Nature or Nurture Reading Answers: IELTS Reading Practice Test

 Nature or Nurture Reading Passage

Paragraph A 

A few years ago, in one of the most fascinating and confusing experiments in behavioural psychology, Stanley Milgram of Yale University tested 40 subjects from all walks of life for the desire to follow the instructions given by a 'leader'. They may feel a personal aversion to the actions they are called to do. In particular, Milgram said the test was aimed at the classic purpose of education for each volunteer 'teacher-subject' and was created to test whether punishing students for their errors would have a positive impact on students' learning ability.

Paragraph B

Milgram's test system involves putting the teacher's lesson in front of a group of thirty switches with labels ranging from '15 volts 'to '450 volts to 15 volts each'. The teacher's lesson was described to provide a shock whenever a student gives an incorrect answer to a question, starting at a low level and raising the intensity of each incorrect answer. The so-called 'student' was actually an actor hired by Milgram, who simulated getting shocked and emitting various statements and explosives denouncing both the shouts, the screams, and the twists and turns of the test and the experimenter. Milgram told the teacher to ignore the students' reactions to the lesson and to manage any level of trauma called on the rule governing the test situation of the moment.

Paragraph C

When the test comes out, the student will intentionally give incorrect answers to the questions asked by the teacher, thereby bringing various electrical penalties up to the danger level of 300 volts and beyond. Many teacher subjects prevent the imposition of excessive penalties, and the question of continuing the trial returns to Milgram with locks and/or complaints. Under these circumstances, Milgram casually explained that the teacher's lesson was to ignore the students' cries for mercy and continue the experiment. Milgram said it was important to follow the procedure until the end because of the experiment if he was reluctant to continue the lesson. His conclusive argument was, ‘You have no choice. You must proceed. ‘Milgram sought to find the number of teacher-subjects who were willing to manage the highest level of trauma, despite strong personal and moral resentment against the terms and conditions of the experiment.

Paragraph D

Before carrying out the experiment, Milgram described his opinion to a team of 39 psychiatrists and asked them to estimate the average percentage of people who would be willing to give a 450-volt vibration level in a normal population. The majority consensus is that almost all teacher-subjects refuse to follow the experimenter. Psychiatrists considered that 'most subjects do not go above 150 volts', and they expected only four percent to go up to 300 volts. Also, they believed that only a crazy margin of 1.000 would give 450 volts more shock.

Paragraph E

What are the real results? Well, more than 60 percent of teacher subjects consistently obey Milgram up to the 450 volt limit ! In repeated experiments in other countries, the percentage of appreciative teacher-subjects was even higher, reaching 85 percent in one country, and how do we calculate this broad discrepancy that peaceful, rational, intelligent people predict for the convenience of their study? Stress, and palpitations in a real-life lab, but what do co-editors do?

Paragraph F

One’s first inclination might be to argue that there must be some kind of inbuilt animal attack intuition that was started by the experiment and that Milgram’s teacher- subjects were just obeying a genetic need to release this pent-up first urge onto the student by providing the electrical shock. A current hard sociologist can say that this aggressive instinct evolved into a positive trait that our ancestors valued in the struggle against the hardships of life on the plains and in caves, finally discovering its way into our genetic make-up as a remnant of our old animal ways.

Paragraph G

As an alternative to this idea of genetic programming, the teacher should glance at the actions of the subjects as an outcome of the social context in which the experiment was performed. Milgram, he himself pointed out. Most of the subjects in the experiment look at their behaviour in a larger context that is beneficial and useful to the community in pursuing scientific truth. The Psychology Lab has a powerful claim to legitimacy and inspires confidence and trust in those who operate there. The act of shocking the victim, while seemingly evil in solitude, takes on a totally distinct meaning when placed in this setting.

Paragraph H

Thus, in this interpretation, the subject combines his individual personality and private and moral ethics with the larger organizational structures, handing over personal characteristics such as loyalty, self-sacrifice, and discipline to the service of evil power structures.

Paragraph I

Here are two completely distinct reasons why so many teacher-subjects were willing to relinquish their personal responsibility for the sake of an institutional authority figure. The issue for biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists is to sort out which of these two polar interpretations is most reliable. This is, in essence, the issue of modern social biology, which dictates the extent to which hard-wired genetic programming dictates how animals and humans interact with the environment, i.e., their behaviour. Social biology is concerned with clarifying the biological basis of all behaviour.

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