Milgram's (1963, 1965) was a controversial experiment. He researched the effect of authority on obedience. I don't think the scientific community overreacted to this experiment because it is unethical to reduce subjects to "twitching shuttering wrecks". Though the human mind is amazing strong we still do not know its breaking point. For interviewers to carry out the kind of experiment they did, they have to be willing to face the consequences of the experiment which could be a permanent damaged mental state. I do believe we need to do experiments like this as the outcome was very eye opening but it has to be better regulated and the background and methods of experimentation clearly …show more content…
The group with six actors and one real subject was shown a card with one line and asked to match that line to another card with three separate lines. The results shows that 25% of people always said the correct answer but the rest of the group varied the right response due to the what the rest of the group did. Symbolic interaction is the way we use different symbols in our lives to view the world and communicate with each other. Functional analysis is the idea that society is a complete unit made up of interrelated parts that work together. Conflict theory stresses that society is composed of groups that compete with one another for scarce resources. The Asch and Milgram experiments show that all three of the above theories have some truth to it. We can see how Symbolic Interaction influenced the majority of people to listen to the authority figure telling the teacher to do something unethical when the teacher himself is an authority figure. This probably stemmed from a symbol of an authority figure like an overbearing father in the subjects life that caused the teacher to give in to the authority figure in the Milgram experiment. Functional analysis shows most people want to work together instead of going against the group and this explains the result of the Asch experiment. Finally conflict theory shows that some people will go against the group to

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