Chapter Summary Of The Book 'Opening Skinner's Box'

Obscura! One always has a choice as to whether obey or defy an order given be a superior. In chapter two, Obscura, of the book Opening Skinner’s Box by Lauren Slater, she discusses the controversial experiment of Milgram. In Milgram’s experiment he wanted to if people would obey or disobey orders for someone who was “superior” to them when instructed to shock someone, from low voltages ,15, all the way up to lethal voltages, 450. Stanly Milgram used ordinary people to shock them. He had also hired actors to dress as doctors and instruct the ordinary people to shock the other person if they failed to answer correctly. Each time the person answered a question wrong the voltage would increase. Milgram told his subjects that the experiment would

There had been experimentation on obedience but none had been done like Milgram’s. The experimenter warns, “In this experiment, one of you will be the learner and receive shocks when you make a mistake in word pairs read to you, and the other one will be the teacher and administer the shocks when the word pair repetition is wrong.” (Slater 33). He wanted to see if people would shock a person continuously because someone had told them to. Milgram wanted to know how far people would go. His experiment was all a hoax. The shock machine was fake. All he wanted was to know how many people would be obedient and how many would be defiant. Much to Milgram’s surprise sixty-five percent of people did what were told of them, and only thirty-five percent were

Joshua, a man involved in the experiment, ““I shocked. I feel bad about that. I shocked but I only went to 150, I broke it off at 150.” He keeps repeating this, as though to reassure himself…. He ages; the experiment stays still in time.” (Slater 49). Joshua had been defiant in the experiment. One of his emotional setbacks are that he has to try and convince himself that he stopped at an appropriate timing or voltage. Another subject, Jacob, was obedient, he states, “I saw how pathetically vulnerable I was to authority, so I kept a strict eye on myself and learned to buck expectations.” (Slater 59). Milgram helped Jacob overcome a major factor in his life, he finally came out. Milgram’s experiment helped people overcome some factors in their lives, yet he some of his subjects back in tremendous ways, they can’t even trust