This course will highlight the most interesting experiments within the field of psychology, discussing the implications of those studies for our understanding of the human mind and human behavior. We will explore the brain and some of the cognitive abilities it supports like memory, learning, attention, perception and consciousness. We will examine human development - both in terms of growing up and growing old - and will discuss the manner in which the behavior of others affect our own thoughts and behavior. Finally we will discuss various forms of mental illness and the treatments that are used to help those who suffer from them. The fact of the matter is that humans routinely do amazing things without appreciating how interesting they are. However, we are also routinely influenced by people and events without always being aware of those influences. By the end of this course you will have gained a much better understanding and appreciation of who you are and how you work. And I can guarantee you that you'll learn things that you'll be telling your friends and family about, things that will fundamentally change the way you think of yourself and others. How can you resist that?!
Lecture 2 - Authority (16:29 min)
Loading...
From the course by University of Toronto
Introduction to Psychology
1707 ratings
From the lesson
The Social Mind
This topic is Social Psychology and it features some of the most controversial experiments in psychology. Some of these will having you thinking very deeply for a long time after you see them. You'll have time to analyze and interpret our experience with conformity and authority.
Meet the Instructors
Steve JoordensProfessor
Department of Psychology
All right, so imagine yourself as a psychologist who has just experienced
World War II, and you're really trying to understand the phenomenon that was World
War II. And what I mean by that is the rise,
especially of Fascist tendencies Fascist governments are one where you have a very
strong central figure or leader that really takes control, usually by force
and strength and then if they do it well they can suddenly have whole legions of
troops underneath them doing things that most of us would find highly immoral or
unethical. and so the question that was in one
psychologist's mind, Stanley Milgram, is how does this happen and is this
something that just happens to certain kinds of people, or, or is this tendency
to follow strong authority >> Something that's deep within us all.
so we set about to examine this issue, via one of the most controversial
experiments of all time. At least at the time he did his
experiment. So let's talk about that.
Week six, lecture two, Authority. Again, a lot of this research you're
going to hear about was really inspired by World War II, and inspired by
predominantly, Hitler. Although there are many other fascist
leaders at the same time, but in many of the war trials that came after World War
II, we would have people on trial who had done horrific things.
And they would say things like well I was just following orders.
It's now like a famous line. I was just following orders.
Now it's sort of not my fault, or it's not my responsibility that I did these
horrific things. And that was the, the context that
Stanley Milgrim was seeing playing out. And it really kind of fascinated him.
How does a figure like Hitler get that sort of control over a bunch of people?
is was there something weirdly magical going on in the sense that, did Hitler
have some special kind of charisma for lack of a better word?
Or were we seeing something that's just a part of standard human nature.
How do you know? Well here's the Milgram experiment.
FIrst of all, just as a sort historical kind of interesting thing.
This is the announcement that Stanley Milgram put up.
to invite people into the experiment. Now the important thing to kind of note
about this is he invited all sorts of people.
So you I don't know how well you can read that but we will pay 500 New Haven men
which is where he did this in Connecticut to help us complete a scientific study of
memory and learning. the study will be done at Yale
University. Each person that participates will be
paid $4.00 plus $.50 for car fare for approximately one hour's time.
Hey, this was just post World War that's not bad.
And they were looking for ordinary people: factory workers, business men,
professional people, telephone workers, white collar workers.
Basically anybody between the age of 20 and 50 not including high school and
college students, kind of interesting. So they were, he was looking for standard
people from the community. Alright, what did he then do them, well
you, you were introduced to that notion of a confederate in the last Lecturing,
confederate will play a role here too because we're really going to have three
characters playing a role each time, and of course Milgram repeated this
experiment over and over again with other players.
It was always him ass the experimenter, then there was the confederate that we're
going to call the learner. And then there was the reals subject that
we're going to call the teacher. But from the teacher's perspective, they
arrived at the lab, and they arrived at about the same time as another
individual. This other individual said they had also
answered this ad. So again, to the teacher's perspective
they were both participants, arriving in a lab to do an experiment.
Very early in the experiment, Stanley Milgram repeated some of these issues,
that this will be an experiment about memory, and learning.
And he said one of you will play the role of teacher.
One of you will play the role of learner, and let's flip a coin, or draw straws, or
do something random-looking to decide who is which.
But that part was rigged. So the real subject was always made the
teacher and the confederate was always made the learner.
Now, what, the way Stanley said this was going to work, is that they were going to
be assessing the power of electric shock to enhance learning.
That's right, electric shock. early on in the experiment, they brought
both subjects, but especially the learner, into a separate room, and they
sat in front of a terminal that had some buttons, so that they could indicate
responses. And an electrical current was hooked up
to them. The real teacher was allowed to feel the
electrical current too, to get a sense of what a very light current felt like.
which was just, you know, kind of uncomfortable, kind of like if you stick
your tongue on a battery. You do that, right?
so that kind of, you know, eww, kind of feels uncomfortable, but not painful.
but that was the latest current. I'll get to that in a moment.
They would come in, the learner would get all hooked up with this electrical
apparatus and then the teacher would come sit in a separate room where they could
speak to the learner, and they could hear the learner, but they couldn't actually
see the learner, at least not in the classic setup.
And the way things would work is that Stanley would give the teacher a set of
questions. The teacher was to ask each question, one
at a time, to the learner and give them multiple choices.
So it was a multiple choice type test. If the learner got it right, you could
proceed to the next question, but if the learner got it wrong.
>> Then two things happened. First, the teacher was to give them a bit
of a shock. Okay, press a button that delivered an
electrical shock to the learner. Second, they were also supposed to turn
up the amount of shock. So each time a person got an answer wrong
The amount of shock they experienced went up, and this would happen over the tests.
So every wrong answer, they get shocked, you turn up the current.
They get shocked, you turn up the current.
Now, in reality, no shocks were being delivered.
But the teacher didn't know that. they were given, let me just show you
this next apparatus, this sort of device to turn up the current.
And this device was labeled things like mild current, to medium, to strong, to
very strong, to high danger and it went up, you know, to really extreme-sounding
settings. Now, of course the, the subject had felt
the light one. This is just to give you a sense of what
it look alike when they were hooking up the student, again who was a confederate,
and the important thing was that Stanley Milgram himself was right there when the,
when the teacher, the subject, was doing the experiment.
The question was, the central question was, how far would they go.
Would this person keep going all the way to the end of the highest shock level?
Would they keep turning the shock up? and there were some added little bits to
the experiment to make it, I guess you'd say, even more interesting.
At some point, when they got to sort of the high mild shock.
The, the teacher would start. Sorry, the learner would start saying,
ow, that's really painful. That really hurts I don't want to do this
anymore. And Stanley Milgram would just tell the
teacher, just keep going. It's part of the experiment.
You, you know, you have to keep going. The experiment requires you to continue
and. If the subject continued.
If they went to higher and higher,then at some point the learner got even more
extreme. And they might say something like I don't
feel good. I don't want to do this.
Let me out. etc, and they would be pounding on the
wall at some point. But Stanley would say keep going, keep
going the experiment requires you to continue.
If the subject kept going, then at some point the learner would, in fact, shut
up. They wouldn't respond at all.
And what Milgrim would say is, no answer is a wrong answer.
So if they don't respond, shock them, and turn it up, ask the next question.
And keep going. >> Okay and Milgrum would just gently,
he wasn't yelling at them, he wasn't overbearing.
He was just telling them in a very authoritative way, you must continue.
And the question was how many of them would.
Now, Milgrum expected that not many of them would.
But let me show you some data. Let's look at the bottom bar here first.
If you do it in the original way, the way I just described to you, in fact a
startlingly large number of subjects, went to the maximum shock level.
Even though the learner complained, even though the learner banged on the wall,
even though the learner went silent. They kept going rich to the maximum
level, 65%, two out of three, now what does that tell us?
Well it tells us that us, if we took, you know, there's I don't know how many
people in this moot course still, now, but let's say there's ten thousand of us
still going strong, 20 thousand of us still going strong, then a full
two-thirds of us would have done that. Would that be me?
Would it be you? We don't know.
There was only a third that said no, I will not do this.
Kind of creepy. Really kind of makes you look inside
yourself and wonder. Now Subsequent experiments try to look at
some of the things that were related to this compliance.
To authority. so for example if you did this in an
office building instead of a university, the very presence of being a university
with a professor in a lab coat, that made people more compliant.
As soon as you put it in an office building, now only half.
Went all the way but still half if the, if the teacher and learner were right
together. So if, if you could actually see the
person now the person has to enact the shocks.
But if you can actually see the person then only 40% went all the way but still
40% did. If you actually made the teacher put the
person's hand on a plate that delivered the shock.
So they pushed it down literally. So they now had to take a very active
role, well, now, only three of 10 went all the way.
That's still three of 10. >> Yeah, if the experimenter actually left
and wasn't physically present, but just told the person to just keep continuing
by phone. The physical presence means a lot so it
drops to twenty-three. If it's not an authority figure, but just
a more ordinary person, like a graduate student giving the orders, it drops a
little more. etc.
so if you watch other teachers refuse, then you're very unlikely, so this is the
conformity, right? As long as you see some others refuse,
then you're more likely to do so. Let's really highlight this for a moment.
What this means is that in a context where people are following authority, If
you feel it's wrong then it's very important to speak up because the model
you set when others see it makes them more likely to speak up as well.
Fascinating result etc. So, so you get the idea but again it's
the 65% that's really shocking. And it really suggests that everyone.
Well, not everyone of us. But 2 3rds of us.
The majority of us. Seem to have this willingness to, in
fact, harm another person. If an authority figure is looking over
our shoulder and telling us to do so. Why?
Well, the notion is that we transfer responsibility of our behaviour to them.
If somebody tell us, then it's their fault.
And somehow, we don't feel as personally culpable.
We don't feel the same amount of guilt, and the same amount of inhibition.
when it's somebody else's fault, when we can blame somebody else.
Fascinating and spooky. this has raised whole issues of ethics.
I have Socrates here. Socrates you know first guy that
discussed ethics in a, in a whole lot of detail.
Is it right, to, to do this? To, like what do these participants
think? When you debrief them at the end.
And if you're one of those two thirds. You leave this experiment scarred.
You didn't actually hurt anybody, but you would have.
You know it looks like you would have. You were willing just because the shocks
were not delivered, I mean that's a nice thing to.
That's a comfort afterwards. But you still leave there with the
knowledge that man, I was willing to do that.
Is that a good thing, like does that scar you for life?
Well, you know, when they interview the participants, afterwards.
There were a few that felt very scarred by it.
But most of them felt like they had learned something very important about
themselves. A lot of them were not upset.
They were in a weird way thankful. They really felt like wow, now that I
realize how susceptible I am to authority, I will be more on guard.
I will be more careful. I will think about this situation for the
rest of my life. and that's, you know, the real positive.
But, it is true that now, if you wanted to replicate this sort of experiment.
You wanted to redo it. There are some, I'll show you one.
But it's very tricky you have to have a good reason for doing it.
And, in fact, it started, this experiment started a whole discussion about what
psychologists should and should not be allowed to do in a lab which ultimately
led it to a code of ethical conduct. So, it was a very important watershed
experiment in psychology both for what it showed and for how it changed.
The way we do research, okay, so to really get a sense of this you have to
see it. I have two examples here, I have the
original mil grim experiment, a video of that, I also have a bit of a replication
of the Milgrim experiment where they give you a little bit more context, so both of
those you have to see them. So check them out.
it will really change the way you think about yourself.
And it'll make you wonder. Certainly did for me.
This reading is one that, that's a philosopical, it's, it's a little dense.
So some of you may not want to read too much of this.
But, but those of you philosophically inclined may wish to.
It's talking about using authority in a political situation.
So this relates it all, relates the Milgram kind of study.
Back to things like the fascist situations.
so it's kind of fascinating and here's another one where there in this article
the discussion is really about you know, what can we really take from Milgram's
experiment. What does it really mean?
What does it really tell us about ourselves?
So again, another little fascinating read.
Alright so check those out. This is how this week is going to be,
kind of fascinating experiment after fascinating experiment.
Social Psychology is a really, really cool area with a lot to learn from.
So I will see you back at the next lecture and I hope you have a fantastic
day until then. Bye bye.
Explore our Catalog
Join for free and get personalized recommendations, updates and offers.
Coursera provides universal access to the world’s best education,
partnering with top universities and organizations to offer courses online.
© 2018 Coursera Inc. All rights reserved.
