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fandomhigh2005-10-06 09:14 am
Speech Comm--Obedience Training
301--Obedience Training
The desks are gone...again...and in the front of the class is a table with collars and small remotes on it. There is also a large basket full of candy.
"Please sit down on the floor...I have something to tell you before we begin."
Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can
point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and
it is only the person dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, with
defiance or submission, to the commands of others. For many people, obedience is
a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding
training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct.
The dilemma inherent in submission to authority is ancient, as old as the
story of Abraham, and the question of whether one should obey when commands
conflict with conscience has been argued by Plato, dramatized in Antigone, and
treated to philosophic analysis in almost every historical epoch. Conservative
philosophers argue that the very fabric of society is threatened by
disobedience, while humanists stress the primacy of the individual
conscience.
The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but
they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set
up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary
citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an
experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects'
strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears
ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The
extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an
authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently
demanding explanation.
That's from Stanley Milgram...you should have read it already. We've talked about trust, influence, manipulation, power...now we're going to look at absolute control. Now, please pair up. One of you is the controller, and one of you will be obedient. In order to encourage obedience, please come up here and get a collar. Controller, you get the zapper. For half the class the controller can request any action of the obedient...rewarding with the candy or punishing with a shock as he or she sees fit. HOWEVER...then you will switch, so don't be a tyrant or it'll bite you on the behind..
O'Neill, you're my partner today.
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I am SO not willingly enduring pain for an experiment. I'm going to be a doctor, not a masochist. Or a sadist.
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Like hell I'm letting someone put a collar on me and zap me!
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