Topic > Summary of Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments

Parker focuses most of his writing on answering the question of whether or not the experiment reveals new information regarding obedience (100). Doggedly providing his opinion on the matter, Baumrind states at the beginning of his article that he believes that obedience and suggestibility cannot realistically be studied in the laboratory due to environmental anxiety (90). Supporting Baumrind's opinionated statement, however, Parker actually pushes readers to reconsider their opinions by describing a specific supporting scenario in which one of the subjects expresses that during the experiment he could not believe that Yale would conduct such a dangerous experiment (101 ). Parker logically interprets that subjects with similar suspicions like this probably continued to obey orders despite their disbelief due to the laboratory environment, suggesting that in the real world the consequences of violent actions are more evident than in a test and that the experiment cannot be fully applied when studying obedience in authentic circumstances (101). Agreeing with Parker, Gina Perry, a psychologist and published author, describes the importance of subjects' belief in the validity of the electroshock machine in her article, "The Shocking Truth of Milgram's Infamous Obedience Experiments." Perry