Week 17: Experimentation!

Last week I decided to perform a little social experiment by applying the Golden Rule to my week. I have to admit, I'm quite exhausted. I've made a few too many commitments and I've found it difficult to keep up with everything. No one really took advantage of me per say, but there were a few favors that I would of generally turned down that I found myself doing. On the positive side, everyone else was repaying kindness with kindness, and I found the few favors to be worth it.

So this week we spent the majority looking a group of social experiments that dealt with human reaction in a certain scenario. We kicked off this week with a series of games that exposed the ideas of cooperation and taking advantage of the situation. In most cases, the player was forced to make a decision that would either benefit only themselves, the other player, both, or neither. Most of the games result in my teammate and myself finding the best possible way to win the game at the expense at the other player. However, in the game of chicken, we realized that we could only benefit the other player. That being the case, we both took huge hits at the expense of our own scores to make sure the other player didn't succeed.

We concluded the week with an introduction to sociological experiments that dealt with the moral convictions of a participant in a given situation. I found it interesting that participants acted in the exact opposite way of what we would deem socially acceptable or how most of us would like to think we'd act. For example, the Asche Experiment placed one participant ina room with a group of actors. When they were given a question with an obvious correct answer, all the actors purposely answered incorrectly. The participants, for fear of ridicule, went with the majority and chose the incorrect answer. We'd all like to think that we'd be that acception and be that lone rebel, but in all honesty, few of us would. Even when we are unfamiliar with others around us, the desire to blend in is still apparent and some of us would even convince ourselves that the group was giving the correct answers in order to justify going against our morals.

The Milgram Experiment gave far more surprising results than I would have expected. Like Asche, this experiment has one participant and everyone else is an actor. The participant is in a room with an experimenter and is instructed to give another "participant" in the next room an electrostatic shock every time they answer a question incorrectly. The person being shocked can clearly be heard screaming in agony from the next room over, but the pressure from the experimenter caused the participants to continue shocking the "student". Again, I'd like to hope I'd walk away from the experiment, but the idea of an authoritavie figure in the room puts me under the impression that I'd submit, something most of us do around a person of higher authority.

We'd all like to be that rebel that follows their morals instead of the group or the authoritative figure, but more often than not, we conform. I'd like to know why. This week ?I'd like to read up on why we feel the need to conform when placed in these tough situations. Is it because our sense of judgement is blocked? Is it because of how society raised us? I'm interested in reading up on subjects of the various experiements and hearing what their explanation for their actions was.

Sources:
Asch Experiment. Photograph. Experiment Resources. Web. .

Milgram Experiment. Photograph. Wikimedia. Web. .