Book Reading #10 - Opening Skinner's Box

Title:
Chapter 2: Obscura

Reference:
Slater, Lauren. Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century. W.W. Norton & Company: 2008.

Summary:
This chapter was about Stanley Milgram.  He did the authority experiments testing how people react to an authority figure when it comes to how far people will go if they are hurting someone else.  The findings were that 65% of people delivered lethal amounts of shock to the patients.

The second part of the chapter described the authors interactions with two of the participants in the study: one did not deliver lethal shock and the other did.  She is interested in the relation between those who did and did not go through with it.  Her findings reveal that the study made people really think about their current obedience to authority.  It made her reflect on our morality and how exactly we should handle certain situations.

Discussion:
I was more excited about this chapter before I read it than after.  It is always interesting hearing about findings and theories of the experiment, but I was disappointed that all the information I had heard before.  It was interesting to hear the conclusions of the author on the last page of the chapter.