Lecture

Obedience: Milgram's Experiments

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In course

HUM-240: The Psychology of social influence

Le cours aborde l'influence sociale qui s'exerce dans et entre les groupes. Les groupes jouent un rôle fondamental nos vies de tous les jours; ce cours fournit une compréhension du fonctionnement des groupes, des relations entre groupes et de l'impact des ...

Description

This lecture explores the concept of obedience through Milgram's experiments, focusing on the dynamics of authority and compliance. It delves into the experimental procedures, ethical implications, and results of the studies, shedding light on the factors influencing obedience levels. The lecture also discusses the role of empathy, cognitive expansion, and reciprocal fields in reducing obedience, as well as the impact of proximity and feedback on behavior. It analyzes the variations in obedience levels based on different experimental conditions and the implications for understanding human behavior in social contexts.

Instructor

Fabrizio Butera

Teaching & PhD Courses Cooperation and environmental psychology HUM-317 This seminar addresses the formation, change and maintenance of individual and collective pro-environmental behaviors, as studied by environmental social psychology. In particular, we will focus on the role of coopération. L'(in)action pro-environnementale I HUM-420 This Social Psychology course examines the gap between intentions and behaviors, the barriers to individual and collective action, and the mo

Official source

Related concepts (32)

Milgram experiment

The Milgram experiment(s) on obedience to authority figures were a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, 40 men in the age range of 20 to 50 from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner".

Obedience (human behavior)

Obedience, in human behavior, is a form of "social influence in which a person yields to explicit instructions or orders from an authority figure". Obedience is generally distinguished from compliance, which is behavior influenced by peers, and from conformity, which is behavior intended to match that of the majority. Depending on context, obedience can be seen as moral, immoral, or amoral.

Experimental analysis of behavior

The experimental analysis of behavior is a science that studies the behavior of individuals across a variety of species. A key early scientist was B. F. Skinner who discovered operant behavior, reinforcers, secondary reinforcers, contingencies of reinforcement, stimulus control, shaping, intermittent schedules, discrimination, and generalization. A central method was the examination of functional relations between environment and behavior, as opposed to hypothetico-deductive learning theory that had grown up in the comparative psychology of the 1920–1950 period.

Applied behavior analysis

Applied behavior analysis (ABA), also called behavioral engineering, is a psychological intervention that applies empirical approaches based upon the principles of respondent and operant conditioning to change behavior of social significance. It is the applied form of behavior analysis; the other two forms are radical behaviorism (or the philosophy of the science) and the experimental analysis of behavior (or basic experimental laboratory research).

Behaviorism

Behaviorism (also spelled behaviourism) is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual's history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual's current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental events.

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