Knowledge can be separated into two distinct categories: shared and personal knowledge. Personal knowledge is gained through one’s own experience and comes from the circumstances of the individual such as biography and interests. However, shared knowledge is the product of more than one individual: it includes a set of norms, values and cultural mores (Santrampurwala et al 34-38). Our knowledge and ideals of ethics which are moral principles that guide our decision-making process come from these two categories (Lagemaat 364). Ethics are primarily based on intuition, however, a huge part of our ethical behaviour is derived from our gained knowledge. Many claim that our personal knowledge can be shaped through shared knowledge. Evidence from …show more content…
Perspective on ethics often comes from authority figures, the conclusion can be made that one’s ethical behaviour can be heavily influenced by those who have power over a person’s thinking. To further prove that authority figures play a huge role in the determination of ethics, one can refer to the ‘Psychology of Obedience’ which, according to Milgram, states that subjects are more likely to obey when commands were given by an authority figure rather than another volunteer or when the authority figure was present in the room with the subject. Volunteers were recruited for Milgram’s research. Each volunteer was paired with another, one being the ‘learner,’ who was actually a confederate of the experimenter and the other being the ‘teacher.’ The ‘learner’ was strapped to a chair with electrodes and asked questions. The teacher was told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake. Volunteers were being watched by an experimenter who would ask the teachers to continue whenever they hesitated. The volunteers were also asked to raise the level of volts as the experiment proceeded. Two-thirds of the participants (teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts. However, when the experimenter was put into another room and the ‘teachers’ were now being instructed through a telephone from another room, the …show more content…
One ethical issue was deception; Milgram made his subjects believe that they were really shocking the ‘learner,’ when the ‘learner’ was actually a confederate of the experimenter. Milgram conducted an interview afterwards to evaluate the effect of deception, 83.7% of participants said that they were “glad to be in the experiment” (McLeod, "The Milgram Experiment”). Their eagerness to participate in an experiment in which they were asked to harm another individual indicates that these participants may have obeyed orders regardless of if there was an authority figure within the room or not. Furthermore, the experiment was designed to put the participants in a great amount of stress (McLeod, "The Milgram Experiment”). Researchers have found that stress can alter one’s decision-making process, causing them to focus on the positives (money the participants gain) rather than the negatives of the experiment (the harm that may be caused to the ‘learner’) ("Stress Changes How”). The stress that the participants were put through may have impacted their ethical decisions more than the authority figure within the
The student and teacher were placed in separate rooms and an instructor was placed in the same room as the teacher. He would then attempt to convince the teacher to continue the experiment even if the student starts crying out or wanting to leave. The teacher was required to “shock” the student if they said an incorrect answer. However, the ‘shocks’ became more intense and came with each incorrect answer. They eventually started getting very dangerous and potentially life threatening.
This Milgram research on respect to authority figures was a series of cultural science experiments conducted by Yale University scientist Stanley Milgram in 1961. They assessed the willingness of survey participants, men from a different variety of jobs with varying degrees of training, to obey the authority figure who taught them to do acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to think that they were helping an unrelated research, in which they had to distribute electrical shocks to the individual. These fake electrical shocks gradually increased to grades that could have been deadly had they been true. McLeod's article about the Milgram experiment exposed the fact that a high percentage of ordinary people will
Milgram’s experiment displays how much was situated in a time and how his life affected his choices, and his experiments have gained notoriety. The discursive approach to attitudes builds on a criticism of key assumptions and methods of the cognitive social approach and highlights the limitations of the experimental method for developing a comprehensive understanding of a phenomenon such as obedience. Through Gibson’s rhetorical analysis he highlighted the importance of the interaction between participant and experimenter which suggests that the standard view on experiments could do with revising. The experimental setting although it is great in most cases it can create a hostile environment with individuals acting out of character and therefore not creating the best results. Gibson has highlighted that the nervous anxious participants that were portrayed in the original papers were in fact passive and argumentative and that’s just by looking at it differently and examining different things such as the language people use to be persuasive.
Society and government require people to be obedient towards authority, but is it always the best thing to do? During the aftermath of World War II many of the major leaders of the Nazi regime were put on trial for crimes against humanity (History.com). These trials were known as the Nuremburg war trials, were most of the convicted proclaimed that they were “just following orders” (McLeod 584). Being an accomplice to a crime is also against the law. In the Nuremburg trials, those accused were not breaking the law that their government had created, they were actually following it.
While arguably one of the defining psychological studies of the 20th Century, the research was not without flaws. Almost immediately the study became a subject for debate amongst psychologists who argued that the research was both ethically flawed and its lack of diversity meant it could not be generalized. Ethically, a significant critique of the experiment is that the participants actually believed they were administering serious harm to a real person, completely unaware that the learner was in fact acting. Although Milgram argued that the illusion was a necessary part of the experiment to study the participants’ reaction, they were exposed to a highly stressful situation. Many were visibly distraught throughout the duration of the test
During the 1960’s Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments to test how a person reacts to authority. He started these tests in response to World War Two and the reports of the German soldiers who claimed they were “just following orders’ when asked about
The Milgram experiment was conducted to analyze obedience to authority figures. The experiment was conducted on men from varying ages and varying levels of education. The participants were told that they would be teaching other participants to memorize a pair of words. They believed that this was an experiment that was being conducted to measure the effect that punishment has on learning, because of this they were told they had to electric shock the learner every time that they answered a question wrong. The experiment then sought out to measure with what willingness the participants obeyed the authority figure, even when they were instructed to commit actions which they seemed uncomfortable with.
Stanley Milgram wants to know how people would go in obeying an instruction. For his experiment he stand a procedure it is different from others. His experiment taken at human beings. 40 males aged between 20 and 50 were selected for the experiment, These 40 males were professionals who is unskilled. There is a teacher and learner in his experiment.
Two ‘prisoners’ had to be removed early from the experiment and several were emotionally distressed. However, it does show the power of situation on people’s behavior and decision-making. The people chosen for the experiment were regular students. They were assigned to their roles randomly – the prisoners had not done anything ‘wrong’ and the guards had not earned their position of authority.
In our Theory of Knowledge class, we often do ethical “pickles” (dilemmas). When an ethical pickle is presented, the class usually splits into different sides, which represent various opinions about the ethical pickle. It is interesting because we all live in the same city and go to the same school, yet our views on ethical problems are often completely different. This suggests that in spite of the influence of shared ethical knowledge, all of us develop a personal morality, which indicates that an important role is still played by personal
Robert J. Sternberg is a professor of Psychology and vice president at Oklahoma State University. Sternberg states, “To act ethical, individuals must go through a series of steps”. He presupposes teaching these 8 steps is just as important as teaching students how to pass a test. Numerous of dilemmas proceeding in establishments are not generated the by absences of knowledge, but because of the lack of ethics. People may apprehend the rules of being ethical but are unable translate into their everyday lives.
The "teachers" continued, at the 180 volts mark the "learner" cried out that he cannot take it any longer. Once reaching 300 volts, the fifty-year-old "learner" yelled about his heart condition and begged to be released. At these points, a decent amount of "teachers" halted the experiment while a large percent continued until the final 450 volt question even though the "learner" had stopped responding. At the 150 volt mark those who were going to stop, did so. If I were in this position I would stop at the first sign of discomfort from the "learner."
In this essay I will be discussing on how shared knowledge can have an influence on personal knowledge. To start with, I will be discussing a situation that is ‘knowing a person’ to prove till a high extent that personal and shared knowledge have a great effect on each other including that shared knowledge can shape personal knowledge. To start with, knowing a person can fall under the two categories that are shared and personal knowledge. On one hand, personal knowledge which is gained from personal experience using intuition and instinct as a way of knowing. Equally important, if the person you know is at a deep level, for instance; a family member or a very close friend.
How shared knowledge can shape personal knowledge Justification Shared knowledge has been known to shape personal knowledge in various areas of knowledge. Throughout our life as individuals, we strive to harness different forms of knowledge. We acquire information from distinct sources in our community and society and then try to interpret them using our knowledge matrix and ways of knowing such as reason, language, and intuition. Knowledge can, therefore, be divided into two distinct groups, personal and shared knowledge.
In order to effectively answer the question in hand, one must firstly define both terms. Shared knowledge is generated by a large number of people that have an overarching, similar belief over what is ‘right’, and thus what is ‘true’. Personal knowledge on the other hand, is what may be true to a single individual, without taking in account what ‘we know’ but much more what ‘I know’, thus posing a paradox between social conformity and individual beliefs. I have decided to tackle the knowledge question by analysing two areas of knowledge, the Human Sciences and the Arts, investigate the way in which shared knowledge shapes personal knowledge, how personal knowledge prevails over shared knowledge, and, finally, how both these beliefs of truth