Book Reading #10: Opening Skinner's Box

Opening Skinner's Box

Lauren Slater

Chapter 2: Obscura

Stanley Milgram and Obedience to Authority

Summary:  In this second chapter of her book, Slater relates the story about Stanley Milgram, and more specifically on the experiment of obedience to authority. In this experiment, Milgram wanted to study the reaction of people and the obedience that they would exert even when they were doing something they knew they were not supposed to. The experiment consisted in applying increasing voltages to a supposed learner every time they answered a question wrong. However, there was an actor behind the wall acting like if he was receiving real shocks. Through out the chapter, Slater researches more about the experiment, and the people that participated in it. She also relates the impact the study had over society and also over Milgram's professional career. The results of the study: 65% of the subjects followed the experiment through. Slater is able to talk to two of the experiment's subjects: one that proceeded with the experiment until the end, and one that did not. She comes to a great surprise when she learns that what was expected from these individuals was the complete opposite, the one that was obedient during the experiment lived a life of challenges and "disobedience," while the one that defied Milgram's experiment had a life of "obedience."

Discussion: Without the intention to sound redundant, but I really enjoyed reading this chapter. It is things that I have never heard before, and it is quite intriguing to learn about how such experiments were even possible, and how they impacted people's lives. In the chapter she mentions that there were hundreds of subjects of which she only discussed the lives of two of them. With this information is impossible to draw conclusions of whether or not the experiment was effective, of what the results were on the subjects, and if the results depended on the personality of the subjects. 
When trying to tie this chapter back to the field of computer science, I really have to give it some thought.  So, in this experiment, he was testing how obedient people can become, with complete disregard for their own morals and values. Maybe it relates in the sense that we develop technology, and people use these developments, but each one of them will have a different reaction and interaction with the technology. It can be good, or it can be bad. Even when we might have the intention of developing something with a certain purpose or objective, each user will give it their own use.