22.3.09

Would you.....



......give an electric shock to a puppy if ordered to do so? Charles Sheridan and Richard King decided to find out in 1972. They, like many psychologists, thought that Milgram's participants may not have believed they were giving real electric shocks to the learner in his original obedience to authority experiment. They just went along with the psychologist in charge of the experiment. To test this hypothesis they replicated Milgram's experiment with one important difference: the learner was given electric shocks and the participants could see and hear the effect of these shocks. For ethical reasons they could not use a human volunteer and decided to use a cute puppy instead.

They told undergraduate psychology students that the puppy was being trained to tell the difference between a flickering and non-flickering light. The puppy had to stand to the left or right of it's cage in response to the different lights. If it failed to produce the correct response it was given an electric shock. The shock levels rose at the same rate as Milgram's experiment: 15 volts at a time.

The majority of participants, 20 out of 26, obeyed and gave the puppy the maximum shock. Out of 13 women who took part all of them obeyed and gave the maximum shock to the puppy.

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