Sociology Matters Chapter Summaries

In chapter four of the book Sociology Matters by Richard T. Schaefer what I found the Stanley Milgram social experiment very interesting. It’s an experiment where people are asked to volunteer in the research on investigating the effects that punishment has on learning. They are asked to shock the learner if they do not get the right answer. Also I did not know what deviance truly was and that it in a way connects with Milgram’s Experiment. Stanley Milgram’s social experiment connects with both obedience, labeling, and deviance. Firstly, in order for Milgram’s experiment to work the people had to obey and do what the researchers told them to do. The definition of obedience defined in the book is, “...a compliance with higher authorities in a hierarchical structure.”(Schaefer, 103) This is exactly what happened in the experiment. The experimenter dressed in a gray technician’s coat which in the volunteers eyes showed authority. This is because in our modern industrial world we are used and taught to submit to submit to people that have a title or uniform that indicates

Labeling is how individuals are seen by other people. For example, if a person was an alcoholic that label will stay with them forever and people will judge the person based on that label. In the recreation of the experiment Schulman discovered that white students were more likely to shock the black learners than the white learners. The percentage margin was of 70 percent to 48 percent. As the book says, “... They imposed more shocks on the Black learners that on the White learners.”(Schaefer, 104) This relates to labeling because the white students were labeling the learners by skin color and that is how they decided if they wanted to shock them or not. They based their decisions on how they taught the person deserved it because of their