Bloggy blog 2

"Opinions and Social Pressure" by Solomon E. Asch was about a very knowledgeable experiment. It deeply answered the question as to what is more powerful, the the human mind's beliefs or social pressure. Asch put this to test by having a group of volunteers look at some lines on paper and say which one they thought was the longest. However, all but one of the volunteers were told to answer incorrectly to some of them before the experiment. It was then down to the last person to decide whether to say what they thought was right or go with the majority. Most of the time the person went with the majority showing that social pressure usually does override personal opinions.

"The Perils of Obedience" by Stanley Milgram was another knowledgeable experiment that was a lot more schematic. In this experiment, Milgram wanted to test whether or not the typical human would put obedience above their morals. He tested this by having one volunteer as a teacher and the other volunteer as the learner. The teacher would have to teach a word pattern to the learner, who was strapped to chair with electric impulses ready to strike. If the learner answered incorrectly, he would then be zapped and the voltage would increase with each wrong answer. What the teacher did not know, however, is that the learner was actually an actor and their was no electrical shock. The teacher would usually go along with the experiment and whenever one stopped to question the observer, the observer would tell them to continue on. Almost all of the teachers continued on until the end of the experiment, teaching Milgram that obedience does, in fact, usually override the human morals.

I think that the two experiments used in "Opinions and Social Pressure" by Solomon E. Asch and "The Perils of Obedience" by Stanley Milgram were both crazy experiments that I could not have thought of to save my life. However, both were highly effective and they certainly taught me a lesson. They taught me that we, as humans, need to stand up for what we think is right more often, no matter the cost. If that means looking like a fool (with your pants on the ground) by making an observation that everyone else does not agree with, then so be it. If that means disobeying orders from some guy you just met, that for some reason has the urge to shock the crap out of some helpless life form just because they do not know some stupid word pattern, then all the better to you. The fact is that we can not just sit here and let our fellow brothers and sister become stupider by knowing the wrong facts or by having electrical shocks enter their brains.178 If we just sit around and let things occur that we do not think are right, then we should not just stand their and take orders from our peers or our higher rank. If we let this freedom of speech go from our mouths, then we might as well just call up Osama and tell him to take this country because we simply do not want it anymore. Opinions and morals used to soar in this country and I think that this should happen again.