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Essay / Summary of Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments
Parker focuses the majority of his writing on answering the question of whether or not the experiment discovers new information regarding obedience (100). Continuing to give her opinion on this issue, Baumrind states at the beginning of her article that she believes that obedience and suggestibility cannot be realistically studied in the laboratory due to the anxiety that reigns in the environment (90). However, supporting Baumrind's opinionated assertion, Parker effectively makes readers reconsider their views by describing a specific scenario in which one of the subjects expresses that throughout the experiment, he could not believe that Yale would carry out such a dangerous experiment (101). Parker logically interprets that subjects with suspicions similar to this likely continued to obey orders despite their disbelief due to the laboratory setting, suggesting that in the real world the consequences of violent actions are more obvious than in a test and that the experiment cannot be fully applied when studying obedience in authentic circumstances (101). Agreeing with Parker, Gina Perry, psychologist and published author, describes the importance of subjects' belief in the validity of the shock machine in her article "The Shocking Truth of Milgram's Notorious Obedience Experiments." Pear