`` What Color Is Your Paradigm `` By Howard Edson - 874 Words

In his book What Color is Your Paradigm, author Howard Edson said: we cannot live for ourselves. A message that s interpretations may vary from one another. However, one possible interpretation could be that the human society is incapable of living as separate individuals. Thus, creating a need amongst us to interact and cooperate. Decisions and interaction individuals take are affected by numerous factors. Such decisions and the factors affecting them are the backbones of Psychology. Psychologists try to explain and predict behaviors of individuals. They tend to construct experiments where subjects are presented a situation. Their behavior is observed and recorded. Patterns are then perceived and analyzed to reach to a†¦show more content†¦The manners in which people tend to respond to and obey authority were explored by Milgram; in order to study the effects of authority on the levels of obedience observed wherein subjects were instructed to direct an electroshock with var ying degrees, only to find the majority of subjects continued to obey the authority even at high levels of voltage shocks. From his tests, Milgram extracted some factors that could increase or decrease the levels of obedience observed. Some of which include, the physical proximity of the authority to the participant, the proximity of the victim from the participant and whether the co-participants are willing to obey. In his experiment, Milgram tested several variations to achieve the aim of his experiment. Several situational factors, one at a time, to see their effect on the obedience of the subjects. In one of the variations, the teacher was instructed to hold the learner s hand on a metal plate and deliver the electric shock when he refuses to cooperate. This showed a decrease in the obedience of subjects. This suggests that the physical presence of the learner and the physical contact between the teacher and the learner trigger empathizes from the teacher s side since they are more aware of the suffering and pain inflicted upon the learners. This empathy and sympathy with a human being may have been a motive for the participants to disobey.