Reference no: EM131526371

Psychology Assignment - Milgram and Zimbardo's experiments

Read the article below than answer the 2 questions below article. You can add an examples from Internet, Books, Magazines but content from Internet should be paraphrased and cited in APA (6th) format.

Much psychological research reveals the ease with which ordinary people can be recruited to engage in harmful, sadistic behaviors against their fellows. In one classic study, by Stanley Milgram, the majority of ordinary American citizens who participated in the study blindly obeyed an authority figure in administering what they believed were painful, even lethal shocks to a stranger. Another researcher, Albert Bandura, showed that intelligent research participants were willing to give increasingly higher levels of shock to other college students when their victims had been labeled as "seeming like animals," by a research assistant. In another demonstration of the power of situational forces to distort individual values, normal college students recruited to role play prison guards became their roles in a matter of days, behaving with escalating violence toward their prisoners - other college students. We know that a cult leader, Jim Jones, reverend of Peoples Temple, was able to program his followers to commit suicide or to kill one another on his command - more than 900 American citizens did so in the jungles of Guyana. Research by sociologist, John Steiner indicates that most Nazi concentration camp guards were "ordinary men" before and following their years of perpetrating evil. Many more examples could be culled to illustrate reasons why we should not demonize or medicalize these terrorists as an alien breed. Instead, we should focus on a better understanding of the mind control tactics and strategies that might make even good people engage in evil deeds at some time in their lives, and how generations of young people are recruited into lives of terrorism. We need also to better appreciate cultural ways of being that differ from our own, as well as acknowledge "the dark side of religion" in terms of how religiously-based value systems can be perverted to justify and reward the most horrendous of human deeds against his fellow man.

Tracking down the terrorist leaders by our intelligence and military forces has the collateral danger of modeling revenge and retaliation at a national level that can become a stimulus for individuals to adopt a similar orientation toward innocent citizens in our own country whose ethnicity, religion, or appearance might be similar to those of the terrorists. Can we allow that transfer of hostility to develop because in doing so, it fuels the cycle of violence started by the terrorists? Terrorists create terror; terror creates fear and anger; fear and anger create aggression; and aggression against citizens of different ethnicity or religion creates racism and in turn, new forms of terrorism.

1. Cite current examples (last two years) of possible social or political implications of Milgram's work in American society today.

2. Describe how the situation created by Milgram may have parallel situations (like what was found in Nazi Germany during World War II) in the recent cases of genocides in Rwanda (1994), Bosnia (1992-1995) or the current Darfur area of Africa. What could cause ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, to become agents in a terrible destructive process such as these?