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Week 3: Social Control and Morality Paper
Priscila Rodriguez
Department of Humanities American Career College: Introduction to Sociology
Instructor Edric Leggett
June 7, 2023
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Examples of social control include the use of religious texts to enforce moral standards, police to enforce secular laws, and stigmatization to suppress unwanted behaviors
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2022/2023
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Week 3: Social Control and Morality Paper Priscila Rodriguez Department of Humanities American Career College: Introduction to Sociology Instructor Edric Leggett June 7, 2023
The concept of morality has been debated over time since the beginning of time.
Religious institutions have rules of morality Christianity and Judaism have the 10
commandment's, and Islam has the 5 pillars' everywhere we look we will see at set of rules we
should live by to keep our morals and the punishments we may face in this life or the next. But
when it comes to our own question of morality and what our morals are it becomes much more
personal and relevant to us. What do we do when we have real moral choices that can hurt
someone? That is when our real morality is tested. In 1963, Stanley Milgram tested how
obedience to an authority like figure affected our moral decisions and the results showed that
in most cases people will bend and go against their morals to follow the authority figure Cohen,
A. (2008). We were also quizzed on how moral we are as people and personally got moral as a
result. In this essay I will analyze my morals and how they relate to the Stanley Milgram
experiment and our current subject of the week.
To begin with we should really understand the Stanley Milgram experiment of 1963 and the
results it showed. The experiment involved three participants: the experimenter (authority figure), the teacher (the subject), and the learner (a confederate who pretended to be another participant). The learner was seated in another room and connected to electrodes, while the teacher was instructed to administer electric shocks to the learner whenever they made a mistake on a word-pairing task. However, the shocks were not real, and the learner's responses were pre-recorded. The experiment was to see how far the teacher would go on delivering increasingly painful shocks, as told by the experimenter, despite the learner's apparent distress and pleas to stop. One of the most important aspects of the experiment was that the shocks were not actually delivered. Milgram found that most of
individuals' life chances, opportunities, and experiences. Those in lower classes have less resources and depend on authority more than those with higher status who most likely are the authority. So it is not surprising that those of lower classes will bend their morals to stay protected from the authority that is “above them” Schaefer, R. T. (2021). In conclusion personal morality will always be difficult. We saw in the Stanley Milgram experiment that when being told by an authority figure to shock a stranger most of those being experimented on would shock when being pressured by an authority figure. It makes me wonder about my own morality but according to the quiz that we took I am a moral person. Authority may make a person more compliant with doing amoral things; those with low social stratification are going to be more inclined to bending their morals and engaging in deviance due to the need for authority and the protection that it may provide. We must analyze our own morality and see if we would have saved 10 but kill one or kill 10, we don’t know for 1 we love.
Cites Cohen, A. (2008). Four decades after Milgram, we’re still willing to inflict pain. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/opinion/29mon3.html Schaefer, R. T. (2021). Sociology: A Brief Introduction (14th ed.). McGraw-Hill Higher Education (US). https://online.vitalsource.com/books/