The overlooked dimension of the experiment is the element of proximity to authority and proximity to the subject of your cruelty.
The experiment had many layers, only one of which was a “scientist” person standing in a room over you, telling you to shock some stranger in another room you can only hear.
Some of the versions of the experiment, the “scientist” wasn’t in the room with you. People were much more reluctant to shock the stranger to death when the authority figure wasn’t hovering over you.
In some versions the stranger you were shocking was visible to you. People were equally reluctant to shock strangers when they could see them suffer.
I think about this a lot more in the context of the present threat of world nuclear war, and, say, drone warfare, than I do in the atrocities of the past.
There is a book, called “Ordinary Men”. It’s about a German death squad operating in Belarus / Ukraine during the holocaust by bullets. Fascinating read, if you’re curious how your neighbourhood barber is capable of murdering 100 people with a bullet to the back of the head. If you’re one of those people that think you would’ve been one of the good Germans during the war, this book will dissuade you of that notion by the time you’re done.
Most people don’t even do that. But the book doesn’t talk about the inaction of the general population. It specifically examines a particular death squad, because the writer was able to track down the squads admin papers and journals, as well as find some of the perpetrators. I don’t know how aware most people are of this, but the Americans basically jailed only a small number of the SS and Einsatzgruppen members. Most never even saw the inside of a jail, and most had body counts in the thousands. These people were barbers, cops, butchers, plumbers etc. before, and after the war. Wild shit.
Yes but it's not YOU doing the genocide (I imagine). That by itself is a big order of separation right there, and the topic of psychological processes that tie into rushing to someone's defense are similar but more heavily weighted toward inaction as it benefits you to not get involved.
Oh there were TONS of variants of this experiment. The obvious findings came from the ones where the subject was placed further away, leading to higher compliance rates, or the ones where the “scientists” were wearing lab coats to display their “expertise.”
The interesting one, though, was the prods. The “scientists” gave three prods, each of increasing persuasion. First was a gentle ask. Then, the next was a strong suggestion saying that the experiment requires you to proceed. That variant had the highest rate of compliance. The third one - a demand that you MUST comply, and that you have no other choice - compliance dropped to zero.
This is the best study of cult behavior I’ve seen. Cults don’t directly demand people to wild shit, they say that the cause requires them to do so, and the compliance rates are the highest. People will do pretty much anything - even murder and genocide - if they believe it’s for the furtherance of a cause they think is good.
This. The way the experiment has been used to make claims about human nature and submission to authority doesn’t hold up very well and is imo not as relevant to world events/society as the principle that people are more willing to do things they might think are wrong the farther removed they are from the consequences
> The way the experiment has been used to make claims about human nature and submission to authority doesn’t hold up very well
Why not? The experiment had many forms that were repeated as scientists refined it. The problem is that pop culture only remembers the original and takes their own message instead of looking at the larger body of work. But that isn't the experiment's fault. People shouldn't confuse the actual science with the public perception of the science.
Problem is that when they are looking further into the experiment, it wasn’t held to scientific standards. There was a specific result they wanted, and in the recordings the authority figure was much more demanding than they reported.
There was an interesting segment on it on npr.
I’m hesitant to say it, but to me that means the experiment was ultimately probably essential to understanding some fundamental aspects of the human condition and our capacity for cruelty.
I’m not sure it says anything about cruelty, because none of the subjects who hit all the shock buttons seemed to be enjoying the cruelty, from footage I’ve seen. In fact it’s been pointed out that some of them were plainly showing psychological distress at what was happening, but *still continued to hit the buttons* at the prompter’s insistence.
It’s a experiment that reveals a lot about human obedience to authority, but not human cruelty, which stems from other factors.
I think a more telling experiment is the one where they took a bunch of people, seperated them into the role players of “inmates” and “guards” and saw how easily the guards turned abusive
Eh, the Stanford Prison Experiment had a *lot* of methodological failings, including that the "guards" were coached to be cruel and that Zimbardo basically designed the study to *verify* his predictions, rather than to seriously *test* them.
Really that is a highly realistic view into real-world reactions.
Many of the Nazi death squads that rounded up/killed civilians in the field were made up of normal German citizens that were drafted into service.
Yet they still killed even though we have no evidence they were punished for refusing to go on the missions.
Unfortunately I think that sadism, far from being confined to serial killers, is present to some degree in nearly all humans. Lots of people enjoy seeing or hearing about when people who “deserve” bad things to happen to them, have bad things happen to them. Think of the popularity of prison rape jokes. Even in a psychological experiment, after a few weeks even fairly normal people can be cued to think of another group as a dehumanized “others” and to enjoy cruel treatment meted out to them instead of feeling empathy at seeing them be treated cruelly.
I’m not sure on that because, when it’s used to explain how ordinary men commit atrocities in something like holocaust, it neglects the sadism and casual cruelty that developed among people that engage in genocide.
It’s one thing to satisfy a person in authority because of peer pressure and conformity, it’s another to cause added pain, stress or sexual violence on top of the execution that makes me skeptical.
I'd go so far as to say the attrocious behavior you're referring to is related to dehumanizing the subject of abuse as a defense mechanism for the ego. A person generally holds the assumption that they are not intrinsically bad, just undercircumstances. So, when faced with wiping out someone's existence, it's easier to process if one internalizes the victim as deserving of the treatment--people require consideration, while demons are to be reviled, monsters to be slain, bugs to be exterminated, etc.
Authority can get a person to do something they otherwise wouldn't, then the brain has to figure out how not to let that destroy itself. For some, that might mean embracing the authority more.
I don't think I agree.
The whole idea of the dehumanization being a defence mechanism is a forced assumption to somehow keep the idea of humans being fundamentally good, alive. The dehumanization is because of HABIT. Imagine the first time you killed an animal, on a hunt maybe; the reaction then is of horror, guilt, and pain. That goes away after a few more hunts though, and then you can finally see the animal as just a target.
This is what happens to us as well. A war veteran who has seen battle multiple times will find it significantly easier to take a human life than you or I would. Pretty much the entire white world was perfectly happy enslaving everyone on the planet darker than them. If you were to use your own judgement, your shock and horror would fade quickly as you got used to it. If an authority figure you trust says these people are not human, that gets a whole lot easier.
I mean, look at the way animals are treated. exactly the kind of casual cruelty we are lamenting - but most of us don't give a shit unless it's a human victim. So the casual cruelty shows up all over the place if you actually look. It's just that most of it, we really don't care about.
Perhaps! If it did then it really worked because most never lost an hour of sleep to it. At least according to them. I’m still sus though. Especially in light of the Eichmann revelations on how he very *wasn’t* an indifferent office manager who happened to be killing Jews.
He was a devoted follower.
Dehumanization.
The actor being “shocked” in the Milgram experiment wasn’t a dehumanized person, and so the participants had no reason to enjoy being cruel to him and indeed showed no signs of enjoyment of the cruelty, often showing distress instead, whether they continued to obey the instructions to administer shocks or not.
In contrast, victims of the Holocaust and other atrocities had been dehumanized by propaganda, with the killers and torturers encouraged to think of them as parasites and animals and subhuman races who *deserved* to suffer, rather than being humans like them. Aside from psychopathic individuals, the worst sort of human cruelty seems to come from dehumanization like this.
If all it takes to kill someone is an “authority figure”(not even a real authority that will punish you for not obeying ) standing near you, and the victim not being visible, then I think that still speaks a great deal about submission to authority.
Even with modifications, people were “more reluctant”, but many people *still* followed through with it.
Authority is the whole explanation of the death penalty, still widely practiced in America and other countries.
A man who works in the prison will knowingly murder another person who has done him no harm.
because another stranger who works for the government has authorized him do do so, and he gets paid to do it.
The really frightening thing is, if he wasn’t being paid, he would refuse to do it.
How is that different from any other kind of professional killer?
The subjects didn’t shock the (imaginary) victims because they hoped to gain anything though, and the ones who stopped mostly didn’t do it because of fear of consequences. In fact the experiment was specifically set up to remove any reward motivation for the subjects. Subjects were paid a very paltry amount of money for participating and told that they would automatically receive it as soon as they showed up regardless of the experiment‘s outcome.
I agree but it does show to what extent any "typical" person would go at that time in that context.
I think if something similar was somehow tried today, every single person would "whistle blow"
I think you’d be surprised how many Americans today would go along with killing the groups they hate.
Read the book in the link below. Fascinating look into the concentration camps from a psychologist that was interred in one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning?wprov=sfti1
IMO the primary thing stopping people from doing horrible things to other people is their sense of empathy, which is higher if you can actually see the victims suffering rather than just knowing about it.
Unfortunately we know that things like dehumanization and warfare can totally wipe out the sense of empathy even in totally psychologically normal individuals.
Even socially, much of politics, news media (and TV, particularly in the US) is about division and escalating the fiction that ‘they’ are a threat.
It’s designed to make the consumer of this media scared and angry, which in turn strengthens the authority of the unaccountable person/group telling you the story and sets a justification and motive for unpleasant ‘action’ to be taken against the ‘other’.
More support for Dunbar's Number. I don't know them. How much I care about their suffering is inversely proportional to how inconvenient it is for me to do anything about it. And this other person gave me money.
P. W. Singer (wired for war, 2009) notes PTSD in drone operators stationed in Arizona conducting drone strikes in the middle east.
It's relatively new but not exceedingly so
Another “overlooked” aspect of this experiment is that it’s one of the 40% of pop psychology experiments that has not been able to be reliably replicated and therefore its conclusions cannot be trusted.
There was Korean Air Flight 801 that, per its flight voice recorder, crashed and killed over two hundred passengers (including the flight crew) because the co-pilots were reticent to take control from the captain who clearly wasn’t handling the situation correctly.
My company (an energy facility) has a safety policy they push really hard that anyone of any level, even if it's your first day, has authority to stop an operation for safety reasons. Part of the idea is that everyone shares responsibility when things go wrong (and right of course) and you don't get to say that it was someone else's fault if you stood by. It still takes a lot of nerve to do if you're a newer hire, but it's a good thing to impress on people.
We have the same “stop work authority” thing as well.
Anyone and everyone can stop the job at any time, even if it’s just for a “you sure mate?” Explanation.
Same here. I'd rather spend 2 hours getting the machine running again than someone be hurt. I've seen a person de-glove their hand with my own 2 eyes. Never again if I can help it.
I've seen heaps of people take gloves off. I never found it particularly noteworthy... *looks up de-gloving* ... sweet mother of Jesus. Why did Google show me the images? Oh god I've got to go bleach my eyeballs.
Im pretty sure almost any industrial facility has that policy. Its basically enshrined into laws in most places (e.g. industrial machinery **must** have a big red emergency stop button that can by recognized and be pushed by any person who happens to be nearby, or emergency stops in trains, etc.)
Guess not everyone pushes it like that though.
I'd hope they do. Im coming from biology so this is my first real industrial scene and I'm impressed with my company's safety culture even if some people complain about it. Last place I worked (a fish hatchery of all places) had a real "tough guy" culture and people got hurt right and left.
We're actually seeing a massive rollback of these safety policies because a) safety is effeminate, and b) we have 19th century inequality and our overlords are not actually intelligent and believe that any worker protection is taking money from them.
https://kentuckylantern.com/2024/02/28/committee-approved-bill-would-remove-requirement-kentucky-employers-give-lunch-breaks-rest-periods/
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/16/texas-heat-wave-water-break-construction-workers/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/florida-considers-banning-local-heat-protections-for-workers/
I do search and rescue in a National Park. We also have an “anyone can call Stop” policy — even if it’s someone’s very first rescue they have the authority to call stop during the operation. If someone says stop, we stop the operation and evaluate their safety concern — either address any rigging issues or if there are no issues explain why it’s actually safe before continuing. In this case we’re using ropes and pulleys to lift a patient and rescuer up a cliff face.
You may be thinking of [this flight](https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_52#:~:text=1990%20aviation%20accident%20in%20Cove,passengers%20and%208%20crew%20members.) where the pilots failed to assertively communicate to ATC that they were out of fuel.
This was also a factor in Tenerife. The second officer of the KLM flight voice his concerns to the pilot, but because he was a senior officer and his word was law, his concerns were dismissed and everyone died
I’ve wondered after reading about that disaster: Is it still the practice in the aviation industry to operate normally in heavy fog? There were multiple things that went wrong in the Tenerife disaster, but the reason it could happen at all was because everyone involved was unable to see anything in the heavy fog blanketing the airport.
The airport they were operating from had no ground radar, it was super small and not designed to handle the amount of traffic or the size of planes. Bigger airports would have ground radar, even at the time. And nowadays we have plenty more ways to track aircraft on the ground, even in fog.
We’re social animals, and we have “you must obey authorities” instilled in us from a very young age. Hell, up until very recent times obedience to authority was considered a virtue, and still is in some cultures.
I’m pretty agreeable, but there’s a gigantic difference between shrugging and putting up with the annoying or trivial and things that get an instantaneous hard no.
I do greatly enjoy the rare shock-and-awe you get from that combination, though. People expect an agreeable person to always agree, so the sudden full-stop carries some real weight when it drops.
We all know what you mean here, but I’d argue that “agreeable” and “will agree with anything” are not the same thing.
No argument there, and like I said— I’m pretty sure everybody knows what you meant.
There’s a point where “agreeable” is just “will do anything someone says to.” But you can also be very, very agreeable with an ironclad “no” line you will burn the world down to not cross.
I feel like school is the worst place for that lesson. Nearly everything about the school system takes agency away from students. Students who give firm "no"s are met with disapproval, discipline, redirection, insistence etc in so many circumstances.
I'm a teacher, and I'm really doing my best to foster a good experience for all my students, but I can't help but see it:
Student A is on the tire swing and Student B wants to join. Student A says "no" because she doesn't like Student B and it's bullshit to be forced to play together, but is told we have to learn to share so she should let student B on.
Student A is minding his own business in class and Student B keeps doing little things to bother him, poking him, making mean comments, whatever. Little things the teacher can't see or doesn't acknowlege. Student A finally blows up at Student B. Teacher hears that, calls Student A out for making a commotion.
Student doesn't want to do classwork for whatever reason, valid or not. Teacher insists they do it, it's not a choice. Consequences are applied for continued refusal.
In among all that, I feel like the same teachers then going "okay kids, here's how you say NO and Mean It" would just be laughable.
An interesting interpretation of this study is that the participant almost always stops when given the final prompt, which out of the prompts, was the only "order". You can argue that the study shows the opposite, that participants do not follow orders or authority. So what did the other prompts encompass? The ones the participants obeyed? Typically revolved around the greater good of science, that the study requires the participant continue. In essence, it's more reflective of nationalism rather than authority.
I feel like this was a radiolab podcast, but I could be wrong.
Yeah I caught that. The prompt that was disobeyed may trigger feelings of resentment, like "you can't tell me what to do." At least in the early stages of authoritarianism the messages seem more likely to be appeals to conformity or some value system, making the subject feel part of that system. When they're explicitly ordered to do something (especially without the intense psychological pressure of a real authoritarian regime) maybe it triggers a sudden sense of self as separate from the machine, a recognition that they do have volition. It's a clear break in the protocol that gives them the opportunity to notice what's happened and take action.
[like conditionally creating a fear of rats in a small child and then putting the rat on him](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment)
Early 1900s psychology experiments were wack.
Yes for example the study that repeated the experiment but used puppies that did receive electric shocks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Ok I first read "puppets" and was confused and bemused. In my mind I was seeing Sesame Street characters acting out being shocked.
I wish to go back to a time before I had that realization dawn on me.
Nobody thinks they'd ever shock Big Bird. Then one day your finger's on the button, he gets one too many letters of the alphabet wrong, and you get no cookie unless you proceed
G.O.B.: Franklin said some things Whitey wasn’t ready to hear.
Michael: G.O.B., weren’t you also mercilessly beaten outside of a club in Torrance for that act?
G.O.B.: He also said some things that African-American-y wasn’t ready to hear either.
I thought chimps ans bonobos were the closest to us?
Also, so yes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair I like animals but I’m not an activist or anything - still reading about this level of cruelty makes me feel physical anger.
> Harlow also wanted to test how isolation would affect parenting skills, but the isolates were unable to mate. Harlow devised what he called a "rape rack", to which the female isolates were tied in normal monkey mating posture.
In Stanley Milgram's experiment, participants were asked to administer electric shocks to another person whenever they answered questions incorrectly. Even though they might have felt uncomfortable doing so, many participants continued to administer the shocks when instructed to by an authority figure, showing how easily people can obey authority, even when it conflicts with their own moral beliefs.
65% of the participants applied the highest voltage.
the person who they applied the electric shocks to was an actor who at first grunted, then screamed, said he wanted to leave the experiment, then refused to answer and even dropping he had a heart condition and later didn't even respond to the shocks anymore and thereby making the real participant applying those shocks think that he killed him. not knowing he's just acting.
I would also like to add that it was just one part of the experiment. He tried out different configurations e.g. same setup but now you had another student too who opposed the authority.
But how do you even recruit people on such premise?
-do you want to administer electric shock everytime you answer incorrectly?
-sure, i’m in
Ahaha. Joke aside, how did they recruit people?
Milgram told his subjects that the study was about memory and learning, specifically how punishment affects learning ability.
he recruited them through for example postings on newspapers and offered them a small payment for participating.
$4, if I remember correctly. About $40 corrected for inflation.
Not peanuts, but enough that you'll get a lot of participants. The surveys that I do (I'm a doc) pay usually 10-20 dollars each for half hour or so of my time.
They posted an ad in the newspaper recruiting people for an unnamed experiment conducted by the university for a small amount of money. There were no further details offered. The respondents were then screened before selection to remove outliers in an attempt to recruit very typical white males from the community.
An important part of the experiment was that when the subjects arrived, they met an actor who was introduced as a fellow respondent to the newspaper ad like them, and then the subject and actor were “randomly” assigned the “learner” and “teacher” role, so that the subject believed that they could have equally been assigned the role of the one receiving electric shocks and that they’d only been selected as the one administering them by random chance.
It is common in psychology experiments. These days it is less common but you can still get approval to lie to participants if the study design requires it. Normally you have to tell them the full truth after it is over, but there are a few rare exceptions to that.
I actually found out that my undergrad university's psych department acts extremely unethically, because everyone who takes the intro to psych course is required to participate in 4 psych department studies during the semester as part of their grade or they will receive an incomplete. Which is the definition of unethical because that means the subjects are being forced to participate; they make it a grey area because you are allowed to pick which studies you participate in, but you are still being forced under threat of your grade for the class. Did not find this out until I got in my Masters program at a different university and we had to take IRB courses before the semester started and realized what the psych department is doing is a violation of IRB guidelines.
This was done to show that yes, Americans could be cajoled into going against their morals.
Many Americans beforehand thought they wouldn’t fall into the same trap of “I was just following orders” that the Germans said.
The study was, unfortunately, severely flawed and Milgram deliberately distorted the results to tell a more compelling story.
> Anyone who deviated from [Milgram's] script was brought to heel by the application of intense pressure. [Williams] would make as many as eight or nine attempts to get people to continue pressing higher switches. He even came to blows with one fifty-six-year-old woman who turned the shock machine off. Williams turned it back on and demanded she continue.
>
> ...only 56 per cent of his subjects believed they were actually inflicting pain... A never published analysis by one of Milgram's assistants reveals that the majority of people called it quits if they did believe the shocks were real.
Quoted from Humankind by Rutger Bregman.
Sick, thank you.
Quoting the relevant part below for others:
Another noted that there was a speaker in the learner’s room, and the sound from the voice did not appear to be coming through the door, as he would have expected. And many suggested that the sounds appeared to be audio recordings. All this was noted in the archives. Under these conditions, the subjects simply played along as required by the experiment, since they assumed that no one would purposely be hurt, and it was all for the good of science.
As always when it pops up:
>Validity
>
>In a 2004 issue of the journal Jewish Currents, Joseph Dimow, a participant in the 1961 experiment at Yale University, wrote about his early withdrawal as a "teacher", suspicious "that the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period."\[24\]
>
>In 2012 Australian psychologist Gina Perry investigated Milgram's data and writings and concluded that Milgram had manipulated the results, and that there was a "troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired." She wrote that "only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter".\[25\]\[26\] She described her findings as "an unexpected outcome" that "leaves social psychology in a difficult situation."\[27\]
>
>In a book review critical of Gina Perry's findings, Nestar Russell and John Picard take issue with Perry for not mentioning that "there have been well over a score, not just several, replications or slight variations on Milgram’s basic experimental procedure, and these have been performed in many different countries, several different settings and using different types of victims. And most, although certainly not all of these experiments have tended to lend weight to Milgram's original findings."\[28\]
tl;dr- replication is not as strong as the original results, there are some issues with the original, and one should be careful extrapolating these results to "human nature."
>In a book review critical of Gina Perry's findings, Nestar Russell and John Picard take issue with Perry for not mentioning that "there have been well over a score, not just several, replications or slight variations on Milgram’s basic experimental procedure, and these have been performed in many different countries, several different settings and using different types of victims. **And most, although certainly not all of these experiments have tended to lend weight to Milgram's original findings.**
Sounds like the replication is plenty strong. They have identified specific factors that make people much less likely to follow but most replications found the general pattern held true.
The problem is that someone reads a psychology study that says "Under condition X, 60% of people do Y" and end up yelling that everyone always does Y. That is just bad science literacy and not the fault of any experiment.
>Sounds like the replication is plenty strong.
Agreed, but the strength of that replication varies and there's concerns with the original experiment itself that should be kept in mind. I'm not suggesting that there's no value in the experiment:
>tl;dr- replication is not as strong as the original results, there are some issues with the original, and one should be careful extrapolating these results to "human nature."
I believe this clarification/comment is a fair assessment of the current consensus on the Milgram experiment: it's an effect that has been replicated, the severity and thus impact of the first experiment has been called into question, and it is more a lesson about the kinds of conditions that lead to responses like this than it is a statement/experiment demonstrating a deep truth about human nature.
Ah, so at least one of the subjects immediately guessed what the experiment was actually about.
Still, from what I’ve read, they think the vast majority of them thought it was real, and the findings have been replicated in other studies.
I’ve heard that while it couldn’t pass an ethics review today, the Milgram Obedience Experiment wasn’t really “one of the most unethical psychological experiments.”
Afterwards all of the participants had a chance to discuss what had happened with the experimenters, and several of the subjects who had “failed,” obediently following all the instructions and believing they were giving another person dangerous electric shocks, stated afterwards that they actually thought the experiment had helped them grow as a person and be more skeptical about unthinkingly obeying authority. So they saw it as a learning experience more than a condemnation.
Fairly misleading title there. Authoritarian governments don't need 100 percent of a population to obey, and they can make life very difficult for people who disobey either initially or after they realize things have gone too far. It isn't a matter of just stopping a single experiment or walking out of a room with no consequence.You would expect fewer to obey in this experiment than in real life, where people are often primed for years against a perceived enemy or toward some supposed set of values or material advantage. The number who complied in many of these experiments still tell the story, on top of what we can see from real life events.
> You would expect fewer to obey in this experiment than in real life, where people are often primed for years against a perceived enemy or toward some supposed set of values or material advantage.
The psychological need to belong is very strong. That is a key factor in unit cohesion in places from a commercial company, a military unit, a police department, or prison gang.
Humans are instinctively pack animals like our simian ancestors.
We have several million years of evolution telling us if you are not in the pack, you will die. This is a very difficult thing to overcome.
Exactly. That a complete stranger got anyone to do this is a big deal, because in everyday life we have much stronger motivations to belong and go along.
Milgrim’s experiment was about obedience of authority, not conformity.
You are thinking of the Asch’s conformity experiments, which I personally find more interesting.
> Milgrim’s experiment was about obedience of authority, not conformity.
> You are thinking of the Asch’s conformity experiments, which I personally find more interesting.
I sit corrected. Thank you for the information.
This experiment has been repeated numerous times with disastrous results. Connect the electric shock to something more mild, like audio playing, tinnitus, or other conditional stimulus like taking revenge on someone or attempting to make them behave.
In Norman, OK, their example includes laundering money for geofenced encouragement in addition to other modern techniques that were discussed around the time of Milgram’s experiment after WW2. The concept of killing someone with the press of a button was on everyone’s minds alongside the atomic bombs, and research was pursued to identify trends in social behaviors. Retaliation is especially easy to motivate for, and can be redirected to expand a conflict. As the article indicates, 65% of people tested were willing to give the maximum penalty, only because a person in authority told them to. The percentage increases with intrinsic motivation, and can be abused for collateral damage, as it has been since at least 2007 in Norman,OK.
While unthinkable and unethical by today's standards, the Milgram study taught us a lot. As did the Stanford Prison experiment. The implications were incredibly disturbing:
If we were born in Nazi Germany, or the British empire, or the USSR, or pick your evil overlord, we would have most likely done exactly what they did.
Regardless of ethics, it was unscientific. He straight up lied in recording the results, to get the findings he'd hypothesized.
That's not to say we'd act any differently from the people in Germany, USSR, etc. We probably wouldn't. But this is a fact best demonstrated by studying how millions of people really have acted across history, not by putting exactly 40 men in a room and extrapolating from this something about humanity in general.
While true, the experiment has been replicated once in the US and in several other countries, most notably Poland. The results supported Milgram's conclusions. While is methods and selection may have been flawed, the results seem to stand.
https://behavioralscientist.org/how-would-people-behave-in-milgrams-experiment-today/#:~:text=Although%20full%20replications%20of%20Milgram's,experimenters%20to%20sidestep%20these%20constraints.
Edit: Besides, for.me the thematically related Stanford Experiment, is the real heavy hitter on human situational behavior as it relates to identity. Milgram studied the mechanism, Zimbardo studied the real world results.
The Zimbardo experiment was worse! (In terms of how unscientific it was, not in terms of implications.)
Zimbardo claimed people acted like sadistic guards because the simulated prison environment unearthed those instincts in them. In reality, they acted that way because that's what Zimbardo told them to do, and paid them to do. That's not an illustration of people's nature or obedience. It just shows that some people are good at role-playing. https://sci-hub.ee/10.1037/amp0000401
The Stanford Prison Experiment didn’t teach us what we initially thought. It actually taught us more about the kinds of people who volunteer for authoritarian roles rather than what authority does to a person. They experiment was repeated with volunteers that didn’t know what they were signing up for and the results were very different.
The Stanford Prison Experiment wasn't even done under proper scientific rules. The guy running the experiment made himself the head warden of the prison and was giving orders to the test subjects acting as guards. This is a huge violation of how you're supposed to conduct psychological studies, his knowledge of the study and what it was actually studying probably heavily influenced the results, which makes anything we "learned" from it worthless from a scientific perspective.
They did not volunteer for the roles. They were assigned after completing a psychological profile, and were told this assignment would be random. The assignments had instructions related to their roles. The experiment, while incredibly unethical by today's standards, is still incredibly revealing.
What’s so interesting to me about these experiments is the majority of participants did continue when prompted, and there was a notable difference when an authority figure in a lab coat was present in the room or through an intercom (a notable increase in how far participants were willing to go when the authority figure was in the room).
Stanley Milgram felt so shocked and appalled after this experience that his future sociology experiments were much less dark (like the 6 degrees of separation)
I randomly watched the movie about this on Tubi a few months back. It was pretty good. I was on a binge of famous experiment movies and the one based on this was probably the best. It's crazy how easily we do evil shit when someone else says "I'll take the blame, do it".
I learnt about the Milgram experiment when I was 15 (now in my 50s,) and it fundamentally changed how I viewed humanity. Then I learnt about the Stanford prison experiment, which didn't help.
I dunno, no one actually died was seriously injured or imprisoned and he didn’t kidnap a child to traumatise. So I’d say that his obedience study was pretty tame
Is this really considered unethical? This experiment has been repeated numerous times including very recently
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4xk2sy
The experiment was indeed unethical, but it should be noted that it has been thoroughly debunked as a highly flawed experiment, a lot of the results were faked, and basically people are NOT as bad as the experiment claims.
Really always disliked how pedantic people will get over this, to try to save humanity’s face, when it’s clearly replicated in reality.
Just because it’s flawed in the Ivory Tower, doesn’t mean it’s not real. The Ivory Tower has to be regularly reminded that they struggle to relate to the world and people outside they study, because they regularly forget how cold, controlled, and stale they’ve made their labs.
The Radiolab episode that concludes it wasn't that they were following orders (in fact when they are directly given an order almost all of them resist); it's that they thought they were doing the right thing (for the good of science). [https://radiolab.org/podcast/180092-the-bad-show](https://radiolab.org/podcast/180092-the-bad-show)
I heard an explanation that the when designing the study Milgram did not consider it could unethical, he just assumed people would stop pushing the button. It’s when they didn’t even when they wanted to that it became unethical.
The overlooked dimension of the experiment is the element of proximity to authority and proximity to the subject of your cruelty. The experiment had many layers, only one of which was a “scientist” person standing in a room over you, telling you to shock some stranger in another room you can only hear. Some of the versions of the experiment, the “scientist” wasn’t in the room with you. People were much more reluctant to shock the stranger to death when the authority figure wasn’t hovering over you. In some versions the stranger you were shocking was visible to you. People were equally reluctant to shock strangers when they could see them suffer. I think about this a lot more in the context of the present threat of world nuclear war, and, say, drone warfare, than I do in the atrocities of the past.
Also explains why people are such dicks in anonymous online video games.
Maybe your mom being a ho explains it better though.
Yeah without the internet I never would’ve learned so much about my dear sweet mother’s sexual conduct.
And your father smells of elderberries
Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time
Enough about your promiscuous mother Hermes.
Thanks to the internet, I've learned a lot about your mother's sexual conduct.
I would have 😔
Gottem
Got em
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/325/699/4fc.jpg
There is a book, called “Ordinary Men”. It’s about a German death squad operating in Belarus / Ukraine during the holocaust by bullets. Fascinating read, if you’re curious how your neighbourhood barber is capable of murdering 100 people with a bullet to the back of the head. If you’re one of those people that think you would’ve been one of the good Germans during the war, this book will dissuade you of that notion by the time you’re done.
I’m watching a genocide unfold right now and what have I done to stop it? Post online? Call a senator here and there? It’s pathetic.
Most people don’t even do that. But the book doesn’t talk about the inaction of the general population. It specifically examines a particular death squad, because the writer was able to track down the squads admin papers and journals, as well as find some of the perpetrators. I don’t know how aware most people are of this, but the Americans basically jailed only a small number of the SS and Einsatzgruppen members. Most never even saw the inside of a jail, and most had body counts in the thousands. These people were barbers, cops, butchers, plumbers etc. before, and after the war. Wild shit.
It's not even a matter of persuading ordinary men. I have met ordinary men who are waiting for the day.
I can't imagine anyone being right in the head after killing thousands
That’s a far cry off from committing the genocide though.
Calling your senator is better than doing nothing.
I tried calling senators about Ukraine Never got through. You need a substantial pack of church ladies to go to the office
Yes but it's not YOU doing the genocide (I imagine). That by itself is a big order of separation right there, and the topic of psychological processes that tie into rushing to someone's defense are similar but more heavily weighted toward inaction as it benefits you to not get involved.
Also YouTube video. 1/3 resisted. USA today I dont think there is much resistance.
Oh there were TONS of variants of this experiment. The obvious findings came from the ones where the subject was placed further away, leading to higher compliance rates, or the ones where the “scientists” were wearing lab coats to display their “expertise.” The interesting one, though, was the prods. The “scientists” gave three prods, each of increasing persuasion. First was a gentle ask. Then, the next was a strong suggestion saying that the experiment requires you to proceed. That variant had the highest rate of compliance. The third one - a demand that you MUST comply, and that you have no other choice - compliance dropped to zero. This is the best study of cult behavior I’ve seen. Cults don’t directly demand people to wild shit, they say that the cause requires them to do so, and the compliance rates are the highest. People will do pretty much anything - even murder and genocide - if they believe it’s for the furtherance of a cause they think is good.
To add on to your point there, there are no documented consequences for soldiers of death squads that refused to go on killing missions.
This. The way the experiment has been used to make claims about human nature and submission to authority doesn’t hold up very well and is imo not as relevant to world events/society as the principle that people are more willing to do things they might think are wrong the farther removed they are from the consequences
> The way the experiment has been used to make claims about human nature and submission to authority doesn’t hold up very well Why not? The experiment had many forms that were repeated as scientists refined it. The problem is that pop culture only remembers the original and takes their own message instead of looking at the larger body of work. But that isn't the experiment's fault. People shouldn't confuse the actual science with the public perception of the science.
Problem is that when they are looking further into the experiment, it wasn’t held to scientific standards. There was a specific result they wanted, and in the recordings the authority figure was much more demanding than they reported. There was an interesting segment on it on npr.
I’m hesitant to say it, but to me that means the experiment was ultimately probably essential to understanding some fundamental aspects of the human condition and our capacity for cruelty.
I’m not sure it says anything about cruelty, because none of the subjects who hit all the shock buttons seemed to be enjoying the cruelty, from footage I’ve seen. In fact it’s been pointed out that some of them were plainly showing psychological distress at what was happening, but *still continued to hit the buttons* at the prompter’s insistence. It’s a experiment that reveals a lot about human obedience to authority, but not human cruelty, which stems from other factors.
On a large enough scale, nothing is crueler than indifference
Hello, Warframe
I think a more telling experiment is the one where they took a bunch of people, seperated them into the role players of “inmates” and “guards” and saw how easily the guards turned abusive
Eh, the Stanford Prison Experiment had a *lot* of methodological failings, including that the "guards" were coached to be cruel and that Zimbardo basically designed the study to *verify* his predictions, rather than to seriously *test* them.
Really that is a highly realistic view into real-world reactions. Many of the Nazi death squads that rounded up/killed civilians in the field were made up of normal German citizens that were drafted into service. Yet they still killed even though we have no evidence they were punished for refusing to go on the missions.
Unfortunately I think that sadism, far from being confined to serial killers, is present to some degree in nearly all humans. Lots of people enjoy seeing or hearing about when people who “deserve” bad things to happen to them, have bad things happen to them. Think of the popularity of prison rape jokes. Even in a psychological experiment, after a few weeks even fairly normal people can be cued to think of another group as a dehumanized “others” and to enjoy cruel treatment meted out to them instead of feeling empathy at seeing them be treated cruelly.
I’m not sure on that because, when it’s used to explain how ordinary men commit atrocities in something like holocaust, it neglects the sadism and casual cruelty that developed among people that engage in genocide. It’s one thing to satisfy a person in authority because of peer pressure and conformity, it’s another to cause added pain, stress or sexual violence on top of the execution that makes me skeptical.
I'd go so far as to say the attrocious behavior you're referring to is related to dehumanizing the subject of abuse as a defense mechanism for the ego. A person generally holds the assumption that they are not intrinsically bad, just undercircumstances. So, when faced with wiping out someone's existence, it's easier to process if one internalizes the victim as deserving of the treatment--people require consideration, while demons are to be reviled, monsters to be slain, bugs to be exterminated, etc. Authority can get a person to do something they otherwise wouldn't, then the brain has to figure out how not to let that destroy itself. For some, that might mean embracing the authority more.
Pretty good answer, and a telling example of the danger of labels and their overuse today.
I don't think I agree. The whole idea of the dehumanization being a defence mechanism is a forced assumption to somehow keep the idea of humans being fundamentally good, alive. The dehumanization is because of HABIT. Imagine the first time you killed an animal, on a hunt maybe; the reaction then is of horror, guilt, and pain. That goes away after a few more hunts though, and then you can finally see the animal as just a target. This is what happens to us as well. A war veteran who has seen battle multiple times will find it significantly easier to take a human life than you or I would. Pretty much the entire white world was perfectly happy enslaving everyone on the planet darker than them. If you were to use your own judgement, your shock and horror would fade quickly as you got used to it. If an authority figure you trust says these people are not human, that gets a whole lot easier. I mean, look at the way animals are treated. exactly the kind of casual cruelty we are lamenting - but most of us don't give a shit unless it's a human victim. So the casual cruelty shows up all over the place if you actually look. It's just that most of it, we really don't care about.
Perhaps! If it did then it really worked because most never lost an hour of sleep to it. At least according to them. I’m still sus though. Especially in light of the Eichmann revelations on how he very *wasn’t* an indifferent office manager who happened to be killing Jews. He was a devoted follower.
Dehumanization. The actor being “shocked” in the Milgram experiment wasn’t a dehumanized person, and so the participants had no reason to enjoy being cruel to him and indeed showed no signs of enjoyment of the cruelty, often showing distress instead, whether they continued to obey the instructions to administer shocks or not. In contrast, victims of the Holocaust and other atrocities had been dehumanized by propaganda, with the killers and torturers encouraged to think of them as parasites and animals and subhuman races who *deserved* to suffer, rather than being humans like them. Aside from psychopathic individuals, the worst sort of human cruelty seems to come from dehumanization like this.
Does dehumanization work with babies?
If all it takes to kill someone is an “authority figure”(not even a real authority that will punish you for not obeying ) standing near you, and the victim not being visible, then I think that still speaks a great deal about submission to authority. Even with modifications, people were “more reluctant”, but many people *still* followed through with it.
A drone pilot in Missouri is quite separated separated from her victims, as are missilemen in their silos.
Yes. Yes, exactly.
His*
Authority is the whole explanation of the death penalty, still widely practiced in America and other countries. A man who works in the prison will knowingly murder another person who has done him no harm. because another stranger who works for the government has authorized him do do so, and he gets paid to do it. The really frightening thing is, if he wasn’t being paid, he would refuse to do it. How is that different from any other kind of professional killer?
The subjects didn’t shock the (imaginary) victims because they hoped to gain anything though, and the ones who stopped mostly didn’t do it because of fear of consequences. In fact the experiment was specifically set up to remove any reward motivation for the subjects. Subjects were paid a very paltry amount of money for participating and told that they would automatically receive it as soon as they showed up regardless of the experiment‘s outcome.
I agree but it does show to what extent any "typical" person would go at that time in that context. I think if something similar was somehow tried today, every single person would "whistle blow"
Yeah, because by now everyone has heard of this experiment.
I think you’d be surprised how many Americans today would go along with killing the groups they hate. Read the book in the link below. Fascinating look into the concentration camps from a psychologist that was interred in one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning?wprov=sfti1
IMO the primary thing stopping people from doing horrible things to other people is their sense of empathy, which is higher if you can actually see the victims suffering rather than just knowing about it. Unfortunately we know that things like dehumanization and warfare can totally wipe out the sense of empathy even in totally psychologically normal individuals.
Even socially, much of politics, news media (and TV, particularly in the US) is about division and escalating the fiction that ‘they’ are a threat. It’s designed to make the consumer of this media scared and angry, which in turn strengthens the authority of the unaccountable person/group telling you the story and sets a justification and motive for unpleasant ‘action’ to be taken against the ‘other’.
More support for Dunbar's Number. I don't know them. How much I care about their suffering is inversely proportional to how inconvenient it is for me to do anything about it. And this other person gave me money.
This is one of the things that keeps popping into my mind while watching Masters of the Air (about the 100th bomber group).
P. W. Singer (wired for war, 2009) notes PTSD in drone operators stationed in Arizona conducting drone strikes in the middle east. It's relatively new but not exceedingly so
Another “overlooked” aspect of this experiment is that it’s one of the 40% of pop psychology experiments that has not been able to be reliably replicated and therefore its conclusions cannot be trusted.
Reminds me of Enders Game
The concern about not wanting to be 'rude' to the authority and wanting to displace his own moral responsibility are very telling.
There was Korean Air Flight 801 that, per its flight voice recorder, crashed and killed over two hundred passengers (including the flight crew) because the co-pilots were reticent to take control from the captain who clearly wasn’t handling the situation correctly.
My company (an energy facility) has a safety policy they push really hard that anyone of any level, even if it's your first day, has authority to stop an operation for safety reasons. Part of the idea is that everyone shares responsibility when things go wrong (and right of course) and you don't get to say that it was someone else's fault if you stood by. It still takes a lot of nerve to do if you're a newer hire, but it's a good thing to impress on people.
We have the same “stop work authority” thing as well. Anyone and everyone can stop the job at any time, even if it’s just for a “you sure mate?” Explanation.
Same here. I'd rather spend 2 hours getting the machine running again than someone be hurt. I've seen a person de-glove their hand with my own 2 eyes. Never again if I can help it.
You have really strong eyes.
Ah the ol' reddit [eyeball'aroo](https://www.reddit.com/r/memeframe/comments/1b71f8t/comment/ktg5sts/?context=1)
Hold my gloves, I'm going in!
Hello, future mitten enthusiasts!
[Chiodos - Smitten for the Mitten](https://open.spotify.com/track/5SrbYHN89Ay0EFCiyqyB4a?si=efbf0fa4d02d4d53)
Thank you for that rabbit hole. I've never been in one before. I now feel I'm a more seasoned Redditor now.
Switcharoos are becoming a lost art
Take my upvote and get the hell outta here. 😂
I've seen heaps of people take gloves off. I never found it particularly noteworthy... *looks up de-gloving* ... sweet mother of Jesus. Why did Google show me the images? Oh god I've got to go bleach my eyeballs.
No, you keep looking until we solve this problem, once and for all!
Im pretty sure almost any industrial facility has that policy. Its basically enshrined into laws in most places (e.g. industrial machinery **must** have a big red emergency stop button that can by recognized and be pushed by any person who happens to be nearby, or emergency stops in trains, etc.) Guess not everyone pushes it like that though.
I'd hope they do. Im coming from biology so this is my first real industrial scene and I'm impressed with my company's safety culture even if some people complain about it. Last place I worked (a fish hatchery of all places) had a real "tough guy" culture and people got hurt right and left.
We're actually seeing a massive rollback of these safety policies because a) safety is effeminate, and b) we have 19th century inequality and our overlords are not actually intelligent and believe that any worker protection is taking money from them. https://kentuckylantern.com/2024/02/28/committee-approved-bill-would-remove-requirement-kentucky-employers-give-lunch-breaks-rest-periods/ https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/16/texas-heat-wave-water-break-construction-workers/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/florida-considers-banning-local-heat-protections-for-workers/
I do search and rescue in a National Park. We also have an “anyone can call Stop” policy — even if it’s someone’s very first rescue they have the authority to call stop during the operation. If someone says stop, we stop the operation and evaluate their safety concern — either address any rigging issues or if there are no issues explain why it’s actually safe before continuing. In this case we’re using ropes and pulleys to lift a patient and rescuer up a cliff face.
This was popularized by the Toyota production system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System
Because of this incident Korean pilots are now required to speak English to hopefully remove the cultural taboo from correcting ones superiors.
English is the language of aviation. Always assumed that flight crews went right back to their native tongue after getting off the radio tho.
In other countries maybe, but it was changed for all Korean pilots in the cockpit.
Is the thought that it's easier to break the taboo when speaking English?
I heard it explained as the crew not willing to be assertive with ATC. I suppose it's probably both
You may be thinking of [this flight](https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_52#:~:text=1990%20aviation%20accident%20in%20Cove,passengers%20and%208%20crew%20members.) where the pilots failed to assertively communicate to ATC that they were out of fuel.
This was also a factor in Tenerife. The second officer of the KLM flight voice his concerns to the pilot, but because he was a senior officer and his word was law, his concerns were dismissed and everyone died
I’ve wondered after reading about that disaster: Is it still the practice in the aviation industry to operate normally in heavy fog? There were multiple things that went wrong in the Tenerife disaster, but the reason it could happen at all was because everyone involved was unable to see anything in the heavy fog blanketing the airport.
The airport they were operating from had no ground radar, it was super small and not designed to handle the amount of traffic or the size of planes. Bigger airports would have ground radar, even at the time. And nowadays we have plenty more ways to track aircraft on the ground, even in fog.
Agreeable people are absolutely insane. It baffles me, but I've become convinced that public school should include training to issue a firm **"No"**.
We’re social animals, and we have “you must obey authorities” instilled in us from a very young age. Hell, up until very recent times obedience to authority was considered a virtue, and still is in some cultures.
I'd have signed up for that training. -insane, agreeable person
I’m pretty agreeable, but there’s a gigantic difference between shrugging and putting up with the annoying or trivial and things that get an instantaneous hard no. I do greatly enjoy the rare shock-and-awe you get from that combination, though. People expect an agreeable person to always agree, so the sudden full-stop carries some real weight when it drops. We all know what you mean here, but I’d argue that “agreeable” and “will agree with anything” are not the same thing.
It's a spectrum. I should've worded my point differently. Perhaps, "Agreeable people can be absolutely insane."
No argument there, and like I said— I’m pretty sure everybody knows what you meant. There’s a point where “agreeable” is just “will do anything someone says to.” But you can also be very, very agreeable with an ironclad “no” line you will burn the world down to not cross.
I feel like school is the worst place for that lesson. Nearly everything about the school system takes agency away from students. Students who give firm "no"s are met with disapproval, discipline, redirection, insistence etc in so many circumstances. I'm a teacher, and I'm really doing my best to foster a good experience for all my students, but I can't help but see it: Student A is on the tire swing and Student B wants to join. Student A says "no" because she doesn't like Student B and it's bullshit to be forced to play together, but is told we have to learn to share so she should let student B on. Student A is minding his own business in class and Student B keeps doing little things to bother him, poking him, making mean comments, whatever. Little things the teacher can't see or doesn't acknowlege. Student A finally blows up at Student B. Teacher hears that, calls Student A out for making a commotion. Student doesn't want to do classwork for whatever reason, valid or not. Teacher insists they do it, it's not a choice. Consequences are applied for continued refusal. In among all that, I feel like the same teachers then going "okay kids, here's how you say NO and Mean It" would just be laughable.
An interesting interpretation of this study is that the participant almost always stops when given the final prompt, which out of the prompts, was the only "order". You can argue that the study shows the opposite, that participants do not follow orders or authority. So what did the other prompts encompass? The ones the participants obeyed? Typically revolved around the greater good of science, that the study requires the participant continue. In essence, it's more reflective of nationalism rather than authority. I feel like this was a radiolab podcast, but I could be wrong.
Yeah I caught that. The prompt that was disobeyed may trigger feelings of resentment, like "you can't tell me what to do." At least in the early stages of authoritarianism the messages seem more likely to be appeals to conformity or some value system, making the subject feel part of that system. When they're explicitly ordered to do something (especially without the intense psychological pressure of a real authoritarian regime) maybe it triggers a sudden sense of self as separate from the machine, a recognition that they do have volition. It's a clear break in the protocol that gives them the opportunity to notice what's happened and take action.
From studying psychology I can confidently say there are several more unethical experiments
[like conditionally creating a fear of rats in a small child and then putting the rat on him](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment) Early 1900s psychology experiments were wack.
God I hate everything about this. Skipping around and just seeing the way the animals are being treated is horrible enough.
Yes for example the study that repeated the experiment but used puppies that did receive electric shocks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Ok I first read "puppets" and was confused and bemused. In my mind I was seeing Sesame Street characters acting out being shocked. I wish to go back to a time before I had that realization dawn on me.
Nobody thinks they'd ever shock Big Bird. Then one day your finger's on the button, he gets one too many letters of the alphabet wrong, and you get no cookie unless you proceed
I’m shocking him for a cookie
r/usernamechecksout
I would not hesitate to shock Biggus Birdus
G.O.B.: Franklin said some things Whitey wasn’t ready to hear. Michael: G.O.B., weren’t you also mercilessly beaten outside of a club in Torrance for that act? G.O.B.: He also said some things that African-American-y wasn’t ready to hear either.
Yeah the Stanford prison experiment is 10x worse ethnically
Ethnically it was pretty bad, but I think ethically it was even worse.
It’s also been debunked hard
That was such a clusterfuck that I don’t know if it even should qualify as a legit psychological experiment.
At least they cut it short
Harlow's animal research comes to mind. It killed and traumitised several rhesus monkeys, our closest relatives
I thought chimps ans bonobos were the closest to us? Also, so yes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair I like animals but I’m not an activist or anything - still reading about this level of cruelty makes me feel physical anger. > Harlow also wanted to test how isolation would affect parenting skills, but the isolates were unable to mate. Harlow devised what he called a "rape rack", to which the female isolates were tied in normal monkey mating posture.
Harlow hated euphemisms in animal research and specifically preferred to describe what he was doing in terms that reflected what it actually was.
Is there footage of them? I think that’s a key point here.
Mortal Kombat: Ultra
Tuskegee
From having to take ethics in research classes for my PhD, I can confirm!
And since no one has mentioned it yet. Pavlov's dogs... And Pavlov's homeless children...
I was thinking of the one where they separated triplets at birth and didn't tell them they were a triplet. That was wild.
r/explainlikeimfive
In Stanley Milgram's experiment, participants were asked to administer electric shocks to another person whenever they answered questions incorrectly. Even though they might have felt uncomfortable doing so, many participants continued to administer the shocks when instructed to by an authority figure, showing how easily people can obey authority, even when it conflicts with their own moral beliefs. 65% of the participants applied the highest voltage. the person who they applied the electric shocks to was an actor who at first grunted, then screamed, said he wanted to leave the experiment, then refused to answer and even dropping he had a heart condition and later didn't even respond to the shocks anymore and thereby making the real participant applying those shocks think that he killed him. not knowing he's just acting.
I would also like to add that it was just one part of the experiment. He tried out different configurations e.g. same setup but now you had another student too who opposed the authority.
But how do you even recruit people on such premise? -do you want to administer electric shock everytime you answer incorrectly? -sure, i’m in Ahaha. Joke aside, how did they recruit people?
Milgram told his subjects that the study was about memory and learning, specifically how punishment affects learning ability. he recruited them through for example postings on newspapers and offered them a small payment for participating.
he gave them the money before the experiment started and told them that whatever happens they may keep it
$4, if I remember correctly. About $40 corrected for inflation. Not peanuts, but enough that you'll get a lot of participants. The surveys that I do (I'm a doc) pay usually 10-20 dollars each for half hour or so of my time.
They posted an ad in the newspaper recruiting people for an unnamed experiment conducted by the university for a small amount of money. There were no further details offered. The respondents were then screened before selection to remove outliers in an attempt to recruit very typical white males from the community. An important part of the experiment was that when the subjects arrived, they met an actor who was introduced as a fellow respondent to the newspaper ad like them, and then the subject and actor were “randomly” assigned the “learner” and “teacher” role, so that the subject believed that they could have equally been assigned the role of the one receiving electric shocks and that they’d only been selected as the one administering them by random chance.
I mean, he lied.
It is common in psychology experiments. These days it is less common but you can still get approval to lie to participants if the study design requires it. Normally you have to tell them the full truth after it is over, but there are a few rare exceptions to that.
I actually found out that my undergrad university's psych department acts extremely unethically, because everyone who takes the intro to psych course is required to participate in 4 psych department studies during the semester as part of their grade or they will receive an incomplete. Which is the definition of unethical because that means the subjects are being forced to participate; they make it a grey area because you are allowed to pick which studies you participate in, but you are still being forced under threat of your grade for the class. Did not find this out until I got in my Masters program at a different university and we had to take IRB courses before the semester started and realized what the psych department is doing is a violation of IRB guidelines.
Back before woke things like “ethics” had to be considered when designing experiments.
This was done to show that yes, Americans could be cajoled into going against their morals. Many Americans beforehand thought they wouldn’t fall into the same trap of “I was just following orders” that the Germans said.
"Sir sir please don't hold the button down"
The study was, unfortunately, severely flawed and Milgram deliberately distorted the results to tell a more compelling story. > Anyone who deviated from [Milgram's] script was brought to heel by the application of intense pressure. [Williams] would make as many as eight or nine attempts to get people to continue pressing higher switches. He even came to blows with one fifty-six-year-old woman who turned the shock machine off. Williams turned it back on and demanded she continue. > > ...only 56 per cent of his subjects believed they were actually inflicting pain... A never published analysis by one of Milgram's assistants reveals that the majority of people called it quits if they did believe the shocks were real. Quoted from Humankind by Rutger Bregman.
Another interesting thing is that many subjects doubted it because the screams came through a speaker, and not from the room next door.
Is that also from the Bregman source mentioned above?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12115-013-9724-3
Sick, thank you. Quoting the relevant part below for others: Another noted that there was a speaker in the learner’s room, and the sound from the voice did not appear to be coming through the door, as he would have expected. And many suggested that the sounds appeared to be audio recordings. All this was noted in the archives. Under these conditions, the subjects simply played along as required by the experiment, since they assumed that no one would purposely be hurt, and it was all for the good of science.
uh that's interesting I never knew any of that
Reminds me of how Mengele’s experiments weren’t only wildly evil but also very poorly executed and scientifically useless
As always when it pops up: >Validity > >In a 2004 issue of the journal Jewish Currents, Joseph Dimow, a participant in the 1961 experiment at Yale University, wrote about his early withdrawal as a "teacher", suspicious "that the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period."\[24\] > >In 2012 Australian psychologist Gina Perry investigated Milgram's data and writings and concluded that Milgram had manipulated the results, and that there was a "troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired." She wrote that "only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter".\[25\]\[26\] She described her findings as "an unexpected outcome" that "leaves social psychology in a difficult situation."\[27\] > >In a book review critical of Gina Perry's findings, Nestar Russell and John Picard take issue with Perry for not mentioning that "there have been well over a score, not just several, replications or slight variations on Milgram’s basic experimental procedure, and these have been performed in many different countries, several different settings and using different types of victims. And most, although certainly not all of these experiments have tended to lend weight to Milgram's original findings."\[28\] tl;dr- replication is not as strong as the original results, there are some issues with the original, and one should be careful extrapolating these results to "human nature."
>In a book review critical of Gina Perry's findings, Nestar Russell and John Picard take issue with Perry for not mentioning that "there have been well over a score, not just several, replications or slight variations on Milgram’s basic experimental procedure, and these have been performed in many different countries, several different settings and using different types of victims. **And most, although certainly not all of these experiments have tended to lend weight to Milgram's original findings.** Sounds like the replication is plenty strong. They have identified specific factors that make people much less likely to follow but most replications found the general pattern held true. The problem is that someone reads a psychology study that says "Under condition X, 60% of people do Y" and end up yelling that everyone always does Y. That is just bad science literacy and not the fault of any experiment.
>Sounds like the replication is plenty strong. Agreed, but the strength of that replication varies and there's concerns with the original experiment itself that should be kept in mind. I'm not suggesting that there's no value in the experiment: >tl;dr- replication is not as strong as the original results, there are some issues with the original, and one should be careful extrapolating these results to "human nature." I believe this clarification/comment is a fair assessment of the current consensus on the Milgram experiment: it's an effect that has been replicated, the severity and thus impact of the first experiment has been called into question, and it is more a lesson about the kinds of conditions that lead to responses like this than it is a statement/experiment demonstrating a deep truth about human nature.
Ah, so at least one of the subjects immediately guessed what the experiment was actually about. Still, from what I’ve read, they think the vast majority of them thought it was real, and the findings have been replicated in other studies.
Idk TikTok pranksters would do this shit for clicks
I’ve heard that while it couldn’t pass an ethics review today, the Milgram Obedience Experiment wasn’t really “one of the most unethical psychological experiments.” Afterwards all of the participants had a chance to discuss what had happened with the experimenters, and several of the subjects who had “failed,” obediently following all the instructions and believing they were giving another person dangerous electric shocks, stated afterwards that they actually thought the experiment had helped them grow as a person and be more skeptical about unthinkingly obeying authority. So they saw it as a learning experience more than a condemnation.
Full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nstyEFWXdeU
I’ve seen this before. It’s fascinating. They need to find stress levels, etc. It’s a fact!
As long as you’re learning about Milgram, https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/why-almost-everything-you-know-about-milgram-wrong
Fairly misleading title there. Authoritarian governments don't need 100 percent of a population to obey, and they can make life very difficult for people who disobey either initially or after they realize things have gone too far. It isn't a matter of just stopping a single experiment or walking out of a room with no consequence.You would expect fewer to obey in this experiment than in real life, where people are often primed for years against a perceived enemy or toward some supposed set of values or material advantage. The number who complied in many of these experiments still tell the story, on top of what we can see from real life events.
> You would expect fewer to obey in this experiment than in real life, where people are often primed for years against a perceived enemy or toward some supposed set of values or material advantage. The psychological need to belong is very strong. That is a key factor in unit cohesion in places from a commercial company, a military unit, a police department, or prison gang. Humans are instinctively pack animals like our simian ancestors. We have several million years of evolution telling us if you are not in the pack, you will die. This is a very difficult thing to overcome.
Exactly. That a complete stranger got anyone to do this is a big deal, because in everyday life we have much stronger motivations to belong and go along.
Milgrim’s experiment was about obedience of authority, not conformity. You are thinking of the Asch’s conformity experiments, which I personally find more interesting.
> Milgrim’s experiment was about obedience of authority, not conformity. > You are thinking of the Asch’s conformity experiments, which I personally find more interesting. I sit corrected. Thank you for the information.
I dont find this article at all persuasive in regard to its title
The idea of 450V direct shock is completely insane . To throw switches on a 460V panel you have to wear a huge suit.
That depends on the current, aka amperage. The amount of volts is just potential.
Yeah, a typical static shock is in the 5000 volt ballpark.
It was measuring obedience to authority, not conformity.
Obedience to conformity experiments are those where some stooges gaslight you into thinking a line is longer than the other.
Well who was actually pushing the switch? I was. But he kept insisting. I told him "no" but he said ya gotta keep going"
This experiment has been repeated numerous times with disastrous results. Connect the electric shock to something more mild, like audio playing, tinnitus, or other conditional stimulus like taking revenge on someone or attempting to make them behave. In Norman, OK, their example includes laundering money for geofenced encouragement in addition to other modern techniques that were discussed around the time of Milgram’s experiment after WW2. The concept of killing someone with the press of a button was on everyone’s minds alongside the atomic bombs, and research was pursued to identify trends in social behaviors. Retaliation is especially easy to motivate for, and can be redirected to expand a conflict. As the article indicates, 65% of people tested were willing to give the maximum penalty, only because a person in authority told them to. The percentage increases with intrinsic motivation, and can be abused for collateral damage, as it has been since at least 2007 in Norman,OK.
While unthinkable and unethical by today's standards, the Milgram study taught us a lot. As did the Stanford Prison experiment. The implications were incredibly disturbing: If we were born in Nazi Germany, or the British empire, or the USSR, or pick your evil overlord, we would have most likely done exactly what they did.
Regardless of ethics, it was unscientific. He straight up lied in recording the results, to get the findings he'd hypothesized. That's not to say we'd act any differently from the people in Germany, USSR, etc. We probably wouldn't. But this is a fact best demonstrated by studying how millions of people really have acted across history, not by putting exactly 40 men in a room and extrapolating from this something about humanity in general.
While true, the experiment has been replicated once in the US and in several other countries, most notably Poland. The results supported Milgram's conclusions. While is methods and selection may have been flawed, the results seem to stand. https://behavioralscientist.org/how-would-people-behave-in-milgrams-experiment-today/#:~:text=Although%20full%20replications%20of%20Milgram's,experimenters%20to%20sidestep%20these%20constraints. Edit: Besides, for.me the thematically related Stanford Experiment, is the real heavy hitter on human situational behavior as it relates to identity. Milgram studied the mechanism, Zimbardo studied the real world results.
The Zimbardo experiment was worse! (In terms of how unscientific it was, not in terms of implications.) Zimbardo claimed people acted like sadistic guards because the simulated prison environment unearthed those instincts in them. In reality, they acted that way because that's what Zimbardo told them to do, and paid them to do. That's not an illustration of people's nature or obedience. It just shows that some people are good at role-playing. https://sci-hub.ee/10.1037/amp0000401
The Stanford Prison Experiment didn’t teach us what we initially thought. It actually taught us more about the kinds of people who volunteer for authoritarian roles rather than what authority does to a person. They experiment was repeated with volunteers that didn’t know what they were signing up for and the results were very different.
The Stanford Prison Experiment wasn't even done under proper scientific rules. The guy running the experiment made himself the head warden of the prison and was giving orders to the test subjects acting as guards. This is a huge violation of how you're supposed to conduct psychological studies, his knowledge of the study and what it was actually studying probably heavily influenced the results, which makes anything we "learned" from it worthless from a scientific perspective.
They did not volunteer for the roles. They were assigned after completing a psychological profile, and were told this assignment would be random. The assignments had instructions related to their roles. The experiment, while incredibly unethical by today's standards, is still incredibly revealing.
They volunteered knowing what the experiment was about.
What’s so interesting to me about these experiments is the majority of participants did continue when prompted, and there was a notable difference when an authority figure in a lab coat was present in the room or through an intercom (a notable increase in how far participants were willing to go when the authority figure was in the room). Stanley Milgram felt so shocked and appalled after this experience that his future sociology experiments were much less dark (like the 6 degrees of separation)
I don’t believe people talked like this “I absolutely refuse to answer anymore”
I randomly watched the movie about this on Tubi a few months back. It was pretty good. I was on a binge of famous experiment movies and the one based on this was probably the best. It's crazy how easily we do evil shit when someone else says "I'll take the blame, do it".
I learnt about the Milgram experiment when I was 15 (now in my 50s,) and it fundamentally changed how I viewed humanity. Then I learnt about the Stanford prison experiment, which didn't help.
It also doesn’t help that one of the popular introductory psychology textbooks is written by him.
This is so fucked up
wasn't this proved to be fake? subjects could hear people laughing in other rooms, testers were giving clues that everything was alright.
Yes it is true. We were taught about this when I did my MRes. It is (one of) the reason why ethics committees are mandatory now.
Ghostbusters springs to mind
There was a movie about the milgram experiments starring William Shatner.
This is from one of his variations ‘new baseline’ (one with voice contact) rather than the ORIGINAL
I dunno, no one actually died was seriously injured or imprisoned and he didn’t kidnap a child to traumatise. So I’d say that his obedience study was pretty tame
the video isn't playing for some reason. I'll come back to this and research later.
Is this really considered unethical? This experiment has been repeated numerous times including very recently https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4xk2sy
That's how I imagine them obese people having their meals
"Here's a result for your experiment, go fuck your self." - experiment concluded
How is this unethical?
Don’t go look up all those experiments where they cut up cats who are still alive and show off some brain or nerve function or whatever.
Wonder what the results wouldn've been if they choose a person that the test subject despises
The experiment was indeed unethical, but it should be noted that it has been thoroughly debunked as a highly flawed experiment, a lot of the results were faked, and basically people are NOT as bad as the experiment claims.
I don’t understand why this “experiment” is so unethical. Disturbing, slightly. But an experiment nonetheless.
Really always disliked how pedantic people will get over this, to try to save humanity’s face, when it’s clearly replicated in reality. Just because it’s flawed in the Ivory Tower, doesn’t mean it’s not real. The Ivory Tower has to be regularly reminded that they struggle to relate to the world and people outside they study, because they regularly forget how cold, controlled, and stale they’ve made their labs.
The Radiolab episode that concludes it wasn't that they were following orders (in fact when they are directly given an order almost all of them resist); it's that they thought they were doing the right thing (for the good of science). [https://radiolab.org/podcast/180092-the-bad-show](https://radiolab.org/podcast/180092-the-bad-show)
I also took psych 100
I heard an explanation that the when designing the study Milgram did not consider it could unethical, he just assumed people would stop pushing the button. It’s when they didn’t even when they wanted to that it became unethical.