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Who Is The Key Protagonist In Enron's Obedience?

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Enron’s Obedience In 1962 a Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram performed a number of experiments investigating what he labelled “the issue of authority” he undertook the experiment to evaluate how normal everyday people were capable of doing terrible acts even when these actions went against their innate moral compass. The most notable experiment implemented was called the “Obedience Experiment”. This was a rigged experiment, test subjects would ask questions to an unseen victim, if the victim failed to answer correctly a shock would be given with the voltage increasing as the victim continued to give wrong answers, unbeknown to the test subject no shock was actually received by the victim. The test subjects were called teachers, the “teachers” …show more content…

Men in white coats were used to ask the “Teachers” to continue and explained that it was “Essential” for them to continue. His experiment discovered that 65% of the people that took part would continue all the way to the 450 volts and even the visual warning of “danger severe shock” emboldened on the face of the panel did not stop them. Milgram concluded that the responsibility had been taken away from the “Teachers” because they were told by figures of authority to continue. Inserting the key protagonist in the Enron story into the confines of the “Obedience experiment” we can clearly see the “victims” were the investors and speculators that invested in Enron. The “Teachers” were the analyst and employees of Enron and the CEO’s and heads were the men in white coats. There rigged experiment was in financial tools and deregulations of the markets. The only major difference was the level of pain felt by the “Victims” in Milgram’s experiment no shocks were ever felt but for the Enron speculators it was a financial pain that would stay for the rest of their lives. The men in white coats in the Enron story were Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, these key men should have set the moral bar at Enron and should have upheld there core values, set out in there code of ethics at the inception of the company, shown

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In the video of the Stanley Milgram Experiment People were given roles as teachers and students. The students had been hooked up to an electrical system were they had been received questions and whenever they had answered incorrectly they received a dosage of electricity and got progressively got stronger each time they were wrong. At a certain point the student stopped responding to pain and the scientist had kept making them give a voltage. Some People discontinued the experiment.

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983 Words | 4 Pages

In the article of “The Perils of Obedience”, written by Stanley Milgram, the experimenter explains that the experiment is to see how far a person could hurt a victim in a situation where he is ordered to do so. Also, in the article “The Stanford Prison

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Second, The Stanford Prison Experiment was a psychological study that was too inhumane to continue because of the behavior of the prison guards when handed with superiority and the mental breakdowns of the prisoners. E: “Now, you 'll all be given sunglasses and uniforms to give the prisoners a sense of a unified, singular authority… And from this point forward you should never refer to this as a study or experiment again,’’ (Dr. Phil Zimbardo).

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In 1971 Philip Zambardo conducted an experiment in the basement of the Psycoigy department at the Stanford Univisty with a team of Psycogy students to see how normal people act in a prison inverment as a guard and or a prisoner. He wanted to see how theses men will adapt in this everment and it was to go on for 2 weeks but got cut short to 6 day for Psyogicl dmage that could of occerd if he keeped the experiment going any longer. Philip learned a lot with this experiment as did society did now to make it a forbitting exerment now. Phillip lreaned how people act in there fack roles and how far people will go when they have the power of a lab coat behinf them.

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992 Words | 4 Pages

His experiment was used to demonstrate how people respond to orders from people with authority no matter what the order was. He started by having participants test another “participant”, who actually was one of Milgram’s men who knew what was going on. Each time the fake participant chose the wrong answer, the real participant had to shock them with a higher voltage until they got to one that would be deadly. Milgram changed parts of the experiment to find variables that changed how far the real participant would go. He noticed that location and experimenter’s dress apparel changes how likely it is that the real participant would go to the deadly voltage.

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415 Words | 2 Pages

Conformity In 1963, Stanley Miligran and Philip Zimbardo conducted a social experiment in which two people were partnered up, one the teacher, one the learner. Their goal was to see how far the learner would go in obeying the teachers’ commands. This was an important experiment in the world because it shows how easy it is for evil people to use their power for corruption, even in giving innocent people orders. Miligran was inspired to do this experiment while reviewing the holocaust.

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On day six Zimbardo and Milgram decided to conclude the experiment. Zimbardo originally intended to explore how prisoners adapt to powerlessness, but he has contended that the experiment demonstrates how swiftly arbitrary assignment of power can lead to abuse. (Maher, The anatomy of obedience. P. 408) Once the experiment was completed Zimbardo and Milgram concluded that generally people will conform to the roles they are told to play.

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950 Words | 4 Pages

While arguably one of the defining psychological studies of the 20th Century, the research was not without flaws. Almost immediately the study became a subject for debate amongst psychologists who argued that the research was both ethically flawed and its lack of diversity meant it could not be generalized. Ethically, a significant critique of the experiment is that the participants actually believed they were administering serious harm to a real person, completely unaware that the learner was in fact acting. Although Milgram argued that the illusion was a necessary part of the experiment to study the participants’ reaction, they were exposed to a highly stressful situation. Many were visibly distraught throughout the duration of the test

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With every wrong answer the electric shock would go up in the shock. This Experiment was one of the unethical practices because there was some emotional distress on the (teacher) who was the one administering the electric shock. The reason for this experiment was to see if the obedience of a person is truly possible to even obey direct

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249 Words | 1 Pages

I understand that Milgram’s experiment on obedience was criticized a few years after it was conducted for its ethical issues. The participants were first deceived, they were unaware that the learner in the experiment was a part of it and they believe he was receiving the shock. The experiment also risk harming the participants psychologically, many of them were stressed while giving the shocks and this could have affected them long term. I also notice the experiment didn’t give the participants the right to leave, it wasn’t voluntary. The conductor would give them strong orders and this would make the participants feel forced to complete the experiment.

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In the circumstances of what I would do to harm someone, it would always as I stated above about the morality. It would take a lot for me to go against myself to harm another person even if told by an authority figure, another person should never been in pain no matter, just as I gave an example of the show that did a recreation of the experiment. Milgram’s experiment should serve as a reminder that, sometimes, an authority figure’s word is not the best thing to do. This doesn’t mean we should distrust authority figures: there’s a reason they wear a uniform, and it’s because most all of them know how to best do their job. However, it should teach us to also listen to our moral compass and use our better judgement when listening to an order that may cause harm to

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440 Words | 2 Pages

Dr. Berger’s experiment attempted to test the morality of people when an authority figure was present. In this experiment, the test subject was told to teach word pairings to a “learner”, each time the learner was wrong, an electric shock would be administered to the learner, each additional wrong answers the shock voltage would be increased. In the actual experiment no shocks were administered, and the real test subject was the teacher to see how many shocks they would administer. In the experiment, 65% of men and 73% of women would administer over the maximum 150 volts. For the reasoning behind why the subjects administered such a high voltage, many participants simply said it was because it was their job, they were told to do it

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981 Words | 4 Pages

The Milgram experiment was conducted to analyze obedience to authority figures. The experiment was conducted on men from varying ages and varying levels of education. The participants were told that they would be teaching other participants to memorize a pair of words. They believed that this was an experiment that was being conducted to measure the effect that punishment has on learning, because of this they were told they had to electric shock the learner every time that they answered a question wrong. The experiment then sought out to measure with what willingness the participants obeyed the authority figure, even when they were instructed to commit actions which they seemed uncomfortable with.

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“Social psychology focuses on three broad topics: how people think about, influence, and relate to one another.” (Social Psychology) When it comes to behavior and how people will act, many experiments were conducted to prove or disprove that “behavior is contagious”. (Social Psychology) Experiments such as Soloman Asch’s Conformity Experiment, Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiment and Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment all impacted modern psychology. These experiments proved that behavior is infectious and what some do impacts what others will do. In this paper, I will show that it is true, “behavior is contagious.”

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In this Enron Scandal ,several moral issues and values are being discussed .The moral issues is the misconduct of code of ethics by management level of a corporation , violation of code of professional ,ethical dilemma that faced by a management level when involved own interest . The first moral issues that discussed in Enron Scandal is misconduct code of ethics by management level of a corporation .In this case ,the mastermind of this scandal is the company CEO , Mr .

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