Midterm Week!

We have finally made it to week 6 and many of you are preparing for those wonderful midterms this week. While I don't have any midterms, I do have 3 exams to take this week in 3 of my classes. Go figure, out of the 4 I am taking, I have exams in 3 of them! Lucky for me. I am sure there is someone out there who has exams in every class, so I guess I really shouldn't complain! Let alone, they might be midterms, which count way more than my weekly tests. Yikes!

I am happy that my demonstrative speech is over and hopefully many of you got a chance to check it out. I am going to get into the whole video blogging over the next couple of weeks. I am in the process right now of planning something, so we will see how that goes and it will be up on my blog as soon as its completed.

I want to share something with you guys this week from one of my class assignments. It's for the discussion board, and it really hit me from left field. I had such a strange reaction, something I never felt before and it made me kind of sick. Not sure why. This assignment is for my Sociology class and it has to do with The Milgram Experiment. I will share with you what my professor has shared and then provide you with the link to a video.

"The Milgram experiment was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram , which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience . Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem . Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices ?"

Check out this replicated video done on a British Reality show http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6GxIuljT3w




Respond to the video. What do you think you would do in this circumstance? Why is it that we tend to conform more to authority even when we are seemingly putting others at risk? Do you think this experiment could help explain the apathy that many German citizens (who were not directly impacted) displayed while they watched the atrocities of the holocaust?"

So that is my assignment and I just completed it this afternoon. This is my response and I am curious to see how others feel about this.

"This video shocked the heck out of me. I couldn't even imagine being a part of that experiment and listening to the other individual on the other end screaming in such pain. I felt what they were doing was extremely wrong and unpleasant to have to listen and watch. In this circumstance, I would stop the experiment as fast as I possibly could. I could not sit there, listen to a person answer a question wrong, and then shock them because they were wrong. I just would need to get out of there ASAP.

It seems that we tend to conform more to authority even when we are putting others at risk, because we were always taught to listen to the higher up than us. Just like when we were younger and our parents told us to stop doing something because it was wrong, we had to listen to them because they were the authority. In this case, the individuals in this experiment had to listen to the authority, who was the man in the white lab coat. Whenever they said they wanted to stop or that they couldn't do this any longer, the man told them that they had to.

Yes, I do feel that this experiment could help explain the apathy that many German citizens displayed while they watched the atrocities of the Holocaust because they really had no say to stop the German authorities from displaying their hatred and anger during the Holocaust. It was part of their job and they couldn't go against the authority. Some of things are nature to them because they are use to looking up to the authority as the decision and power maker, so the Germans really had a lack of concern during these horrific Holocaust times."

These types of assignments are good to have because they help you learn about all different things that have happened in the past. I don't mind learning about it, but this one kind of hit me in a different way. I know we don't particularly see these individuals getting the electric shock, but hearing them and watching the participants keep going is bizarre.

As we begin Week 6, I hope you continue to study for those midterms and earn an A!! It doesn't hurt to get a study group together and work on things like that as well. It can be extremely beneficial to you! GOOD LUCK!