Milgram's Stages Of Behavior Analysis

People sometimes act in ways they know to be wrong or unethical because they see people of a higher authority do it. For example, In Milgram’s obedience experiment, test subjects who were referred to as the “teacher,” were told to give an electric shock to a complete stranger who was referred to as the “student,” if they got an answer wrong on a test. The test subject was told the shock would get increasingly more dangerous each time the student got the answer wrong. When the teacher wanted to stop, a person in a white labcoat would tell them to “Please keep going”, or “Please proceed with the test.” 65% of the teachers kept shocking the students until the last shock setting was reached and it measured beyond lethal. People would shock a complete stranger to death just because an authoritative figure told them to keep going. These people had every chance to stop shocking the person but they kept doing it because a person in a white labcoat told them to. Students in school obey their
This relates to Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development, specifically stage 5. “At this stage, the individual is motivated by the belief in the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.” This means a person believes that something should happen or be done because it will do good for almost everyone or the vast majority of people. Even though the issues don’t immediately affect us, they eventually will. For example, the disasters in Japan affected the United States by changing the prices of technology and other Japanese imports for a period of time. Although the reactor meltdowns in Japan didn’t involve the United States, it still greatly impacted our technology industry. Issues that happen in our world that don’t personally involve us will eventually affect us in the long run and this is the reason we should get involved with things that don’t affect us